Jules Verne was obliged to soften the tone of his darkly satiric 1877 novel Hector Servadac: Or the Career of a Comet when he was reminded by his Paris publisher that a significant percentage of his readership was juvenile. In America, adaptations of Verne's science fiction/fantasy classics (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Mysterious Island) have in the main been pitched to the matinee crowd but the Al Zimbalist-Edward Bernds produced Valley of the Dragons (1961) is the easily the most infantile of the lot - and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Produced on a shoestring budget cadged from Columbia Pictures' New York office on jungle sets left over from Edward Dmytryk's The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961) and utilizing footage repurposed from One Million Years, B.C. (1940) and even the Japanese Rodan (1956), Valley of the Dragons (1961) is the most unscientific saga of a Frenchman (Cesare Danova) and an American (Sean McClory) who are whisked off Algerian sands circa 1881 by a runaway comet and deposited in a strange world where man's primordial past has been preserved as a playground for dinosaurs. Columbia more than recouped its initial investment when Valley of the Dragons became a staple of kiddie matinees and Saturday afternoon Creature Features. Director Bernds had previously helmed the similar World Without End (1956) while producer Zimbalist was responsible for the schlock classic Robot Monster (1953).

By Richard Harland Smith