Would You Visit Jurassic Park?

jp-orig-coverI remember the first time I saw the cover of the book Jurassic Park.

It’s a brilliant, iconic cover. It shows that packaging matters. How do you sell a book about dinosaurs to tens of millions of adults? With an elegantly designed cover (and an entertaining book).

I was in middle school when I first saw the cover of Jurassic Park. A friend was reading it during lunch. A week later, we were all reading it, staying up late to see what would happen.

The movie version, directed by Steven Spielberg, came out soon afterwards. The way Spielberg brought dinosaurs to life was something experienced best on movie screens the size of brontosaurs.

At least, so I was told. I wasn’t yet 13, and my parent’s rule was that I couldn’t see PG-13 movies until I was 13. So I had to wait to see it on VHS a few years later on a TV screen. Remember how small TV screens were back then? My sandwich at lunch today was bigger than the TV on which I watched Jurassic Park, and I’m a light eater.

So when I found out that the movie is returning to theaters, I jumped at the chance to see it. I have my tickets for Thursday’s “midnight” showing at 10:00 pm.

I’ll be up too late to post a blog entry tomorrow, so I leave you with a few questions: Did you see Jurassic Park on the big screen? If not, are you seeing it this time around? And if someone created a real Jurassic Park, a Harry Potter theme park where magic is real, and a Star Wars theme park in space, which one would you choose to visit first?

12 thoughts on “Would You Visit Jurassic Park?”

  1. I was completely enamored by that movie when it came out. I was 13 or 14 and I saw it at least 8 times in the theater. Gotta love the $1 theater. It also inspired me to write my only venture into fan fiction. Still love it to this day. Great soundtrack as well.

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    • 8 times for $8 is amazing. It’s $11 for me to see it once in 3D tonight, 20 years after the original came out!

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  2. I love that book too, and I enjoyed the movie. I can’t remember if I watched it on the big screen, so I probably didn’t. Despite these claims, I think a real Jurrasic Park would take a distant third to a Harry Potter theme park in which magic is real and a Star Wars theme park in space. My ranking may have something to do with the lack of success people seem to have in reigning in the carnage of the carnivorous dinosaurs in the book/movie. I feel a little ashamed to say it as a person born during the original Star Wars era (and as a person who knows many a die-hard Star Wars fan), but I’d have to choose the Harry Potter theme park as my #1 place to visit. I love magic, and the thought of taking some sort of rocket to get to the Star Wars theme park scares me a little. Granted, if the ride up there involved the Millenium Falcon and not a modern space ship, that would make this a tougher decision.

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    • That is tough…ride on a real Millenium Falcon (or even Boba Fett’s awesome ship) versus experience real magic. I’d probably have to go with magic too, simply so that I could fly of my own volition.

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  3. I did get to see it in the theaters thanks to my older brother insisting it was a movie to watch in the theaters. We almost never went to see movies in the theater, but my parents made an exception for this one. I then became so enamored with the music that I learned the piano score for the theme song and played it for years. All around great movie!

    On a different note, a year or two ago our local advertising club brought Chip Kidd, the designer for the Jurassic Park book jacket, to speak. It was a great talk and, as it turned out, really more of a practice session for him to hone his speech for the TED talk he gave a few months later. You can find the talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/chip_kidd_designing_books_is_no_laughing_matter_ok_it_is.html It’s well worth watching!

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    • Good call on the theme song, Christine. I’m always impressed when composers can capture the feel of the movie in a single song.

      Very cool that you got to meet Chip Kidd. I watched that talk a while ago, and he talks about the inception of the Jurassic Park cover (if I remember correctly, it involves him tracing an image someone else created).

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  4. That’s cool, Jamey … are you seeing it as a regular movie or in 3D? I’m hoping to see it in 3D. I never saw it on the big screen (just on TV), so I think that would be quite the experience in the theater! When we were in Hawaii, we visited the Jurassic Park “valley” where the movie was filmed, so this makes the re-release of the movie even more exciting to me!

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    • Colleen–I’m seeing it in 3D. I don’t care much for 3D (especially not post-converted 3D), but I don’t think it’ll detract from the movie. And if the dinosaurs feel like they’re jumping off the screen at me, I’ll be delighted.

      It’s too bad that valley isn’t populated with real dinosaurs!

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  5. I’m very excited about finally being able to see this on the big screen, despite the fact that I’ve seen this movie countless times at home, and am preparing to be wowed by the experience.

    That’s a tough call on choosing which hypothetical theme park to visit, but I’d have to pick the Harry Potter one…unless a fourth option of a Westeros/Game of Thrones Park can be thrown into the mix, and then I’d go with that one as the allure of magic, knights, and dragons would be pretty cool.

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    • I thought about adding a Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings option to that list, but I couldn’t figure out a way to frame it. I guess there are some pretty cool creatures and cities in those worlds, but many of the cities are surpassed by actual old-world cities in the real world. 🙂

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  6. I actually saw Jurassic Park at the Ashland theater back when it was an actual movie theater with my grandma and two younger sisters. About 30 minutes in, the reel LITERALLY caught on fire and burned like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoIqtxJF9x4

    We lost about 10 minutes of the movie which was ok because it gave my youngest sister (about 6 at the time) a chance to stop hyperventilating from fear. Probably not Grandma’s best decision taking us to see that.

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    • That’s awesome. I had forgotten how scary the movie is…it’s essentially a horror movie with dinosaurs.

      Reply

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