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This week, Matt, Joe, and special guest Eric O'Dea dove into one of the most influential series for the 90s kids in the audience: Jurassic Park. From Michael Crichton's groundbreaking novels to the movies, dinosaurs were inescapable -- pun intended. Our hosts discuss the first few works in the series, how the books and movies differed, and just how wrong the science was. Jurassic Park influenced a generation of kids to be really into that dino DNA and spawned a ton of our favorite memes.
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0:00
[Music]
0:10
Hello and welcome to Lore Watch round table free form discussion about lore in your favorite media. I'm your host Joe
0:15
Pres, one of several lore focused folks from Blizzard Watch and I've got my stalwart companion with me as always, Matt Rossy. How you doing today Matt?
0:25
We are back to making animal noises. I think that is okay. Uh and then joining us on this journey
0:31
today is uh Eric from the site. You have may have seen Eric on a few of our other podcasts. I believe Eric has also
0:37
guested on the main podcast uh as well as several of our tabletop uh role playing experiences over on Tavern
0:44
Watch. Uh so thanks for joining us today, Eric. Hey, great to be here, Joe. Today we're uh going to be doing
0:49
something a little bit different. We're taking a break from answering your questions. Uh not that we don't want them. Please keep sending those in. Uh,
0:55
but we had a couple suggestions for this and I figured might as well pull the trigger on it. Uh, today we are going to
1:01
be talking about well the Jurassic Park franchise in general cuz man is there a lot to talk about there. Uh, starting
1:07
from the original novels to the movies uh, to everything in between and figured
1:12
we could talk a little bit about that for, you know, the next show maybe too. We'll see how it goes. Uh, but if you
1:18
did have questions for our podcast or any of our podcasts, you can go ahead and send those in to
1:23
podcastardwatch.com. Specify the show that it is for in the subject line as well as any special
1:28
pronunciation of your name. Uh, if you want to hit us up on Discord, we have the Q and Podcast questions channel, which is open for everybody. Same rules
1:35
apply. If you are a Patreon subscriber, you can go ahead and hit us up on the Patreon Q and podcast questions channel.
1:41
Uh that is where we tend to look there first as a way of saying thank you for our Patreon supporters helping us keep the lights on. And as always, you can
1:48
also send us messages directly through Patreon. But without further ado, I guess let's get started. I mean,
1:53
Jurassic Park was sort of a like I'd say a phenomenon would be really the best way to describe it, right? Like in the
1:59
'9s, or at least when I remember it as a kid, it was like the thing. And I'm not
2:05
just talking about just because of the movies. I remember as a kid being incredibly excited about the books. So,
2:11
who wants to kick off? Yeah, I didn't read the books for a long time. I I was obviously a huge fan of
2:17
the movies. I had the toys. I mean, the the cars and the dinosaurs and the, you
2:23
know, a little chunk of flesh comes off when you have them battle each other. Um, I didn't read the novels until maybe
2:28
the 2000s, but I read them over and over again. They're so good. I thought it was interesting. Um, Kiteon
2:34
as a writer, uh, I think he's very much informed by the fact that he was a medical doctor who then decided, I don't
2:41
actually want to be a doctor. That that sounds like a lot of unpleasant sleeplessness. I'm going to be a writer
2:46
and have that pleasant sleeplessness where I don't have to also make sure people aren't bleeding to death. Um, so
2:52
that's where he went. Of his books, and he wrote quite a few. He wrote 20 total. Uh, 10 of which had his name and then 10
2:58
of which were under pseudonyms. Uh, and also he directed several movies. Of all of this, only Jurassic Park got a sequel
3:07
from him. He wrote Jurassic Park and then he wrote The Lost World. Um, The Lost World is I'd say it's about the the
3:14
movie The Lost World is about 50% faithful to that book. And Jurassic
3:20
Park, the movie, is about 75% faithful to the book. Um, there's there's obvious
3:25
changes always made in adaptation, so that's not neither of these are complaints. It's just a a fact of the
3:31
situation. Yeah. The nature of taking a novel and turning it into a movie, you're always going to have, well, you know, we only
3:38
have two hours. You got to take this character and cut it or split it into two characters or something like that.
3:44
Or in the case of this one, how noxious can we make Nedri? We make Nedri even worse. Uh, he's
3:51
pretty bad in the book, but oh boy. Um, I will say this that like first thing that comes to mind when I when I think
3:58
about the difference between these two is that Jurassic Park the novel starts with a scene that you don't get in the
4:04
films until the second movie. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. There's a scene in the original
4:10
novel where a girl is like on the beach with her family and then she is set upon
4:15
and killed by what is described initially as three-toed lizards. And
4:21
then as the thing goes on, you you because a medical examiner sends a image
4:27
of the skeleton to Dr. Grant. Dr. Grant is like, "That's an effing dinosaur. That that's definitely not some lizard."
4:35
And from there, before he can investigate, he's suddenly called to Isla.
4:42
It's similar to the movie, but the movie streamlines it. The movie is like, "We don't have time." Uh, and then they put
4:48
it in the second movie. I think because The Lost World as a novel starts very much with you assuming you have read the
4:55
first book. Yeah. It's like you've read the first book. If you hadn't, you wouldn't be here or
5:00
you've seen the movie. If you hadn't, you wouldn't be here. So, we don't have to really ease you into this. But the
5:06
movie was like, "Hey, wait a minute. What if somebody hasn't seen or read anything else? We we need something to
5:12
explain what's going on here." So, they took that scene from the first book and put it in the second movie.
5:18
Um, I feel like a little bit of the vibe of the first three movies is based
5:26
around this idea of trying to figure out how much show versus how much tell has
5:31
to be done. And I think the first movie actually nails it because they make it
5:37
all part of the park's experience. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's like the world
5:42
like I don't want to say world for tomorrow, but they they definitely like took the Disneyland approach to it or the Disney World approach to it where
5:48
like Yeah. Yeah. Very much ex your exposition is part of the entertainment, right? Yeah. And I I like especially that they
5:55
have the whole um I don't know exactly what to call it. It feels like the old General Electric uh you know ready the
6:01
light bulb guy speeches where like they have what's DNA and then they explain DNA. I mean, and Kiteon as a writer,
6:10
Kiteon fully understood that DNA will not last. This uh it was very clearly uh
6:16
if you read the book, you can you get the sense he knows this wouldn't work, but he needs a way to get dinosaurs into
6:22
this thing that isn't time travel. And he said he was he was super surprised when he had this idea that you could
6:28
extract DNA from mosquitoes from 65 million or 80 or 100 million years ago
6:34
and it would work. like he thought everybody would immediately see, okay, this is this would never happen. This is not possible.
6:39
This is utter BS. Yeah. Yeah. And no, people bought it completely because they don't know that much about DNA. Um, so
6:47
that's part of the thing I like. I also like that it kind of in a weird sort of way by choosing um uh Sir Richard
6:54
Atenboroough as as the uh the John Hammond of the movie, you make him seem
7:02
like nicer at first. In the books, he's somewhat sinister. In the in the movie, he seems nicer at
7:08
first. So, the sure the true scale of his negligence is even more shocking.
7:14
Um, should we should we do like a quick synopsis of what the heck is actually happening or do I mean I mean let's not assume that
7:21
everybody listening at home has seen the original movies uh or or or read the original novels. Let's uh I mean, if you
7:28
want to give a brief synopsis, go for it. Okay. I'm gonna try and do this without this is gonna work more or less for both
7:33
the book and the movie as best I can. Um, story starts with Dr. Grant
7:39
basically through one means or another finding out that he's there are actual living dinosaurs on the island of
7:45
Nublar. He's either recruited after he's seen one or recruited before he sees
7:51
one. Either way, he's not expecting this weird old rich guy who turns out to be
7:57
funding half of his research to be anything like serious. He doesn't think this is a like a real thing. He just
8:04
thinks it's really weird, but he's like, they they pay the bills, so we have to go. Um him and and Edie Sadler and he
8:12
then meets Ian Malcolm on the helicopter and Ian is of course in deliberately somewhat I want to say antagonistic.
8:20
He's not an actual antagonist once the the story gets going, but he's deliberately a little prickly and he's
8:25
deliberately giving Dr. Grant a hard time and that's because he thinks Grant is totally on board with everything.
8:32
Like he doesn't he doesn't know Grant. He just knows he's there. Everybody else here seems to be in on this. So yeah, um
8:38
when they get to Islamar either way, they begin seeing actual living dinosaurs. Uh and that's when all you
8:45
know everything that we we have to assume about this thing is going off the
8:50
rails. Nobody here except the person involved knows that one of the people at
8:56
the park who is the computer programmer of the park uh I think Dennis Nedri I remember
9:02
yeah Nedri has been contacted by one of uh Hammond's rivals Hammond's company is
9:07
called Imgen uh the rival company is called Biosy and Biosy basically hires
9:13
Nedri to steal them a bunch of embryos they provide him the means to transport
9:18
the dinosaur embryos out of the park without anyone knowing, but they leave it up to him how he's going to do it. He
9:25
decides he's going to sabotage the computer system because the entire park is extremely automated. He decides,
9:31
well, I have to go down there anyway to finish this stuff up. I'll put in a means that I can just shut the whole
9:38
place down. The security will go down. All the all the cameras and equipment will go down. And I'll be able to
9:44
literally walk in, take the embryos, and walk out, and nobody will know I did it. nobody will know anything because
9:50
nothing will be working. He does this uh unfortunately for him either way, either
9:55
it's the book or the movie, he runs into a juvenile Dilophosaurus uh and it kills him with venom that in real life it
10:02
would not have had. Matthew is staring directly at a non-existent camera right now because this is important. You know,
10:08
Dilophosaurus did not have venom. Are we going to have a uh inaccurate dinosaur running count? No, but but
10:14
we'll have that one and I'll probably make some more later, but I'm not going to actually like make it a ding, you know.
10:20
Okay, I'll make a mental note. Matt Rusty has stared at the camera menacingly one time. Yeah. Uh, in terms of what happens next,
10:26
as I said, Nedri is killed. He the embryos are lost. Um, meanwhile, the the
10:32
sites engineer who in the movie is played by Samuel L. Jackson. So, unfortunately, I can never remember his real name, and I just call him Samuel L.
10:38
Jackson in my head. Uh, Arnold, uh, what's his first name? I don't remember
10:43
M Mr. Arnold. Yeah. Yeah. He he decides he's looking over what Nedri did. He's looking over the code. Uh he's like, "Look, um I I'm
10:52
good, but I'm not this good. The only way I can get this to stop doing this is
10:58
to completely shut down the entire park and then bring it back up. That's all I've got. And if I do that, obviously
11:06
there's stuff that's currently still running that will stop running." and and Mulun who is I believe the park ranger
11:13
and you know he's in charge of animal essentially he's essentially
11:19
yeah game warden type thing he it's his job to keep the animals he's like if you do that
11:24
uh at least some like the the raptors are going to get out the raptors are ridiculous um they're not Dionicus
11:32
they're velociraptor wink wink nudge nudge okay I guess that's number two um but he's like they're going to get out I
11:38
need to get down there and make sure that they don't get out uh because they are enormously dangerous. Um while this
11:45
is all happening, the uh the group of of Dr. Sadler uh Dr. Grant uh technically
11:51
Dr. Malcolm Ian is also a doctor uh and and the two children who are the grandchildren of um Mr. Hammond are out
12:01
in the park when their rides effectively shut down. And as a result of this,
12:06
they're stuck there at the at the Tyrannosaurus paddic where the Tyrannosaurus shows up. Um, I'm not
12:12
going to sit here and try and all the ways that that Tyrannosaurus is wrong. It's really wrong, but we don't have time. People didn't know this back then.
12:18
That's not their fault. Um, the Tyrannosaurus initially is just kind of curious. Um, it's not, even in the book,
12:25
it's not really acting aggressively. It's more like, what are these things? Why are they here? How come they didn't
12:32
bring any goats? I just ate a goat. I'd like to eat more goats. Do they have any more goats? Um, one of uh the people on
12:38
the ride who I believe is one of Hammond's lawyers is killed I think in the movie. I don't know if he is even in the book, but he's definitely killed and
12:45
eaten by the Tyrannosaurus mostly because he runs and gets its attention. Yeah, prey response immediately triggers
12:52
hunt response. Yeah. Not going to talk about the eye thing cuz it's not true, but we don't.
12:57
But regardless, all hell breaks loose. Some of them get away. I believe Dr. Sadler, Dr. Malcolm, although he gets
13:04
hurt. Uh, and I forget who is driving, but one other person. They get away, but
13:10
Dr. Grant is unfortunately stranded with two of with Hammond's two grandchildren, and they have to physically get
13:15
themselves out of the park. Luckily for them, this is around the time that uh Arnold shuts down everything. So, they
13:22
manage to climb down an electrified fence, and they only get hit at the very
13:28
end of it. Uh, but they're stuck down there. There's a bunch of trapes across
13:33
the land trying to get back while Sadler and Malcolm get back to the main lodge and find out everything went down.
13:39
Everything is wrong. Um the game warden is eaten by a a velociraptor. Um if if
13:44
it actually had been a real velociraptor, I would have been funny as heck to watch that. But either way, he's
13:50
he's eaten by the by the raptors. They have to go and try and restart stuff that's currently off so they can contact
13:57
somebody outside the park. Uh they manage it. I believe Dr. Sadler does
14:02
this at least in the film. Um meanwhile, uh Dr. Grant manages to evade yet
14:08
another tyranner attack, but this time he wasn't attacking them. He was attacking a herd of uh know that they
14:14
were o over raptorids of some kind, but I can't remember which ones. But he manages to eat one of them, and that's
14:19
what he was trying to do. He wasn't going for them. Another good thing I think sometimes I complain a lot about the dinosaurs in this movie, but for the
14:26
time they're actually really good. Um, Tyrannosaurus doesn't act like he's not
14:31
a she, sorry, she she's not a movie super villain. She's a big hungry animal.
14:36
Yeah. And I mean, we also have to take it with a grain of salt, too, because at and and this is just for the as we're
14:41
talking through the story, Matt brings up a point here that I think we should keep in mind when we talk about the rest of it is we didn't know everything we
14:48
know now, right? Like this is still this is still like very early in the discovery of like the truth or what we
14:55
can surmise as the truth of you know what dinosaurs look like acted like or or what we can surmise from the evidence
15:02
we have and the technology at the time. So a lot of this was just inferred off of what we had available to us.
15:07
So as one example of that as we move on um the reason that the bigger raptors from this movie are called Velociraptor
15:14
is because of a a dinosaur paleo artist named Gregory S. Paul, who basically
15:20
argued that Dionicus, the larger at the time, Dramasaurid, and Velociaptor, the
15:27
smaller of the Dramasids at the time, were the same animal. He argued it was the same genus. And so when Kiteon
15:34
called that animal Velociraptor, he did it purely because Velociraptor is a cooler name, and as far as he knew, both
15:40
animals were basically the same. So that's not on him. That's that's on Gregory S. Paul, who has committed many
15:46
crimes, but is also at the same time very important and did a lot of good things. So, it's very hard to deal with
15:53
Drag Race Paul, and he's not involved in this movie at all or the books. So, we're going to move on now. But at this
15:59
point, you've got the two forces converging. You've got um Dr. Grant and the two Hammond children trying to get
16:05
back to the visitor center while you've got Dr. Sadler, Arnold, and uh Dr. Malcolm essentially trying to get them
16:11
all off of this place alive. Uh, and the when Dr. Grant and the and the Hammond children get to the visitor center, the
16:19
raptors, having just killed and eaten Muloon, get there, too. So, there's a whole in the film, it's it's extremely
16:25
well done. In the book, it's actually scarier in my opinion. Oh, yeah. A lot of these scenes are scarier in the book.
16:31
I was gonna say the book makes it a lot more terrorinducing in a lot of these scenes and the movie and the movie
16:36
definitely had to tone that down to uh make it a little more broad uh broad
16:42
audience palpable. Yeah. I don't think people going to want to watch children have nervous breakdowns. No. And
16:48
go ahead, Eric. You're not going to get children having nervous breakdowns when they're reading a novel. It's not really, you know,
16:54
aimed at them. You you put a PG-13 sticker on a movie and it's about dinosaurs. Kids are going to see that movie. So, you got to scare them, but
17:00
you don't want to terrify them. But I mean, literally the scenes of the the teenagers, cuz one of them is is a teenager, the other is is like a tween.
17:07
I believe he's like he's 11 or 10 or 11. Uh, two of them do have emotional breakdowns and are very close to dying
17:14
in the in the book. And whilst in the movie obviously they're in danger, it's it's not portrayed as aggressively. Um,
17:22
but however you want to look at it, they they get chased around. They finally all manage to get together. Um, they realize
17:29
we have to get out of here right now. We they've managed to reach off the island because of Malcolm and Saddler's efforts
17:35
with the radio. And just as they're about to get killed by the by the uh
17:41
velociaptors with big old quotes around them, the Tyrannosaurus shows up and begins eating them because, you know,
17:48
hey, there's they're here. This is one of those weirdest scenes where it's very unlikely the Tyrannosaur would care, but
17:54
you know, it works for the plot. Either way, uh there's the pathy moment at the
18:00
end of the book slashmov. Uh it's it's a little bit darker in the in the book. Again, that that's going to be true for
18:06
out because keep in mind this is the guy that wrote the Andromeda strain. Like calling him a horror writer is a pushing
18:11
it, but he definitely had an edge in that direction. Um basically, you know,
18:17
Hammet is like, "Yeah, this was a terrible idea. I really thought I could make it work, but no, we're we're not going to do this." Um, but unfortunately
18:24
that leaves them with a big island full of dinosaurs and several other big
18:29
islands full of dinosaurs that they used to make these dinosaurs. Yeah, cuz not everything was contained
18:35
to one island. And I think they laid that out in the book a lot better than they did in the movie. Yeah. And especially once the Lost World
18:41
comes out. Yeah. They're really they're really upfront with it. Yeah. In the Lost World, they definitely are. Um, the movie made it, at least the
18:49
original movie, definitely made it seem like it was mostly contained to a single island. Uh, but like this was I I think an
18:56
archipelago is really the best way to put it. Like I think that was what it was described as. Yeah. Yeah. Because it was a That's why they have Isla Nublar, Isla
19:03
Sorna is I forget the third Isla, but there's at least three islands involved. I think they've now pushed it
19:08
up to four because they also have uh and they go back to one of the islands in
19:14
the in the most recent movie. But for the purposes of the t the first two books in the first three movies, yeah,
19:19
there's several islands. Yeah. And I think it's interesting that the they didn't really establish that in
19:25
the movie until later on. Like they just kind of like I I don't want to say it seems like it's missing, but it seemed
19:31
like an important part of the book where they describe and it's not just that. like they have underwater facilities where they were breeding like uh
19:38
specifically the waterborne dinosaurs. Like there was a whole like production
19:44
chain I guess would be the best way to put it. I don't really have a better way to say it. Um Yeah. No, because it was these were
19:49
experimental procedures and many of them didn't succeed. I mean there were lots of them didn't hatch properly. Uh it's
19:56
fair to say I mean the very fact that they had to use uh amongst paleontology
20:01
afficionados and especially like paleontology students and and teachers the idea of the frog DNA often makes
20:07
people just grown. Yeah. But the the fact is they had to come up with a way that they could make these
20:15
things. There's there's no living relatives that could lay eggs big enough. You you've got to come up with
20:20
something. There's got to be a way to do this. Um, why they didn't use bird DNA, I'm
20:26
not sure. Other than the idea that frog DNA is simpler or because it's more primitive, which isn't true, but you
20:32
know. Um, I'm not sure. I feel like they had to do they had to do a primer of what DNA is in the first
20:38
movie to to kind of explain that because you can assume an audience in 1993 isn't going to be up on that. But they don't
20:45
go too far into it. And when when you know a little bit more about it, I mean, we share 80% of our DNA with bacteria.
20:52
We share 90 something% with other animals. So, it's I mean, if you want to talk a chimp,
20:58
yeah, absolutely. Humans, humans and chimps are so similar that it's kind of surprising we don't hybridize. Um, that
21:04
we're actually closer we are closer to both chimps and orangutans than lions are to tigers, and lions and tigers can
21:10
hybridize. So, it's interesting that we apparently can't. Uh, so I think there's an undercurrent of
21:17
the scientists were being irresponsible. I mean, they hit it on hit it over the head in the movie with like the scientists were so concerned whether
21:24
they could they didn't stop to think if they should. They spent a lot more time in the novel like really extending that and making them like
21:30
careless and evil and like they they really they don't even know the names of the dinosaurs. Like Henry Woo is a
21:37
bigger character in the novel and doesn't even know like how many species they've had. They're labeling them as
21:42
like versions. He's not even an expert on on dinosaurs. He's an expert. Yeah. He's a geneticist. Yeah.
21:49
Yeah. They don't know how they don't know what the DNA is, so they just grow it and they see and then like there's an enzyme
21:54
that's making a protein fold wrong and the dinosaur dies horribly and they like go back to the drawing board. They treat it like software. And so
22:01
they really kind of make those make those characters even more evil and careless than they are in the in the
22:07
movies. And I I think if you've seen the Titans Gate crisis from last year, that same idea of
22:14
mo move fast and and break stuff that works in software development to a degree. Um I'm sure right now Joe is
22:21
like, "Yeah, it works, Matt. Really?" Keep telling them that. But regardless, it it doesn't kill people as much in
22:28
software as it does when you're applying it directly to things like an animal. Uh
22:33
but it it's definitely personified in Dilophosaurus itself because the Dilophosaurus that's
22:38
portrayed in the movie, it's wrong. It's way wrong and we knew at the time it was wrong. But the reason that it's like
22:44
that is to show okay what don't we know about Dilophosaurus because all we have
22:50
is bones and they like it's got venom glands. It's got you know that's stuff that we wouldn't immediately know just
22:56
from looking at the skeleton. But it's also they assume Oh, go ahead. I was going to say, but it's also something that can be
23:02
explained by the experimentation because depending on what frogs they use, they could all of a sudden become venomous.
23:07
There are frogs that spit, you know, hot like I want to say hot bodily fluids at
23:14
at bile at like excruciating temperatures at predators. Like these
23:20
are things that, you know, we know frogs can do because we've even back then we
23:25
had accounts of this. We had videos of it. we had the Edenboro of the world and and all the the uh old school
23:31
adventurers and and and people that were digging into the current world that now
23:37
sort of it gets explained at least with a little bit of a handwave. So again, in the this is the difference between the
23:42
book and the movie. Uh because in the movie, they don't really dive into that, but they kind of almost explain it just
23:49
by the fact that they say they used frog DNA. And in the book, they go into That's much more Yeah. It's much more involved. They go
23:55
into much more about the sequencing and the genomes and and going back to Eric's point, which I think is really fascinating. Uh and this is something
24:02
again that leans into sort of the horror of the book. again that experimentation that that callous uh disregard for life
24:10
the idea that these are just numbered experiments and I believe in the book and I and it's been a while since I've
24:16
read it there's even recounting of terminating surviving ones that didn't
24:21
meet or were not at expectation. So like there's a whole scene. Yeah, they
24:27
absolutely do mention that. There's a whole scene where Henry Woo and John Hammond are sitting in his like
24:32
bungalow, which they retreat to from time to time to eat ice cream in the novel. And Henry Woo is like, "Let's
24:39
just start over because we've learned a lot." And you want the the animals we
24:45
have are too fast and they're not what people are expecting. And you want people in a theme park to see what they're expecting. And the dinosaurs
24:52
hide a lot and when they come out they're too fast and they're like getting sunburned and stuff. So he's like, "Let's make them slower and go
24:58
back to the drawing board and add this." And John Hammond is like, "People want to see real dinosaurs." And he and Henry
25:03
Woo explicitly says, "These are not dinosaurs. These are monsters. These are animals that we've created by some
25:10
dinosaur DNA." Yeah. I think he uses the word chimeas or something like that. Yeah. So like from the beginning from
25:17
the beginning they're not really dinosaurs. They're not what you would see if you went back in time to the Cretaceous or to the Jurassic. But he
25:24
wants to Yeah. He wants to just start. He says like, "Let's just get rid of them all. Let's make the Velociraptors less deadly. Let's make the T-Rex, you
25:32
know, more slow so people can catch up to it when it walks by." Yeah. you know, and there's not only is
25:37
that the case, but there's also the the one theme of the book and the movie that is shared by both uh is the concept that
25:45
they think they've got it all under control because they've made the animals lysine dependent and all the animals are
25:50
female. Like, so these animals can't they can't reproduce by themselves, which is this is a classic '9s trope, by
25:56
the way. This is not the only '9s movie involving genetic splicing that said, "Oh, we're going to make them female
26:02
because they're more docile and and they can't breed." Yeah. Yeah, in this case they don't say anything about dility because they know
26:08
full I mean I think at this point even they know full well that female dinosaurs were larger in many cases. Uh
26:15
but by everything being female there's nothing to make the there's nothing to impregnate them and by everything being
26:21
lysene dependent they will die if they don't get a food supplement that they wouldn't get from eating the stuff on
26:27
the island. Um this is terrible in several reasons as I think even Ian
26:33
Malcolm points out. Why didn't you just make them all male then? Because if they were all male, they
26:39
wouldn't have, you know, the ability to just eat an egg, you know, and if you
26:45
had if you had not, you know, the lysine dependency, the animals begin finding things with lysine in them and eating
26:52
them once they get out into the wild because they're dependent on it. And therefore, if they don't do that,
26:58
they'll die. And it's like, go ahead. in the novels in the novels too that the there's an undercurrent in
27:04
the first novel of this mystery of are have the dinosaurs already escaped the island and before before the novel even
27:10
starts yes the dinosaurs have escaped and then one thing that's not in the movie is that the kids see see the boat
27:17
leaving from their tour like halfway through the novel and they're looking at it with binoculars and they see baby velociaptors on the boat and the whole
27:24
time they're trying to get back and there's this urgency of trying to get back to the control room to call the
27:30
boat and say turn around or you'll will let velociraptors loose on the mainland. And the lysene contingency where they
27:36
will keel over and die unless they're given that supplement. It's another like hubris kind of thing where they think
27:41
like the dinosaurs slip into a coma within 12 hours. And like first of all, it just didn't work, but second of all, the dinosaurs got around it by just
27:48
eating the foods that are rich in lysine. They started eating beans. Yeah. like they they find uh like paths eaten
27:56
through lima bean fields that are in like a razor straight line and it's because the animals are migrating.
28:02
They're moving like in one direction and they're eating all the beans as they go because they've figured out that they need those beans to survive. Well, it's
28:09
like imagine if you said we've we've spec we've we've made it so human beings
28:14
can't generate vitamin C and that means they'll be contained because they don't get the vitamin C from tropical plants.
28:21
They'll die. like we couldn't, you know, and the humans figured out how to get vitamin C without making it themselves.
28:27
Well, and here's the same thing. Here's the hubris of it, though, too, just for those of you that at home that maybe are like, well, what the heck is
28:32
lysine or why is it, you know, why is this such a bad idea? Lysine is a naturally occurring amino acid in a lot
28:40
of different foods and proteins. So, things that are high in lysine, beef,
28:46
chicken, lamb, pork, tuna, salmon, sardines, cat.
28:52
If you have a cat, you have an animal that is lysine dependent. Yeah, we we technically are.
28:58
You are lysine dependent. So, I mean like it's one of the worst things to make it dependent on because it just naturally occurs in so many
29:06
things whether it's dairy and eggs or beans and nuts and seeds. But it is it is a perfect critique of
29:12
that techno capitalist mindset. Yes. Yes. Where they went with the cheapest thing
29:17
they could think of because it's easy to get and then just assumed they could
29:22
keep the animals from ever getting it. In that thread, they also don't test it. They don't, you know, take an example
29:28
dinosaur and say, "Okay, let's take this one off the lysene and see how long it takes and see how it actually works." Because in the valuable,
29:34
yeah, they say they're too valuable. Like absolutely not. Like they would be able to find out there like there's some disease that's going through the
29:40
dinosaurs and they would say like if we could do an autopsy, we'd really be able to figure this out better. And Hammond is like, "Absolutely not. These
29:46
dinosaurs are priceless, so you can wait till one dies." Yeah. And I mean, that is that is a
29:53
perfect encapsulation of essentially the first movie and like the story that it's
29:58
really setting up in the book, the very first novel. Uh, and and a lot of this is just and I mean, we've seen it
30:05
before. It's it's partially anti- capitalistic. It's partially anti-technobble,
30:10
but it is endemic of the time. we already started to see this happening and I mean there are many reasons that
30:16
Michael Kiteon didn't want to be a doctor anymore uh or a medical doctor and a lot of that I think is involved in
30:22
this novel right like there's there's a sort of like I don't want to say morality undercurrent to it but it
30:30
definitely is a part of the story absolutely the moral there is a the moral is is the story if the moral is
30:36
the message here and the moral is when you put price above everything else. Uh,
30:44
lives are inevitably lost. Yeah. And those lives are lost not in spite of
30:49
you, but because of you. Your safeguard made things worse. Your other safeguard
30:56
made things worse. Your lust for automation over everything else made things worse. If they'd simply hired 20
31:03
security guards instead of having Nedri automate the entire park, this never would have happened. Like literally the
31:10
only reason this even happened is because Nedri automates everything and
31:15
therefore can sabotage everything. If they had just five guys with like, you
31:21
know, with cameras watching stuff happen, this wouldn't have happened. So it it it's just the perfect storm of
31:28
continuous just delusion that you are in control of the situation. Which is why Malcolm
31:33
comes off as so incredibly unuous at times because he is basically right. But
31:39
he's he's you know they describe him as a rock star. They make him seem arrogant
31:44
because they want you to be to believe people would ignore him. And you would
31:49
in the first movie or book you'd ignore Malcolm. Yeah. He's he acts like he already knows
31:54
everything. He's he's he shows up and he says obviously and even in the novel it's even worse because he's like I've
32:00
already seen six things that tell me that your experiment's gone wrong and dinosaurs are escaping. Like I can and
32:05
everyone's like how do you know? and he's like, "Isn't it obvious?" And then like another chapter later, he gets to
32:11
his evidence and things like that. But it's Yeah, he's he really leans into them. I think in a way it's very lucky they
32:16
got the actors they did to play these roles. Uh because each of them manages to
32:22
humanize a character who would otherwise not be tremendously great. Like Dr. Grant, you would not want to hang out with Dr. Grant in the book.
32:28
He's he is an unpleasant man. Um being played by by Sam I want to say Sam Neil.
32:35
Yes. It's not Sam Elliott. I ke want to say Sam Elliott. That's crazy. Um well, imagine if it was Sam Elliott. Jeez,
32:40
that's different movie. It would be a different movie. Yeah. Why is he just shooting the dinosaurs? Uh but but Sam Neil plays him
32:48
as somebody. Yes, he's got a temper, but at the same time, he's he's in love with
32:54
the subject. He loves dinosaurs. He loves telling people about dinosaurs. So when he sees that freaking
33:00
Brachiosaurus, there is that moment of childlike wonder on his face. He's like,
33:06
"They did it." And he's willing to go along until he figures out, "Oh, okay. No, they didn't do it. They they they
33:11
they messed it all up. They shortcut. They cut corners." Yeah. Dr. Sadler, uh her role is
33:17
expanded in the in the movie. She's in the book, but she's better in the movie. Uh again, possibly Laura Durn. I I'm
33:24
sorry, Laura Durn. Uh, I can't I can't say that I don't like Laura Durren's performance better. I will say that
33:29
Sadler in the book is smarter and smarter than everybody else. She's not
33:35
She's possibly the smartest person in the book. Um, certainly she's the one who's the most I want to say like
33:43
rational about everything. Yeah, they slipped away. you know, you uh they give Malcolm plenty of time to
33:50
lean into uh Henry Woo and especially Hammond, but she's the one that sits down with them in the movie and gets to
33:55
say, "You never had control." When he's like, "Next time it'll be flawless." She's the one who's like, "You're an idiot." But also in the novel, they're
34:03
the raptors are surrounding the whole compound and the survivors are there and they have to distract them from eating
34:10
through the roof. and she's the one who opens up the gate and walks into the fog to the point where she can't see the
34:16
gate anymore to get the raptors to come after her. And then she runs back in with two chasing her and dodges them and
34:24
gets back in. So, I think that she's the coolest character in the novel and the movie.
34:29
Now, I just if only we get Laura Durn to read the book. Um, but no, I I there's a
34:34
lot of the problem with with with looking at Jurassic Park from modern
34:40
eyes is that it's the same problem you would have looking at a film like Jurassic Park made in in 1970 at the
34:49
time Jurassic Park came out. People didn't originally There's lots of portrayals of dinosaurs in films and
34:54
other media where they look like kangaroos or tripods. That's not just
34:59
because artists and writers decided they should do that. That's because a lot of
35:05
the animals were reconstructed that way and they were reconstructed that way because it made sense
35:13
uh based on what they knew, based on the information they had. Um this goes all
35:18
the way back to the reconstruction of iguanadon. The first reconstruction of Guadon they made was this gigantic
35:26
cow, like literally like a cow that ate water plants and you could get a you get
35:32
10 people to sit in its intestines and have a dinner party if you wanted to. When they made the uh Crystal Palace
35:38
adanodons, they literally had dinner parties inside the not quite completed
35:44
dinosaur reconstructions. Then uh around the time that the 1800s really started rolling, they found more iguanadons and
35:52
they started reconstructing them differently because they now had more complete skeletons. Like when they first
35:57
discovered this thing, they had teeth and teeth that turned out later to not actually even be iguanadon, but to be a
36:02
relative of a guanadon. Um as we discover more, there's always going to be stuff we had didn't know yet. And
36:09
unfortunately that means that if you watch Jurassic Park now there are some big glaring problems with the
36:16
paleontology. Um some that are just like it's it's impossible to ignore how wrong
36:22
they uh the one that really comes to mind is one that they knew at the time. It it kind of shows that they didn't really talk to the those consultants
36:29
they got. They didn't talk to them about every aspect of what they were doing. They did have Jack her like
36:35
but they obviously didn't ask him about this particular you know I'm gonna have to pick his battles
36:41
or they did and they were and they just decided no that's not going to be good television right like yeah and that's possible and that is one
36:48
of the problems too is when you're doing an adaptation like this what are you trying to portray um is the people like
36:56
most people are not going to care that you got Tyrannosaur Vision absolutely
37:01
and you got it wrong even for the science of the time. Like even in like
37:06
the 1980s, people knew this wasn't right because Tyrannosaurus is one of the most
37:14
studied dinosaurs ever. We have more specimens. We have more complete
37:20
specimens. We have studied this thing. We've done CAT scans of its brain case.
37:26
Uh but obviously we hadn't done all of that in 1990. However, we did know that
37:31
it had binocular vision. You don't develop binocular vision if you can't see stuff unless it moves. That's it's
37:38
it would be pointless. Why would you do that? Um, but that's just that is the kind of thing that happens. And in a
37:45
weird sort of way, that sort of helps set up the story of these movies because
37:50
the story of this movies is that even the scientists who do know about dinosaurs don't know everything about
37:58
dinosaurs. No matter how good your your your information becomes, no matter how
38:04
much it evolves over time, there's always going to be stuff we don't know or we're guessing about.
38:09
Yeah. Because it just doesn't you can't preserve it. No. And and not only that, but there's an undercurrent of uh that that sort of
38:16
set up the entire franchise that is established here, which is instead of just looking at the the movies and the
38:23
novels and saying this is all wrong and we're going to correct it, it turns into
38:29
establishing this is all wrong and now that's part of the lore. Like it's Well, yeah. It's like like uh Eric just
38:35
said about Henry Woo. Yes. Henry Woo isn't even trying to make accurate dinosaurs. He doesn't care
38:40
about accuracy. He barely knows what animal he's dealing with. He just wants to give people their he wants to
38:46
literally give people their preconception. And I think it's mirrored in the fact that the motivation for Hollywood making
38:53
a movie is not to make the most scientifically accurate movie. And not just for Jurassic Park, but for any
38:59
movie. The motivation is to make a movie that will put people in the seats and make as much money as possible. So even
39:05
though you even though you bring in a paleontologist and say, "All right, so how big is a T-Rex?" and he tells you
39:10
exactly how big and how it's supposed to move and how it can see. They say, "Well, yeah. Okay. Well, um, this scene
39:16
is more dramatic if this happens and that happens." Well, yeah. And I mean, like that's even to the point where Michael Kiteon as a
39:23
writer wasn't trying to write uh an educational guide to varieties of
39:29
dramas. Um, the fact that he got lucky and that they found a derosaur as big as
39:36
those things after the, you know, after the book and the movie come out, that's
39:42
pure, that's just log. That's just coincidence. But it's coincidence that means it kind of shows you that there
39:47
could be raptors this big because there were raptors this big or bigger. Technically, uh, the one that they
39:54
found, a kilobattor, is slightly larger than the the ones you see the velociraptors you see in Jurassic Park.
40:00
Uh, completely different body plan, too. But, you know, that's that's not worth it. Um, getting one the right size, that
40:06
took a while. They have since found them. They there are quite a few. Uh, but it's at the time, nobody knew this.
40:14
Velociraptor is one of the oldest dramas we have. uh in terms of when we knew about it, the dramas uh itself wasn't
40:21
found until after and Velociraptor was found by the the National History Museum
40:27
of of the Americas uh on an expedition to Mongolia in the 1930s. There's a guy
40:32
named Roy Chapman Andrews led an expedition there and they found amongst other things a velociraptor. It then
40:38
wasn't studied again much by the West until the 1970s and 80s. And that's
40:43
because World War II happened, then the Cold War happened, and Mongolia is
40:48
really close to China and Russia and not so close to anybody else. It was like,
40:54
um, uh, yeah, I guess we're going to be working with the Russians. So, the Russians put out all these papers that nobody in the in the West read because
41:01
most of them don't read Russian. So, Velociraptor was a blank slate. It could be whatever you wanted it to be. Uh that
41:08
like I said, Kiteon could use it because people were arguing it was the same thing as Dionicus. So why not use it?
41:14
It's it's a cooler name. And I think even I I love Dionicus, but I think I
41:20
have to admit Velociraptor is a cooler name than Dionicus. So much cooler.
41:26
It just it sounds like a race car dinosaur. I mean, you can even do like, you know, Velociraptor equals Distance
41:32
Raptor divided by Time Raptor. uh you know that I I now I want to see Time Raptor. Uh but no, I I think I think so
41:40
far we've pretty much covered should we move on to the second book and second movie or
41:45
I think we should we should move on to the second book. We have we have maybe 15 18 minutes left. Uh cover that in as
41:52
much as we can of the third because again the first is the setup. This the first is literally the setup for
41:57
everything that comes in the first three movies and then the current generation of movies which we'll talk about later.
42:03
So yeah, um second go ahead. You can do the if you want to do it, go for it, man. I was just going to do a quick
42:10
differences in the first novel and the book uh in the first novel and the movie the differences between them that will
42:16
be relevant going forward. Yeah. Because there's a couple characters like Henry Woo gets a horrible death from
42:21
Velociraptors and gets his like novel comeuppance. Uh John Hammond gets a
42:27
horrible death from Compies. falls down a hill because the kids are in the control room blasting T-Rex roars on the
42:34
speakers and he starts to run into the jungle, falls down a hill, breaks his ankle, and the compies get him. So, that
42:40
is those are those are big main differences. At the end of the first novel, the government of Costa Rica
42:46
comes in and blows up the island to the point where there's nothing left. So there's there's no more Ela Nublar in
42:54
the novel universe, which is almost why they had to reset for the second novel and movie and say, "Hey, guess what?
43:01
There was a whole another island the whole time. Handwave, handwave." Well, that's why it gets brought in.
43:06
Yeah. Ela Sora comes in because of that. Yeah. Yeah. My other favorite link is that in
43:13
the first novel, the character of Jinaro, the lawyer, who is like the the slimy one who's actually agreeing with
43:19
Hammond, uh, he gets eaten off the toilet in like that famous scene. In the book, it's kind of split into two
43:24
characters, and there's Jaro, the lawyer, and then there's another guy, Ed Regis, who's like the uh marketing guy,
43:31
and he's the one who ends up running around and eaten by the T-Rex. Jinaro survives and even does like a couple of
43:36
brave things, but Jinaro in the book is actually a lot more reasonable and and rational than he
43:42
is. He's not just, "Yeah, we're going to be printing money." He's like, "Um, the amount of liability you're opening us to
43:48
is staggering." Yeah. Even though you've done this thing in Costa Rica and not, you know, have you
43:55
ever heard of lawsuits in Disney? Like we are we are going to be drowning in
44:00
lawsuits. Uh, so yeah, there there's a there's more nuance to it for sure. Malcolm doesn't make it off the island.
44:07
They give like a he dies off screen. They're like, "Did he make it?" And they give like the head shake of, "No, he didn't make it." And then in the
44:14
beginning of the second book, he comes back and does the Mark Twain like reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. So the second novel is just
44:21
like, "Nope, that didn't happen." Well, I mean, as you point as, you know, they deliberately didn't actually kill
44:27
him in front of you, right? So if they wanted to, they could bring him back. That was frightening
44:32
going, I need a link here. And I think second novel, second novel, didn't they also handwave Hammond's death? Uh, he's he's not mentioned in the
44:39
novel. His son is. No, his nephew, right? Nephew. Sorry. I think it might actually be a son in the novel, isn't it?
44:45
It's in the movie. It's not. It's the Hammond the Hammond story kind of ends. And it's uh it there's a whole another
44:51
character that is a uh kind of paleontologist who is trying to find evidence. he like doesn't know about the
44:58
incident and so he's find he's the one who's like finding weird things in Costa Rica and he finds the island and then
45:04
Ian Malcolm gets convinced to go and get him. So like they have a different hook, they have a different opening. Um yeah, cuz I was going to say in the
45:10
novel cuz I was going to say cuz in the novel I'm 90% sure that it was uh Peter Lello,
45:16
wasn't it? Like his the nephew of John Hammond or something like that. In the in the movie Peter Ledllo is in
45:22
in the novel there's there's no connection. Yeah, the movie they have to basically just they reintroduce Hammond
45:28
just enough to say he exists and he's he's behind this and then you don't see him again. Uh he's just there.
45:35
In the novel they say they give like a rundown of what happened on the island and they say Jarro who in the novel
45:41
survives they say oh on vacation he died of dysentery which is a disease that keeps you on the toilet and so he died
45:47
on the toilet just like he did in the movie. So that's my that's my favorite Kiteon like touch of linking with the
45:55
movie having come out and saying, "Okay, now I'm gonna write another novel to to like reestablish Here We Are."
46:01
Yeah. And to be fair, um, Kiteon, like I said, this is the only time he wrote a sequel.
46:06
And it was also because it was because the fans were pestering him from the success of the first movie. Yeah. It was partially that, not just
46:12
the fans were pestering him. Um, the the holder of the movie rights was pestering him. Uh, and that's a person who can
46:19
pester you a lot harder. Uh, I believe it was Universal at the time. Um, I know
46:24
that, you know, Spielberg was involved with DreamWorks as well, but I'm pretty sure it was Universal actually own the movie rights. But regardless, yeah, he
46:31
he finally wrote that book to shut people up and it and it kind of feels like it. Um, in a lot of ways, the movie
46:39
is more it's more fun to watch. like this. The book definitely feels again it
46:46
it's a lot more horrible in a sense. Not like horrible as in bad, it's horrible as in horrible things are happening.
46:52
People are getting like chewed up. Um the dinosaurs are scarier. Uh but yeah,
46:58
I don't think Malcolm's daughter is in the novel either, quite frankly. No, it's two random school kids that are
47:04
helping the the crew that's putting together the tech, the trailers, and the jeep. They're they're like running
47:10
errands and then they're supposed to go out to test the stuff out like down the street and they stow away and they show up on the island. So it's Yeah. It's
47:16
just two two kids that are no relation to anybody. Yeah. Um but in general to to give
47:22
people an idea of basically what's going on here, uh Isla Islan was the site that
47:28
they were actually intending to start the park on. Uh Isla is essentially at
47:33
this time where where it's explained to us that it is the test bed. Yeah. Location. Yeah, site B, which is where they were
47:40
doing a lot of the work of trying to see what their behavior would be like if you didn't control it. Um, I don't think uh
47:48
I don't think Woo is in the second movie either, even though he shows up later in later films, but the basic explanation is that before
47:56
they decided that it would be better to control as much as possible about the
48:01
animals, uh, Hammond was arguing pretty hard that he wanted them to be animals. He wanted them to act like real
48:08
dinosaurs, quote unquote. Uh he wasn't accepting that idea that these aren't real dinosaurs. They look like what we
48:14
think they should look like, but that's because we designed them that way. Um which by the way gets around the whole featherless thing, which I still hate.
48:22
Uh but I'll give them credit on that. Oh, we could do a whole episode on just the feathers.
48:28
For whatever reason, Malcolm ends up going down there. He goes up going down there. uh finds that there are people
48:33
who are either hunting or attempting to capture the dinosaurs there. Um well, yeah, cuz in the movie in the
48:38
movie Lello, the uh the nephew of Dr. Hammond, who's taken overen, wants to go
48:44
to site B, which was originally, I think it was abandoned because of a hurricane, uh which is why they moved to the the
48:50
original the original park location. Um, that's a big piece of lore that's offscreen in the novel and the book
48:56
that's like, why is why this other island is also abandoned with dinosaurs running everywhere. Like a year after
49:01
Jurassic Park, a hurricane hits site B and the researchers there just release all the dinosaurs and run away. And
49:08
that's why there's another island of wild dinosaurs. But the the plan the plan here or at least the the one that's
49:15
presented by uh Lello is that uh he wants to go back to Isa
49:20
uh in order to save in which he's now in control of uh and is losing a metric ton
49:26
of money because venture capitalist uh Dr. Hammond spared no expense as he said
49:31
multiple times during the first film. Uh and he wants to open a new Jurassic Park in San Diego.
49:37
Yep. which by the way remember the entire subplot in the first novel about not letting the dinosaurs off the
49:43
island. Now he wants to take the dinosaurs off the island. Um
49:48
which is kind of like the really a good critique of the second part of latestage capitalism where doubling down is a
49:54
thing. Uh there's very much a lot of doubling down in in in JP2. Um JP3 uh I
50:03
don't even know how to talk about it. like it is it is a lot of decent actors
50:08
who are wasted on a movie that they just did because they wanted to make a big dinosaurs fight. Uh I don't have a
50:15
positive thing to say about its plot. I feel like Dr. Grant is completely wasted. The fact that Dr. Sadler is
50:21
barely even in it is even dumber. Um but that's I I'm not surprised that the
50:28
third one wasn't good when nobody who made the first two interesting or good was involved.
50:33
Mhm. Um, you know, Spielberg isn't in even like executive producing at this point. Uh, so yeah, it's not surprising.
50:40
Uh, in terms of the story of of two or the lost world if you reading the book,
50:46
they're both much more aware of I I feel like the chaos and the everything will
50:52
fall apart aspect of the first movie and and the first book are not necessarily
50:58
what the problem is here. Here it's pure hub. it is. Human beings still think
51:04
after they've been it's been demonstrated that you are not in control of this, they're going to double down
51:10
and try even harder to control it. And whether it's uh the nephew in the movie
51:16
or I don't even remember who's doing it in the book. I'll be honest, it's Dodgson. We've got Dodgson here in
51:23
the second novel. In the second novel, we've got Dodson here. He goes to the island with this device that emits a
51:29
sonic pulse. And he's going around to different nests to recover eggs. He's like, "Embros, whatever. We got we got
51:35
eggs now. We got fertilized eggs we're going to bring back to Biosin and reverse engineer them and we're going to have the Dino Tech." So, he goes around
51:42
to a bunch of different nests. And then going back to the T-Rex being able to see movement, Katon kind of redeems
51:48
himself because they're watching this happen. He very deliberately points out that that was ridiculous.
51:53
He's in the T-Rex nest. The battery falls out of the thing. The T-Rex comes up to him. They're watching it on the video feed, which there's a whole like
52:00
video system in the novel that's like active throughout the whole abandoned island, which is a whole different
52:05
thing. But they're watching him and they're like, "Why is he standing still? Why isn't he running?" And one of the
52:11
characters goes, "He's misinformed." And then has this whole long monologue about how Grant is stupid and dinos and T-Rex
52:17
obviously could see more than just movement and that's inaccurate information. Yeah. and and it was um and it's not
52:25
even like you can blame that on the frog DNA because there's no frogs that have that problem either. Uh but yeah, no,
52:32
it's it is I think it's interesting to think about the fact that the first and uh the first and second novels and in
52:38
movies they basically start off with as as Joe's pointed out there the first one
52:44
is definitely setting everything up, but it also it it basically starts off with a this this is the beginning of the
52:51
descent. The second one is like here's what it looks like in freef fall. Uh here's what it's like when literally
52:56
nobody to the point where you don't even find Malcolm annoying any because yeah now he
53:03
just seems like somebody reasonable who who experienced all this and is trying to warn you not to do it again while you
53:10
keep doing it. Uh it's it's like it's like watching someone step on a rake and then step on the rake again and you're
53:16
like, "Hey, the rake." And you boom, right in the face again. You're like, "Why did you step on it again?" Uh, it is fascinating to see it as a
53:23
story. Um, I don't know that I'd say that the follow-up movies really seem to
53:29
understand that well. Yeah, I I think so. Let's let's go back a little bit here. So, Jurassic Park 1
53:36
and 2 were by far and away the start of, for lack of a better term, a cultural
53:42
phenomenon. Like if I remember as a kid during this time frame, uh when these
53:48
movies were first coming out, uh seeing not just, you know, the toys and stuff
53:55
like that at toy stores, but like anywhere you went in like the now long dead malls across all of America, uh or
54:03
or other parts of the world where you would go into like the nature store or the discovery store or whatever these
54:10
things were that were generally selling science bobbles essentially. actually that had a very strong focus on
54:18
dinosaurs, whether it was dinosaur books, skeletons, model kits to put the skeletons together, etc., etc., etc. And
54:24
a lot of that happened mostly after 1993, like after this movie success
54:30
because it wasn't just the book that that was very good uh for its time, but
54:38
the movie was revolutionary. It used a lot of effects uh very very much well
54:46
effectively uh combining early CGI with practical effects in order to get what
54:52
can be deemed a realistic uh you know representation. And a matter of fact, like going back to Jurassic Park as a
54:59
film, it holds up better than most other movies made around the same time frame
55:05
or even later utilizing better technology because, and I will give Spielberg credit for this, uh, they
55:13
understood how to present this fantastical idea in a sort of grounded
55:20
realistic way that made the movie very, very timeless. And because of that, combined with the subject matter, it
55:27
really propelled it to become a cultural phenomenon that informed a ton of other movies, a ton of other novels, and
55:35
sparked the desire to have sequels. And yes, the third movie was probably
55:41
it's probably the worst out of all of them. And I say that with a grain of salt, uh, because it doesn't add
55:46
anything new and it doesn't really do anything. Go ahead. I will I will say um first off we should also talk about the
55:53
fact that the impact of Jurassic Park wasn't limited to other movies or other
55:58
books or just the cultural impact. The fact that Walking with Dinosaurs exists
56:04
is because of Jurassic Park. Yeah. And whilst while Walking with Dinosaurs didn't look as good as Jurassic Park for
56:11
a show made on an effective shoestring it looked really good at the time. I'm not talking about the current version.
56:17
Um, which I don't actually mind, but some people really hate it. I'm just not getting in there. I'm just saying a lot
56:23
of stuff that came after. Um, keep in mind that 1990, like the 1989, 1990 when
56:29
production began on this thing is literally the dead center point of what's called the dinosaur renaissance.
56:35
Uh, and without unless we're going to turn this into a dinosaur podcast, which I'm game for, but I don't think these
56:41
guys are going to let me. Um, two against one. You can do it. Okay. All I All I'm going to say here is
56:47
that the dinosaur ren Renaissance is when they started looking at dinosaurs and saying, "Wait a minute. How come
56:53
these bones are so similar to say this animal that's alive now?" Uh this this pigeon, why is the pigeon and the
57:00
velociaptor very similar? Why is Velociraptor not that different from a turkey? Uh and that kind of thing led to
57:05
eventual understandings about feathers, about all that stuff was in its midphase. Uh what Jurassic Park did was
57:12
essentially create two generations of pe people who went into paleontology.
57:18
Yeah. The Jurassic Park generation. Yeah. And what did they do when they got there? When they got into paleontology,
57:24
they didn't go out and do a ton more expeditions. They went and looked at all the bones that had been laying in
57:31
museums for decades. And that's where a lot of stuff we're learning now is
57:36
coming from that generation of paleontologists. Yeah. it the like it directly contributed to that surge of of uh like
57:43
discoveries, right? Like it is well documented. I mean to the point where I was watching
57:49
um of all things uh I can't remember if it if it's uh I want to say it's the GQ
57:54
one, but you know how there's like various uh GQ and others do like little shorts where they ask an expert on a
58:00
thing to talk about it. They got one one paleontologist to come on and talk about scenes from various Jurassic Park
58:06
movies. And since we are going to talk about Jurassic Park 3 at least a little that this would be how I talk about it.
58:13
He they have him there and I'm looking at the guy and I realize this dude is younger than I am which means this guy has definitely seen Jurassic Park. There
58:19
is no way he hasn't. I saw it when I was in my 20s. There is no way this guy didn't grow up on it. He saw that movie.
58:27
He saw all of them. And it also it also led to a push in the sciences to not just paleontology, but like if you've
58:34
paid attention to the news over the last couple decades, uh, literally from like
58:40
I want to say like the the early 2010s forward, like you have an entire segment
58:45
of bioscience that is attempting to use fragmented DNA to revive extinct species. Um,
58:51
yeah, they're just trying for ones where the DNA can still be there. Yeah. like like woolly mammoth or uh I
58:57
believe there was talk of dodo birds direwolves uh thyloines.
59:02
Yeah, thyloines. Absolutely. So like but that never would have even been a thing had this novel in these
59:08
movies like maybe we would have gotten to it but an entire generation of people went into science
59:13
like inspired by this like they started doing this because they saw this as a
59:19
kid. But also to point out the one of the things that happened because of it too is that like the paleontologist I
59:25
was talking about on the cheek thing. He's he's basically asked at one point they're like who'd win in a fight uh
59:30
Tyrannosaurus Rex or Spinosaurus? And he goes look this is the most boring question anybody can ask about these
59:37
animals. There's so much we don't know about them and so much we could learn
59:42
and so many interesting things they could teach us. But it's T-Rex. And you realize there that the movies
59:50
created and preserved in people a sense of wonder, a sense of joy. Uh the they
59:56
went from these animals are more abund and they were doomed to be extinct and
1:00:01
they're not really important to study to these animals are the most magnificent
1:00:07
land animals that the planet Earth ever produced. They're the most wildly distinctive. They're the most different.
1:00:14
Like think about the fact that like the the two closest living relatives of
1:00:20
dinosaurs are birds who are a dinosaur and crocodilians who are arosaurs like
1:00:26
dinosaurs. And can you imagine like you look at a bird and you look at a crocodile and you don't think these guys
1:00:31
are closely related. Anybody who's ever Anybody who's ever owned a bird will tell you that they are dinosaurs.
1:00:37
Yeah. But they won't tell you they're a crocodile. No. But crocodiles and birds are relatives.
1:00:42
Technically speaking, birds are reptiles. If you don't count birds as reptiles, then reptiles are not a real
1:00:49
group. They're not a monopolyic group if you don't count birds, cuz there's no way to separate birds out. And that's
1:00:57
that's something we learned because of uh, you know, not just because of these movies, but because of the people that
1:01:03
these movies got interested in this subject. Yeah. The people that got inspired by it. But I think
1:01:08
I think we're going to end it here. Uh, I think we're going to continue on in the next episode with what happens after
1:01:14
the initial three movies because there's a lot more that happens after this. Uh,
1:01:20
so I do want to thank you for joining us and remind you that Blizzard is made possible due to the generous
1:01:25
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1:01:31
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1:01:44
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1:01:50
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1:01:56
you are a Patreon subscriber, as a way of saying thank you for helping us keep the lights on, we have the Patreon Q and podcast questions channel which we have
1:02:02
set aside. Uh we tend to look there first just to you know again to continue that thank you. Well, that folks, we'll
1:02:08
see you next week. [Music]
#Movies