The Last Dinosaur is a 1977 Japanese/American tokusatsu co-production, co-directed by Alexander Grasshoff and Tsugunobu Kotani, and co-produced by Japan's Tsuburaya Productions and Rankin/Bass Productions. The picture was filmed at Tsuburaya Studios in Tokyo and on location in the Japanese Alps. The film was intended for a U.S. theatrical release, but failed to find a distributor and ended up as a television film, airing on ABC on February 11, 1977 in an edited 92-minute run time. The film was eventually picked up for overseas markets by Cinema International Corporation, where it was released in the unedited 106-minute version as a double feature in the U.K. with the edited version of Sorcerer. Toho also picked up distribution rights to The Last Dinosaur in Japan for a theatrical release utilizing the unedited 106-minute version in English with Japanese subtitles, and later the film debuted on Japanese television dubbed in Japanese.