A mythical lost Van Halen video that was shot in a dinosaur park has finally been unearthed, 40 years after it was filmed to promote European dates on their Fair Warning tour.
As the story goes, the clip was shot by Italian television in the midst of the band’s European tour at the end of 1981. The location was the “Prehistoric Park” of Rivolta D’Adda, near Milan, and the video aired on a clip show curated by the Italian government’s state TV network.
“These videos aired on Italian state television, RAI 1, during a TV show called Happy Circus,” states the YouTube description. “Van Halen Italia Fan Club found those video clips and shares them with fans all over the world.”
In the video, the band plays along to the Fair Warning track “So Is This Love?” while a lip-syncing David Lee Roth struts around and straddles a brontosaurus statue. It’s delightfully low budget, filmed by the television network without the frills that Van Halen would soon display during the heyday of MTV.
For hardcore fans, it wraps up one of the biggest mysteries in the band’s lore. In 1995, Jeff Hausman of The Van Halen News Desk fan page initially discovered bizarre photos depicting the members of Van Halen performing amidst a dinosaur park. Though it was apparent the images were taken on the set of a music video, nobody knew the exact context or if the footage still existed.
Hausman then published the photos in his Van Halen fanzine, The Inside, in an article headlined: “Sunday afternoon in Jurassic Park?” The cryptic black-and-white images soon became the stuff of legend in fan circles. “We’re not quite sure which song the video concept was for, but we do know that the dinosaurs never made it off the cutting room floor,” read the article [via VHND].
Coincidentally, another more recent article published by Lethal Amounts a few weeks ago attempted to shed light on the mysterious video. Fans who were previously unaware of the dinosaur photos now became curious, and the mystery once again became a talking among the Van Halen faithful. Perhaps that final article was enough to dislodge the dinosaur video from the annals of time.
You can watch the Van Halen dinosaur clip below.
