Jurassic Park/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The Franchise in General

  • Dan Browned: The Spinosaurus being able to snap a T. Rex's neck; the third movie's "dinosaur consultant" went on record claiming this was actually possible. In reality, a Spinosaurus's jaws were too weak to do so and their hands and arms were anatomically incapable of holding on to the T. Rex in the manner it does.
    • Not to mention, T. Rex had one of the thickest necks of all predatory dinosaurs, which some scientists speculate it used to pick up medium sized dinosaurs and shake them to death in its jaws, whereas Spinosaurus had a long, thin neck to allow it to move its head quickly into the water to catch fish using its long, narrow jaws. It would be like trying to get a pelican to try to snap a bulldog's neck. Also, the T. Rex had one of the strongest sets of jaws, proportionally, of all creatures to ever exist. The Spinosaurus wouldn't have been able to survive one bite to the neck. Sure, maybe the T. Rex was off its game or something...
    • Lampshaded by Dr. Grant's remarks at his lecture at the beginning of the movie: he does not consider the Jurassic Park creatures true dinosaurs, but rather genetically engineered monsters. This is shown again by the completely impossible behavior of the Pteranodons. The actual inaccuracies and accuracies in the pterosaurs of the movie are too numerous to list here but anyone who would like to actually look it up can read the Stock Dinosaurs Non Dinosaurs page, which has a whole folder dedicated to describing pterosaurs.
      • To be frank, the whole 'Spino breaking a Rex's neck' thing is only so hated because T. Rex lost, not because of this scientific inaccuracy. there are many more far more drastic bullshit in Jurassic Park- T. Rex having a prehensile tongue, poison-spitting Dilophosaurs, eucaptylus chewing sauropods, 10 foot Velociraptors, Dilophosaurus being the size of turkeys....frankly, messing around with purely hypothetical strength levels is the least of JP's paleontological problems, and if one is truly worried about accuracy there are plenty more stuff one should be annoyed about.
  • Death by Cameo: The Unlucky Bastard in The Lost World is played by screenwriter David Koepp.
  • Dueling Movies: With Carnosaur and Raptor. Everyone remembers them... right?!

Roger Ebert: (on The Critic, to Gene Siskel) You liked Carnosaur 2!

  • Fan Nickname: "Rexy", the T-Rex in the first film (and for all intents and purposes, the true star of the movie), who makes return appearances in the three Jurassic World movies.
  • The Film of the Book: The third film is composed 95% of anything from the two novels they didn't put in the previous movies (aviary, cloning lab, river chase...).
  • Hey, It's That Guy!: You may recognize Jules Winnfield and Dr. Huang in the first film, along with Santa Claus as Hammond.
  • The Red Stapler: Demand for Amber, and all dinosaur related toys, books and products.
  • Refitted for Sequel: The opening to The Lost World: Jurassic Park is adapted from the opening of the first Jurassic Park book.
    • Many scenes in Jurassic Park III are from the other two books: The river chase from the first and the aviary and cloning lab from The Lost World. It's been joked that III exists mainly to use up all the bits from the books they couldn't fit into the first two movies.
  • Science Marches On: A lot of the incorrectness, like Deinonychus being a Velociraptor, is due to this. It was what was believed to be true in 1992.
    • Notably, we now know that Velociraptor had feathers and possessed other avian characteristics (this was sort of addressed in the third film by giving them weird looking little feather "mohawks").
  • Technology Marches On: Nicely averted by the movie. The original novels described the Jurassic Park computer network as consisting of multiple Cray X-MP machines. By the time of the movie, those machines weren't the computing behemoths they were considered to be back in the day, and they decided to replace them with Connection Machine CM-5 supercomputers instead. This makes sense in-universe as that's the kind of machine a business that needed ridiculous amounts of computing power at the time would have plumped for, and it made sense visually because the CM-5 computers were utterly festooned with Blinkenlights, making them the ideal movie prop.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Richard Donner, Tim Burton and Joe Dante were all considered to direct when studios had a bidding war for the material (Donner would have made the film for Columbia Pictures, Burton at Warner Bros and Dante at Twentieth Century Fox). In the end, Universal and Spielberg won out since Spielberg was Crichton's first choice to direct (and the studio used the upcoming Schindler's List, which Spielberg had been lobbying to direct, as incentive). But imagine how dark Burton's and Dante's versions would have been.
    • William Hurt, Harrison Ford, and Richard Dreyfuss were all offered the part of Allan Grant. Julie Binochet and Robin Wright were both considered for the part of Ellie Satler. Sean Connery was offered the role of John Hammond. And Brian Cox auditioned for the part of Robert Muldoon.
    • Spielberg changed the endings of the first two films in the middle of filming. On the first, the film was supposed to end with the dinosaur fossils in the visitors' center falling on the raptors and crushing them. Would've been a tad anti-climatic. Spielberg realized that the audiences would never forgive him if he didn't bring back the T. Rex for one last heroic moment, and so he did. With The Lost World, it was supposed to end with a Pteranadon assault on a helicopter. Spielberg had proposed putting a T. Rex in San Diego early on, but was more or less ignored, until he insisted that it was the ending that would be filmed. It is quite safe to say that both endings that found themselves in the movie are better than the planned ones.
    • It was recently revealed by Kathleen Kennedy that the Tyrannosaurus in the first film was originally going to die about halfway through the movie. When they got to the point that they were going to film that scene, Spielberg decided against it.
  • The Wiki Rule: Jurassic Park Wiki

The First Film

  • Actor Allusion: When describing Sam Neill's character, Dr. Grant, the jefe of the Mano de Dios mine says that "you'll never get him out of Montana". Neill's character in The Hunt for Red October wanted to move to Montana after defecting to the United States.
  • Awesome, Dear Boy: According to IMDB, Samuel L. Jackson and Wayne Knight signed on to the film because they liked the idea of playing characters who get eaten alive by dinosaurs. Unfortunately though, both actors were disappointed that their characters' deaths were not shown in the finished film. Knight's character Nedry's death doesn't happen directly on-camera, and the scene where Jackson's character Arnold gets killed was cut out of the film entirely.
  • Fake American: New Zealander Sam Neill as Alan Grant.
  • Fake Brit: American Arliss Howard as Peter Ludlow.
  • Star-Making Role: Jeff Goldblum wasn't exactly unknown before this film, having starred in hits like The Right Stuff and The Fly, but this is the one that made him a household name.
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