I Just Want To Talk About Jurassic Park

I like Jurassic Park. It's a franchise about a theme park full of dinosaurs and incompetent management. It's a franchise based around one really great movie and a bunch of high budget B-Movie sequels. It's big, dumb, and a ton of fun. 

It's not a hard concept to like, everyone loves dinosaurs. I don't think anyone would not love the chance to see them alive in person. It would be amazing. A theme park full of actual living dinosaurs would be something everyone would love. Dinosaurs are cool.

But dinosaurs would eat everything they saw and cause chaos, so an actual dinosaur theme park would result in anarchy. Which is literally the plot of the movie.

I think one of the things I like best about these movies is the additional media/merchandise. This is something I've liked best about other things as well. I grew up with Star Wars. It wasn't until I was an adult until the prequels and sequels came out. 

Know all those cool Kenner toys? Well, what the hell was that guy who was in one second of the movie somewhere in the background supposed to do? In fact, what was all these other guys supposed to do? There was 3 movies and they had a definite end. Darth Vader was dead and not even a bad guy anymore, and here I was with his toy on Christmas morning. I wanted more and you know where more came from? Those goofy little story books and oddball video games. 

So the first JP comes out and honestly it's not like it took forever for the second movie to come out or anything, but I wanted more and what I got was things like video games and weird other stuff. Then more movies came out and really felt more like other media more than anything. I kinda like that.

The closest to a thematic sequel is the ride at Universal Studios. It began development before the movie began filming, so it's got that same time juice going on. When riding it, you're at the now open Jurassic Park and of course things go wrong. Because if they didn't, it'd be another franchise. Like Steel Magnolias.

The park was open in Jurassic World and I really liked that. But I found myself appreciating that little touch the prior sequels had, the wreckage of the original unopened park. I don't know why I like seeing that so much, but I do. I guess what could have been is the overall theme to to movies and something we can all relate too. That and dinosaurs eating people on a toilet is pretty awesome.