“When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth:” Remembering a Childhood Defined by ‘Jurassic Park’
One of my most sincere, deepest movie loves is also the very first that I can remember. As far back as I have clear memories, I have memories of Jurassic Park. When I was four years old, I went on a huge trip out West with my parents. Montana, Wyoming, you name it. We went on a huge road trip to see some of the most beautiful places in the country, but it was also an unforgettable time for a dinosaur kid like I was. All kids loved dinosaurs, sure, but my love really ran deep from the earliest age. I had a lot of cheap rubber dino toys that I cherished, and that I even took with me on that particular trip. This obsession had been fueled in no small part by my dad. He was an old school outdoorsman, a mountain man at heart, and we took the trip so he could visit his old haunts where he had spent so many of the best days of his life. Even though he loved me and my mom — and Maine, more than he would usually admit — his heart always clearly belonged to the West and there wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t talk about how he wished he could go back there, to the real great outdoors. He also loved dinosaurs.
I learned the names of actual paleontologists from him, like Jack Horner and Robert Bakker. He got legitimately invested in the science and the discovery of it. After all, dinosaurs were a combination of my dad’s favorite things: nature and history, so on one hand it only makes sense. And in the United States, the vast majority of dinosaur finds were discovered in Montana, Wyoming, most of the spots we were visiting on our trip. For me, that great childhood adventure became the dinosaur trip and it was more than my four year old mind could take. We went to the Museum of the Rockies, we drove past an actual dinosaur dig as Jack Horner and his huge crew were famously discovering a Maiasaur nest that would shed a ton of light on dinosaur breeding habits.
It also, as if by fate, happened to be the same year that would see the release of Jurassic Park. The movie wasn’t out yet, but the marketing was in full swing and it fueled my young imagination. Just before the trip began, in the small toy aisle of Renys, my mom made the mistake of buying me my first Jurassic Park toy and one of the first toys I could ever remember getting in general, a screeching electronic Velociraptor that absolutely drove her crazy. As we drove across the country, I would see ads for Jurassic Park wherever we went. There would be at least a few toys everywhere we would stop. I remember excitedly picking up a T-Rex and using it to first scare and then quickly befriend the kids camping next to us for a few nights. I picked up a Jurassic Park Viewfinder that gave me my first glimpse of what the dinosaurs in the movie would actually look like and it completely blew me away.
Yet the best dinosaur-related find of that vacation had been a Pocket Guide to Dinosaurs that my dad had bought me. Unlike the other dino books I had picked up, it was not remotely intended for kids. But that’s what I loved about my dad. He wouldn’t talk down to me and he knew the only way my interest in dinosaurs would grow was by genuinely getting invested and seriously educating myself. Plus, I think he kind of just wanted to read it, too. The artwork in that book was gorgeous and I still hold onto that same copy to this day.
It’s weird to have any memories of Jurassic Park that predate the movie, because it’s the first movie I ever concretely remember seeing in theaters. And I was four. These memories shouldn’t be half as well developed as they are. But my passion for dinosaurs and my anticipation of this movie (even though I was barely aware that movies were even a thing that would come out at a specific time and didn’t just always exist) were so strong that those images and experiences, even though I’ve certainly lost a lot of them, are seared into my brain.
When Jurassic Park finally came out, we went to see it at the Criterion in Bar Harbor. The theater was old then and is ancient now, and in 1993 its old aesthetic was beautiful and its hard, hard chairs weren’t nearly as uncomfortable. We saw it on the balcony. No other movie I saw on that balcony came anywhere close to the same experience. A lot of people my age talk about Jurassic Park as the source of some of their earliest childhood fears, maybe even the first time they were ever afraid of the film. Many of my friends were terrified by the T-Rex when they were young. Or the raptors. I was enamored with every dinosaur I saw, with one major exception.
One of my earliest memories, so clear I can still hear my mom trying not to laugh as she rushed to comfort me, is of the scene where Nedry is eaten by the Dilophosaurus. I loved every dinosaur, including that one, but that crested headed bastard absolutely scared the hell out of me. I think it wasn’t so much the look as the sound. When the frill popped, I jumped. When it made that rattling sound as Nedry screamed, I literally leapt and dove under my seat, where I think I stayed for a minute or two until the scene was over.
Even still, it’s both my earliest movie memory and one of the best moviegoing experiences of my entire life. It was also the first time I could remember my parents loving a film as much as I did. My mom got into it in a way she didn’t for most sci-fi/adventure features. And my dad until the end of his days said that his favorite scene in a movie was that moment seeing the Brachiosaurus for the first time, the first dinosaur we’re introduced to in the movie. He, totally swept by the magic of the film, leaned back and audibly said “Whoa” in the theater.
Jurassic Park became a huge part of my childhood. We owned it as soon as it hit video, I picked up all of the toys that I could find, most of which my mom snagged at a yard sale when a kid got too old for his entire collection. I even threw a Jurassic Park-themed birthday party in second grade. My childhood bond with the closest friend I ever had was built on this movie and our mutual love of it. We even traded dinosaur toys amongst ourselves. In fact, now that our collections are both gathering dust, I’m pretty sure I still have a couple of his and he might have one or two of mine. The second grade birthday was full of great presents, we had cheap cut-out dinosaur masks. And we also had a squirt gun war with my cousin, who had a birthday the same week and happened to have her party the same day. And who also tended to make my life a living hell, so I didn’t feel as bad as I probably should have when I soaked her brand new birthday dress. That night, the party split as despite celebrating dinosaurs all day, I decided that evening that I wanted to watch Street Fighter, and the decision as to which we would watch led to an actual Street Fighter fight bouncing between my two couches. That, admittedly, was mostly due to two friends both on ADHD medication they had forgotten to take. Thankfully, Jurassic Park won.
In 1997, I got to live through the biggest hype of my early childhood for a second time as The Lost World: Jurassic Park hit theaters. Once more, there were toys and video games to pick up, tie-in books to read. I was only in third grade but it already felt like I had grown up with this series and, thanks to being a kid, what I was being handed felt no different than the thing I had loved the first time. I was stoked to see toys of new dinosaurs just as I was stoked at the promise that there would be new dinosaurs to see in the movie itself. And there were. Tons of them. Plus, all the dinosaurs I still loved from the original (save for the scary Dilophosaurus) were back with a lot more to do.
My dad took me to see The Lost World in Bangor. While it was nearly an hour away, Bangor was pretty much the place to see movies. The theater in Ellsworth had always sucked and while Criterion was our local theater, it was only open in the summer. I’m pretty sure it had opened by the time Lost World came out, but my dad absolutely hated the summer tourism in Bar Harbor and would do everything he could not to expose himself to it. So we went to Bangor to see the movie I could not possibly have been more pumped to see, and the experience watching it was very different. At one point, I got up to go to the bathroom and got lost, missing an entire major T-Rex chase sequence. I had a smile from ear to ear at all the dinosaur mayhem as soon as it ended, even still. I loved it just as I had loved the first one. My dad had not. He thought it was stupid, he thought it didn’t make any sense, and so we left it at that.
The buzz on Lost World continued to last me through childhood, as I developed an interest in filmmaking and my aforementioned dinosaur loving friend Pete and I decided we were going to make our own Jurassic Park movie with only our toys. Parts of that were definitely filmed in our respective back yards, but I have no idea what happened to it. I do remember that the plot revolved around the park actually opening up to the public before all hell, naturally, broke loose. I also played the Lost World PlayStation game religiously even if it was frustratingly hard. I was smitten by the PlayStation in general. The move from the second to third dimension in graphics had completely floored me and as far as I was concerned, playing that game was like watching a new movie unfold before my eyes. A movie where the protagonist — be they human or dinosaur — did nothing but die over and over again.
Much more exciting than that video game was the largely forgotten other PlayStation title, Warpath: Jurassic Park. It was everything young me wanted out of a game: a fighter with an all-star roster of Jurassic Park dinosaurs. It introduced me to Suchomimus, a dinosaur I absolutely loved as a kid and that, frustratingly, has still never made it into a single Jurassic Park movie. More exciting than any game, though, was the opportunity to go to Universal’s Islands of Adventure the year it opened and experience an entire Jurassic Park based theme park, the closest I would ever come to actually living the movie (as I naturally dreamed of doing) and it absolutely blew my young mind.
The last Jurassic Park of what we considered to be the “original trilogy,” and the last one to come out in my younger life, was something of a mixed bag even in terms of anticipation. Pete and I still ate and breathed dinosaurs. We still spitballed ideas for our own Jurassic Park sequels, we still did science projects on recent dinosaur discoveries, but we were in sixth grade and every enthusiastic thing we did was undercut by an unspoken knowledge that were supposed to have grown out of it by now.
It made going through the ritual of buying the toys and the games a lot less fun. Well, that and the fact that both of those things were clearly trying half as hard. The toys weren’t just things we felt like we shouldn’t be buying as sixth graders, they were just in general a lot less cool than what the first two movies had gotten. And this time there was no big PlayStation tie-in game. The only Jurassic Park III games I could find were for PC and clearly aimed at little, little kids. But I bought them anyway. There was no Michael Crichton book to read and compare with the movie, just a junior novelization. But this time a new Jurassic Park was seen without parental supervision, and that felt like a huge thing.
While I was still years into a crush that barely knew I existed, my friend had a much more realistic crush on a girl he could actually talk to and brought her along, effectively making me the third wheel on a movie date. Instead of being blown away as usual, we both enjoyed the ride and walked away thinking “That was fine.” Despite a youth built on Jurassic Park, we could feel it slipping away as soon as the third movie hit, and while we still loved dinosaurs all throughout middle school, the asteroid was on its way and I’m pretty sure we could sense it. We kept trading dinosaur toys, watching the first two features over and over and making our camcorder movies, but we couldn’t stop high school from coming.
Still, Jurassic Park remains one of my all-time favorite movies and I love it just as much as I always have. It’s a huge part of my life and every time I see it, I can’t help but think back to a childhood defined by that franchise and the friendships built on it. A childhood when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
