The Gang of Five forum has been one of the greatest things I've found and participated in in a while. It's been awesome knowing so many LBT fans like me, and I've enjoyed participating in projects and discusions.

However, I've noticed with some alarm that I've been spending record amounts of time on the Internet, and my test scores are starting to show it. Sadly, I feel I need to suspend all school-related activites for a while to compensate for the time I've lost. I've only been here for about a month, but it was fun. See you.  

I've recently learned about cool things called Googlewhacks, they are one or two words that when searched for on Google only return one result. I've tried valiantly, and after about 30 minutes am yet to find any. How many can anyone else find? (If you post them make sure to put them backwards or something so as not to wreck it.)


EDIT, 10 DAYS LATER: Woah, looks like no one found any. Go me! I stumped the panel!    

All right, I finally got the Overall Top 20 character list finished! I've calculated the frequencies, and the results are in.

1. Littlefoot
2. Ducky
3. Chomper
4. Petrie
3. Cera
6. Ali
7. Guido
8. Spike
9. Pterano
10. Sharptooth (original)

If you're curious as to how I calculated these, I'll explain my process below:

I went through each poll individually. To the character who was #1 on the list I assigned 10 points and one tally mark. To the charater who was #2 on the list, I assigned 9 points and one tally mark. To the character who was #3, I assigned eight points and one tally mark, and so on. I completed this for every slot on every poll. Once I was done, each charcter now had two things: an overall point value, and also the number of Top 10 lists the character appeared on.

The characters with the most points made the list.

To show you how your favorite characters measured up, I'm also going to post the ranking of every character who appeared in any Top 10 list. However, this caused things o get a bit stickier, especially with the more obscure characters who all scred beween 1-6 points. I needed to add more criteria.

I then rated the characters as such:

1) The characters with the highest point value will appear higher on the list.

2)In case of a tie in point values, characters who appeared on more Top 10 lists will appear higher on the list.

3)In case of a tie in list appearances, characters with the individual highest placing on a Top 10 list will appear higher on the list.

4)In case of a tie in list location, characters who appeared in less movies or had less screen time will appear higher on the list.

I also had problems with some individual top 10 lists:

-Original characters:Since nobody except an OC's creator would ever vote for an Orignal Character, I chose to skip any OC's on a list and give no character any points for that space. For example, if part of a list read: "...5)Littlefoot 6)my OC Joebob 7)Ducky..." then Littlefoot would recieve 6 points, Joebob would recive 0 points, and Ducky would receive 4 points.

-Ptyra posting twice:Halfway down the second page of the thread, I found Ptyra mentioning that she "kinda lied" on her orignal list, and posted a new one. Not wanting to go back into my notes and try to find and erase which data points came from her first list, I merely included both as stand-alone lists. Yes, that means Ptyra got twice as many votes as you did. Deal with it.

-Dash the Longneck posting his list in "no particular order":this casued an intresting conundrum, not knowing how to score the ten characters since there is no hierarchy. I finally decided to give 5 points to every character on his list and move on.

-mcr mad's #9 being "everyone else":Well, that would be intresting. I didn't know if I should give 2 points to every character in the history of Land Before Time, knowing that would kinda screw up the curve a little bit, not to mention make a rather large list. After much thought, I abandoned it altogether. mcr mad's list was only 8 charater's long.

Using this formula, I placed the characters in their proper list, and found the popularity of all characters.

In case you're curious, here are every character's stats along with their point value and #of lists appearing on:

1. Littlefoot             - 164 pts,  22 lists
2. Ducky                - 158 pts,  23 lists
3. Chomper            - 118 pts,  18 lists
4. Petrie                 - 116 pts,  20 lists
3. Cera                  -   91 pts,  16 lists
6. Ali                      -    79 pts, 13 lists
7. Guido                 -    76 pts, 13 lists
8. Spike                 -    63 pts,  15 lists
9. Pterano              -    48 pts,  10 lists
10.Sharptooth        -    45 pts,    8 lists
11.Littlefoot's mom -    43 pts,    8 lists
12.Mo                    -    40 pts,    9 lists
13.Ruby                 -    33 pts,   6 lists
14.Tricia                -    31 pts,    5 lists
15.Grandpa Longneck  29 pts,    8 lists
16.Bron                 -    25 pts,  10 lists
17.Rainbow faces   -    20 pts,    3 lists
18.Doc                  -    16 pts,    2 lists
19.Tippy                -    12 pts,    3 lists
20.Mr. Thicknose    -    10 pts,    3 lists
21.Sierra               -     9  pts,    1 list
22.sailbacked lizard-     9 pts,     1 list
23.ducky's mom    -      8 pts,     3 lists
24.Swooper          -      8 pts,     1 list
25.Rinkus             -      8 pts,     1 list
26.Shorty             -      7 pts,     3 lists
27.Tickles             -      7 pts,     1 list
28.Skitter             -      6 pts,     2 lists
29.Sharptooth (LBT 3)   6 pts,     1 list
30.Ozzy               -       6 pts,     1 list
31.Rooter            -       5 pts,     1 list
32.Strut              -        5 pts,     1 list
33.Allosaurus (LBT 6)   4  pts,     1 list
34.Tria               -        4 pts,      1 list
35.Brachiosaurus (6)    3 pts,      1 list
36.Archie           -        3 pts,      1 list
37.Dill               -        3 pts,       1 list
38.Sue              -        3 pts,       1 list
39.Mr. Clubtail   -        2 pts,       2 lists
40.Hyp             -         1  pt,       1 list
41.Loofah         -         1  pt,       1 list        
42.Thud           -          1 pt,        1 list
43.Mr. Threehorn         1 pt,        1 list
44."Everyone else"       0 pts,      1 list

By the way, to help me figure out how to make the most accurate Top ten list, I asked the Wikipedia Reference Desk for help. Here's a link to the discussion: Wikipedia:Top Ten List

A big part of my Creative Writing class is character analysis, or the breaking down and evaluating of a characters personality, motives, and actions. In the Land Before Time, one thing I've always wondered is: what makes Littlefoot the natural leader of the group? Why was he the best choice to lead the others on their journey to the Great Valley? Why not Cera, the most capable and confidant? Or Petrie, who has the best physical attributes for surveillance and exploration (i.e. his ability to fly)? Or Ducky, who's the nicest and most trusing, and therefore the best at keeping dusputes from arousing? Or Spike, who. . . er . . . all right, I guess we can agree that Spike would not be a likely candidate for leader. But what about the others? What does Littlefoot have that they don't?

To solve this question, I am going to give an alternate example. Namely, the Big Three of Star Trek: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy (a bit off-topic, I know, but necessary to get my point across).

Part of the reason this triumvirate works so well is because of the polar opposites of the two side characters. Spock, the Vulcan, is completely logical, exhibiting no emotion whatsoever; McCoy, the doctor, is overly emotional, rarely basing desicions on facts. This is why neither would make a good captain. The reason Kirk is the best captain is because he is able to use both the logic and the emotion supplied by his two officers, and find the happy median that highlights the best move to make. Note that Kirk is by himself incapable of seeing both sides of the spectrum: alone, he could never fully separate emotion from logic, or visa versa.

This is exactly why Littlefoot, like Kirk, is a natural leader; namely, that he can take the varying sides and opinions of those around him, and find the point where, together, they equal the best move to make.

The Land Before Time movie had it's own Big Three, composed of the first three characters to join the group: Littlefoot, Ducky, and Cera. Cera is distrusting, overconfidant, impulsive, and cares only for herself; Ducky is overly trusting, not very confidant, rarely acts of her own accord, but cares about all those around her. Both have good qualities and bad qualities, but not the perfect mix for leadership. Littlefoot has to take Cera's skepticality and hastiness to act, along with Ducky's kindness and cautiousness, and make use of both.

This is why I think Littlefoot is the best leader of the five.

The term "Starday" has been universally accepted to mean birthday, since it's mentioning in the similarly named TV episode. However, there was a refrence to birthdays much earlier in the franchise.

In LBT5, when the gang was walking to the Mysterious Island over the land bridge, Cera griped, "Its like waiting for your hatch day, it never seems to get any closer!"

To be honest, the first time I heard this line, I thought she meant the actual day that one hatches out of their egg, (for example, mine would be December 8 1988, as opposed to just December 8). For the next few minutes untill the giant wave blasted it's way on screen and drove all else from my mind, I was sitting thinking about the implications of this statement (does that mean unborn dinosaurs are in their egg, already awake and thinking before they hatch? What would it be like to be trapped in an egg like that for so long? Would they really think of their hatch day in relation to 'closer,' not knowing what hatching is yet?) Soon after, some slightly more logical part of my brain took over, and I realized she might have just meant every generic birthday, and immediately dropped all the intriguing thoughts about being trapped in an egg, waiting for days on end for the Hatch Day to arrive.

However, then the TV Series came along, and this new episode established very clearly and indisputably that a birthday is known as a Starday, not a Hatch Day.

Does this mean that a Hatch Day could really refer to just the day of hatching, and only the day of hatching? Would that mean Cera's statement shows that, in the LBT universe, unborn dinosaurs are still awake and aware of their surroundings while still in their egg? I know the producers probably were not meaning to imply this, but it's a really interesting idea all the same.

On the VHS cover of the Land Before Time 4: Journey Through the Mists, Ikky and Dil can be seen in the background, and Ikky was holding a little pair of binoculars! Was this a deliberate toungue-in-cheek joke, or did the producers really miss something like that?

I'd paste a picture, but I don't know how to do that. Here's a link: Amazon.com-Land Before Time 4 Click on "See larger Image." It's still kinda small, but the binocs are visible.

Hello, my name is a pun on LBT (Land Before Time), I'm a 20 year old who was a huge LBT fan in my earlier years, and has recently rediscovered the series. I've reawakened the old flame I had for this series, but now that I'm older I know how to go beyond the series itself, and use the World Wide Web to chat with other LBT fans like myself!

I found this site because a Youtube User, pokeplayer984, linked to it in the summary box of all of his LBT videos.

Since only eight movies were out when I was young, those are the only ones I've seen so far. I hope to see the ewwer ones soon, but there's not much time for full-length movies in college (especially ones you can't watch with your dorm mates, like LBT!)

MY favorite character is Ducky, and my favorite movie is number &, the Stone of Cold Fire, which includes my favorite song, Beyond the Mysterious Beyond (after seeing it for the first time 7 years later, I found myself remembering some of the lyrics!)

I will not be active much, since I'm curently going through college, but I'll check up occasionally to see if anything intresting has cropped up.

I'm not very internet savvy (especially in the emoticon and Web-speak areas), but I'm finding this site to be extremely user-friendly, and well-built. Glad to meet you all!