So which was your favourite? Mean 'ol T-Rex, rampaging primordial beefcake? The ornately hideous Triceratops, a burlesque synergy of wildebeest and armoured car. Or were you, like me, an obscurist, favouring unsung evolutionary freaks such as (deep breath) Parasaurolophus - its snorkle-adorned visage might have been plucked from a Jim Henson movie - and petite, puppy-eyed Hypsilophodon?
"Children love dinosaurs because they are `safe monsters' - a little part of all of us enjoys being frightened by monsters but because dinosaurs are long dead they carry no real threat," says Dr Angela Milner, head of fossil vertebrates at London's Natural History Museum.
Hollywood's abiding dino-fetish - given fresh impetus with the release of Disney's critically-lauded computer-generated Dinosaur - embodies an enduring public affection for these vanished primordial behemoths. Big lizards have stomped and bellowed across cinema screens since the dawn of film, predating Chaplin, talkies and technicolour. Our fascination with prehistoric life dates from the mid-19th century when the scientific establishment's radical fringe, spurred by a slew of major fossil finds, debunked the Great Flood myth which suggested the Earth was merely 6,000 years old. The 1914 single-reel animated feature, Gertie the Dinosaur, was the first to capitalise on a deepening interest in the distant past. Sweet and whimsical, Gertie played to gobsmacked audiences in vaudeville halls across the US, pushing animation into the public consciousness and creating, in illustrator Winsor McCary's eponymous heroine, cinema's first cartoon icon.
The Lost World, a loose 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's guns 'n' garters Victorian yarn, raised the bar for monster movies, employing cutting-edge, stop-motion animation scarcely bettered until computer-generated imaging (CGI) arrived in the early 1990s. Box-office dynamite in its day, The Lost World is chiefly remembered for the silver screen coming-of-age of special-effects wizard, Willis O'Brien, who, in 1933, masterminded Hollywood's most enduring dinosaur flick. What is it about King Kong that, 67 years from its release, still evokes such awe? The beauty and the beast story-line strikes a universal chord, but there is something else. Kong transcended ouevre. It was more than a movie, it was an event - tinsel town's first must-see, no-brains-required blockbuster. Even today, its appeal is readily fathomable. The animatronics are breathtaking, the King Kong versus T-Rex face-off rivals any modern CGI-riven wonder in pace, grace and audacity.
King Kong heralded a golden age in stopmotion animation. O'Brien's protege, Ray Harryhausen, honed the technique over the next 30 years. His feral, frenetic dinosaurs even threatened to upstage Raquel Welch's fur bikini in One Million Years BC, a 1966 primeval fable bizzarely juxtapositioning semi-clad neanderthals with lifeforms which, in reality, predated them by 65 million years. Harryhausen's signature dinosaur film, the 1969 Valley of Gwangi, transplanted Conan Doyle's Lost World to late 19th century California and, in villainous tyrannosaur Gwangi, established pre-history's pre-eminent bad guy.
This movie was followed by an outbreak of revolutionary zeal among palaeontologists. Emboldened by maverick bone diggers such as Robert T. Bakker, the new church of palaeontology challenged orthodox potrayals of dinosaurs as half-witted evolutionary excesses. Invigorated by fresh fossil discoveries, in particular of a family of small meat-eaters, of which Deinonychus and Velociraptor are most familiar, Bakker and his followers proclaimed dinosaurs supra-intelligent, dexterous wonders.
The debate rages on and the pendulum has swung back recently, with Bakker tarred a fanatic who blithely set aside facts which contradicted his theories. Nevertheless, Bakker's legacy, the discrediting of lame stereotypes - doltish brontosaurs drifting apathetically around fern-strewn swamps and dense stegosaurs blundering from one grazing patch to another - endures.
The early 1990s heralded - at a commercial level - a re-birth of sorts for the genre. Yet few movies arouse as much scorn as Spielberg's Jurassic Park (soon to be a trilogy), which was widely dismissed as celluloid froth that anyone past puberty would find indigestible. Imbecilic storylines aside, however, these are milestone productions - with cutting-edge CGI and, with T-Rex expert John Horner on board, setting high standards for scientific accuracy. Here Bakkers's hot-blooded monsters are brought spectacularly to life; ripping, rendering and roaring their way through cardboard characterisation and a maudlin plot.
"Dinosaurs are safe monsters," says Dr Milner. "Kids love to be scared by big, outlandish creatures. And dinosaurs certainly meet the job description. But, since they've been dead for millions of years, there is no chance of them coming after you in the middle of the night."