'Jurassic Park': 25 Details You Probably Missed
06/06/2023 05:56 pm EDT
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1. Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) have a sign in their trailer that reads "No animal released without paperwork completely filled out." This seems a little strange, considering they are paleontologists, and studying extinct animals, as Eighties Kids points out.
2. Grant would not have found a velociraptor skeleton in Montana. Dinosaurs of the velociraptor genus have been found in Asia.
3. However, the dinosaurs seen in the film are more like dinosaurs of the Deinonychus genus. These were found in North America. Author Michael Crichton chose the name Velociraptor over Deinonychus because it was more "dramatic."
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4. Grant's seat belt gag is a case of foreshadowing. He gets two "female" seatbelt ends on the helicopter, so he can't connect them. Instead, he ties them together. In the park, the dinosaurs are all supposed to be female, but they still figure out a way to reproduce.
5. Dennis Nedy (Wayne Knight) can be seen watching Jaws on one of his three monitors. It's still unclear why John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) hired him in the first place.
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6. Hammond's JP29 Jeep is the same one Gray (Ty Simpkins) and Zach (Nick Robinson) find in Jurassic World.
7. The Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park also appears at the end of Jurassic World. You can clearly see the scars from the Velociraptors on the beast.
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8. Hammond was even more ambitious than Walt Disney when he planned Disneyland. Hammond dreamed of expanding Jurassic Park to Europe, as seen in one of the projected images behind Sattler.
9. The Making of Jurassic Park appears among the merchandise. It was a real book published at the time of the movie's release, written by Don Shay and Jody Duncan. Sadly, it is no longer in print, but you can get an inexpensive used copy online.
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10. The famous scene where the T-rex eats the goat was actually filmed inside a studio. In one shot, you can spot one of the sprinklers providing the rain.
11. During the escape from the raptors, the light through the grill shows A, G, C, and T, the bases of DNA.
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12. When Steven Spielberg's name shows up in the credits at the end of the movie, composer John Williams included the famous five tones from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
13. B.D. Wong, who plays Dr. Henry Wu, was the only actor from the first film to appear in Jurassic World (2015). Jeff Goldblum, who played Ian Malcolm, was seen in Fallen Kingdom. Of course, Dominion brought back Laura Dern, Goldblum, and Sam Neill.
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14. One of the other slides projected during the dining room scene shows Hammond believing that Jurassic Park will be more popular than sports and zoos in 1993 and 1995.
15. Part of Jurassic Park was filmed on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, the same island where scenes from Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Avatar were filmed.
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16. Gary Rydstrom won two Oscars for his work on the film's sounds. He developed the sounds of the dinosaurs from various animals and they are all different. He told Vulture that some of the T. rex sounds came from his tiny Jack Russell terrier!
17. Jeff Goldblum is heard saying "Must go faster, must go faster" in Independence Day again. He did not say this again during the filming though. The Independence Day team looped in the dialogue from Jurassic Park.
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18. Hammond's memory was kept alive in Jurassic World. Mr. Masrani (Irrfan Khan) built a statue at the new park.
19. Malcolm was also referenced in Jurassic World since you can spot his book God Creates Dinosaurs in the film.
20. While it is true that many of the dinosaurs in the original film are not realistic at all compared to what scientists believe their real-world counterparts looked like, you could theorize that InGen created the dinosaurs in their own image. After all, in Jurassic World, we see them create their own dinosaur from scratch.
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21. Velociraptor is actually Latin for "swift seizer," not "Bird of Prey." Deinonychus is Greek for "terrible" and "claw."
22. The T. rex lived 68 to 66 million years ago, while the Velociraptor lived much earlier, between 75 and 71 million years ago. So, there is no way they would have interacted together.
23. Gary Rydstrom also explained to Vulture that the Dilophosaurus sound came from a swan. "Swans make a cute hooting sound, so the cute version of the Dilophosaurus sounds like a swan, for the most part," he told Vulture. "Part of the fun of doing these kind of jobs is that I had no idea what a swan sounded like before!"
24. Harrison Ford was offered the role of Alan Grant, but turned Spielberg down. He had just worked with Spielberg on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, after all. Spielberg let the information slip during a Raiders of the Lost Ark screening in 2011.
25. Another cool sound fact: Rydstrom told Vulture that the sounds of the baby Raptor actually came from baby animals, but things change once Grant realizes the baby is a Raptor.
"That's exactly right; as soon as he asks, 'What kind of dinosaur is this?' you start hearing these raspier baby owl sounds," Rydstrom said. "I already knew what the adult raptor would sound like, that it would have this screechy, raspy sound, so I tried to find a baby animal that has that rasp in it."
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