Sunday, June 11, 2023

Celebrating 30 years of 'Jurassic Park'

As I telegraphed yesterday, today's Sunday entertainment feature celebrates 30 years of Jurassic Park. I begin with some corporate PR from the Jurassic World YouTube channel, Celebrating 30 Years of Jurassic Park.

Thirty years ago, the world experienced the original Jurassic Park, "the beginning of something that changed movies." Sam Neill (Dr. Alan Grant), Laura Dern (Dr. Ellie Sattler), and Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Ian Malcolm) return in an exclusive clip to reflect on their experiences and express their gratitude to the fandom for keeping the captivating wonders of Jurassic Park alive. After all, "there's something about dinosaurs which captures the proper imagination like nothing else."
At its core, this video is a great piece of self-promotion, but it has the best preview image, the best video description, and the best capturing of the spirit of the franchise and especially the original movie of any video I found, so in featured position it goes.

News Center Maine had the next best retrospective in 'Jurassic Park' celebrates 30th anniversary.

The film debuted at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., an event that was also a fundraiser for children's charities.
The clip from 30 years ago held up really well, including the interview with Gary Hoyle of the Maine State Museum. The original movie took the science seriously, both the paleontology and the biotechnology, which has led to serious proposals for de-extinction, although not of dinosaurs from amber. That's not going to happen.

I close with KHON2 News' Kualoa Ranch celebrating 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park with LEGO and a giveaway.

It was 1993 when Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, the first one, came out and hit the screens.
On the one hand, this is local news promoting a local commercial event as a public service for locals' entertainment. This is something I see over and over again in local news coverage of holidays and I'm ambivalent about it. On the other, it really does describe the importance of the movie to Hawaii and how it has affected the intervening 30 years, including the filming of "Lost" and "Jumanji" at the ranch. Those are important not only to Hawaii, but to movies and television more broadly.  That history makes this clip worth sharing.

I might have more to write about the 30th anniversary of "Jurassic Park." Stay tuned.

3 comments:

  1. In LA, the theatre right next to the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park is showing Jurassic Park on the big screen.

    I guess it's just a coincidence that the park has a Jurassic Park water ride...

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    1. Hey, Narb, welcome back! It's always a good day to see you comment here!

      I'm not surprised in the least, although it's been updated to a "Jurassic World" ride. When I wrote "I might have more to write about the 30th anniversary of 'Jurassic Park,'" I was thinking about looking at the event from the perspective of the theme parks. Now I'm wondering if the nearest movie theater to Universal Studios Orlando is showing "Jurassic Park," too.

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    2. Blogger got a little overzealous, marked your comment as spam, then hid it from the public. Of course it's not spam, so I approved it.

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