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Jurassic Park is a novel written by Michael Crichton that was published in 1990. Often considered a cautionary tale on unconsidered biological tinkering in the same spirit as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it uniquely uses the mathematical concept of chaos theory and its philosophical implications to explain the collapse of an amusement park showcasing certain recreated dinosaur species. It was adapted into a film in 1993. The book has one sequel, The Lost World.
Plot summary The novel, in an "introduction", is initially presented as a brief report on the consequences of "The InGen Incident", which occurred in August 1989. This "fiction as fact" presentation had been used by Crichton before, notably in Eaters of the Dead and The Andromeda Strain. Most notably, Crichton frames his chapters between the "iterations" of chaotic behavior predicted by the character Ian Malcolm in his (book-within-a-book) report. The narrative begins by slowly tying together a series of incidents involving strange animal attacks in Costa Rica. After paleontologist Alan Grant and his paleobotanist graduate student Ellie Sattler enter the sequence of queried experts they are abruptly whisked off by billionaire John Hammond (founder and CEO of InGen) for a weekend visit to a "zoological preserve" he has established off the coast of Costa Rica. Recent events have spooked Hammond's considerable investors and, to placate them, he means for Grant and Sattler to act as fresh consultants. They stand in counterbalance to a rock-star-like mathematician Ian Malcolm and a lawyer representing the investors, Donald Gennaro. Both are pessimistic, but Malcolm, having been consulted before the park's creation, is emphatic in his prediction that the park will collapse, as it is an unsustainably simple structure bluntly forced upon a complex system. Upon arrival the park is revealed to contain cloned dinosaurs, which have been recreated from damaged dinosaur DNA (found in mosquitoes trapped in amber that sucked Saurian blood) that have been spliced with reptilian, avian, or amphibian DNA to fill in the gaps. Hammond proudly showcases InGen's secret advances in genetic engineering and parades them through the island's vast array of automated systems. To counter Malcolm's dire prognostications with youthful energy Hammond groups the consultants with his grandchildren, Tim and Lex Murphy, who have been sent on vacation while their parents divorce. While touring the park with the children, Grant finds an eggshell seeming to prove Malcolm's earlier assertion that the dinosaurs have been breeding against the geneticists' design (the population graphs proudly introduced earlier were naturally distributed). Malcolm suggests a flaw in their method of analysing dinosaur populations (they never bothered to set their software to search the motion detectors for more than the expected number of creatures, only less) and the park's controllers are shaken by the realization that the park has long been operating beyond their constraints. In the midst of this the chief programmer of Jurassic Park's controlling software, Dennis Nedry, attempts some corporate espionage for Lewis Dodgson, an agent of one of InGen's competitors, Biosyn. By manipulating bugs he wrote into the system, Nedry manages to quickly steal 15 frozen embryos from the lab. He then attempts to smuggle them out to a contact waiting at the auxiliary dock deep in the park (use of the main dock would be noticed). But his plan goes awry: during a sudden tropical storm Nedry gets lost inside the park and crashes his stolen jeep. Nedry's plan called for him to secretly deliver the stolen embryos and return to the park's control room within fifteen minutes but, without Nedry to quietly patch the system, the park's security is left off leaving the security fences deactivated. Without the electrified fences to contain them, dinosaurs begin to escape. A Tyrannosaurus rex attacks the people on tour, thus leaving Grant and the children lost in the park. Ian Malcolm is gravely injured and spends the remainder of the novel slowly dying as, in between lucid lectures and morphine-induced rants, he tries to help those in the main compound understand their predicament and survive. The park's upper management—(engineer and park supervisor John Arnold, geneticist Henry Wu, game warden Robert Muldoon, and Hammond) struggle to maintain control over the situation and for a brief while they manage to get the park largely back in order. But a series of arrogant mistakes on their part plunge the park into greater disarray. The viciously intelligent Velociraptors that were locked away close to the central compound finally escape and pick off Henry Wu and John Arnold in the ensuing carnage. Robert Muldoon sprains his ankle, and Harding and Ellie Sattler are also injured. Finally, Grant and the kids slowly make their way back to the central compound carrying news that several young raptors, raised in the island's wilds, were on board the Anne B when it departed for the mainland. With no social order left, the survivors organize themselves and eventually secure their own lives. Just when the crisis is largely over, Hammond, furious with being ignored and desperate to regain control, has an accident, is picked apart by scavengers, and dies alone. Gennaro tries to order the island destroyed as a dangerous asset but Grant rejects his authority, claiming that even though they cannot control the island they have a responsibility to understand just what happened and how many dinosaurs have already escaped to the mainland. Finally Grant, Sattler, and Gennaro set out into the park to find the wild raptor nests and compare hatched eggs with the island's revised population tally. Cautious and nonviolent, they emerge unharmed. In the end the island is suddenly and violently razed by the fictional Costa Rican Air Force. The survivors of the incident are detained indefinitely by the United States and Costa Rican governments. Dinosaurs and other extinct animals featured Dinosaurs and other extinct animals confirmed to be on Isla Nublar in the novels: Biological issues Scientists and fans of the movie have pointed out that much of what happens in the film is impossible for various reasons. However the novel, and to a greater extent the movie, sparked years of serious debate on the plausibility of cloning dinosaurs. One of the themes expressed throughout this story and its sequels is that of homeothermic (warm-blooded) dinosaurs, a recent theory popularized by paleontologist Bob Bakker. While the cinematic incarnation of Jurassic Park used ostrich eggs as vessels to facilitate expression, the novel very specifically utilized "a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell." The plastic was called "millipore", created by an eponymous subsidiary of InGen.* Film Universal Studios paid Michael Crichton $2 million for the rights to the novel in 1990, before it was even published. In 1993, the Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation was released. Many plot points from the novel were changed or dropped. Rides There are rides based on Jurassic Park in the Universal Studios theme parks in Universal City, California, Orlando, Florida and Osaka. Jurassic Park: The Ride premiered at Universal Studios Hollywood and was designed by Steven Spielberg while he was also working on the movie. The ride cost over $85 million to design and build when it premiered. Islands of Adventure in Orlando, Florida has an entire section of the park dedicated to Jurassic Park which includes the main ride, here christened Jurassic Park River Adventure, and many smaller rides and attractions based on the Jurassic Park series. Video games There have been a number of Jurassic Park video games released to act as merchandise for the release of each film. The titles have appeared on a range of platforms including NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, PC:DOS/Windows, SNES, Sega Mega CD, Sega Genesis/Sega Mega Drive, 3DO, arcade, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Toys and Merchandise Jurassic Parks merchandise is notable for being both heavily featured in the movie itself (scenes taking place in the park's gift shop featured much of the movie's actual merchandise) and a scene decrying the use of merchandising (Ian Malcolm's "lunch box" speech). As was common for such large releases, particularly of "family" movies, at the time, Jurassic Park had a large merchandising campaign. In many ways, Jurassic Park was one of the last big film releases to have such a campaign, though the practice was common at the time. The film spawned a series of action figures marketed by Kenner, with most of the film's main protagonists, human and dinosaur, represented. This included dinosaurs not seen in the movie (such as the Pterodactyl) and a very confusing action figure that is named for "villain" Dennis Nedry, but seems to bear closer resemblance in design and on package character notes to "hero" Ian Malcolm. The dinosaurs all featured a JP logo tattoo and I.D. number on their skins, both as an addition or an elaboration on the film's story, as well as to serve the important point of helping differentiate offical movie dinosaur toys from other similar dinosaur products that existed for years before and after. The Jurassic Park figures were one of the last movie tie-in ranges that were designed with children, rather than collectors, in mind, and consequently feature less articulation and accuracy than those of modern movie action figures, owing more to the first film action figures from Star Wars (also Kenner) than to modern, post-McFarlane and laser imaging toys. Of higher mold quality were the various model kits released to tie in with the movie, the launch range consisting of T-Rex, Raptor, and Unwell Triceratops. There was also a model of the film's Ford Explorer props, which perversely were possibly the most popular of the kits in the scale modelmaking community. There was also a set of candy-filled Dinosaur Eggs that contained small, though quite detailed for the time, replicas of various dino species. The initial run of these eggs were colored tan, to match quite closely the raptor egg seen in the film. The later eggs contained slightly larger dinosaur models, made of a harder plastic, the egg shells now a uniform bright artificial white. Both sets of eggs were embossed with the T-Rex silhouette logo. Production an sale of these eggs, at least in the UK, continued for many years after the film's initial release, only ceasing their irregular appearance when the movie's sequel was announced. This was also true of the Jurassic Park Candy Sticks, which were notable for possibly being the first of the regularly film-branded sweets to use this name instead of the more common Sweet Cigarettes and dropping the food-dyed red tips (ironic considering the park's IT departments' dependency on them). It was also likely the last major film release in the UK that branded these sweets, including cigarette-card style cards inside each packet, an association that goes back to at least Spielberg's earlier family blockbuster, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. These cards were separate to the main series of trading cards, which were released by Topps worldwide using the company's style for movie trading cards and packaging which was set four years earlier for Tim Burton's Batman. In addition to telling the story of the film, these cards included subsections on both "Behind the Scenes" information on the making of the movie as well as the pencil sketch designs of Mark "Crash" McCreery and Stan Winston of the film's non-human stars. Again this is something rarely seen in the modern era of film, being no doubt in part replaced by DVD commentaries and web presence. This information could also be found in the obligatory Magazine of the Movie/Official Movie Magazine distributed worlwide, with some aesthetic changes, depending on region. There was also a Starlog Dinosaur Special released to coincide with the movie, which featured a JP-influenced lenticular cover, although it featured other dino-films as well. More directly related to the film, and of a very high standard for the time, was the Jurassic Park comic book published by Dark Horse Comics. In the US, these comic books continued long after the film's release, branching into its own new storylines (not considered canon) which were told in several subsequent limited series, much in the vein of Dark Horse's Aliens and Predator licensed titles. In the UK, Dark Horse UK published these stories as part of an ongoing anthology that also reprinted other independent and international dinsosaur-related comic strips, including the first UK appearances of Gon, Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, and some completely "silent," beautifully rendered natural history stories showing Jurassic Park-familar dinos in their natural habitats. These pieces are naturally the standouts in addition to the lunch boxes, pencil tins, stationery sets, etc., that accompanied the film's release, including, for example, free baseball caps with the film's logo atop in felt which were given away with the purchase of JP-branded super-sized popcorn and Coca-Cola deals in United Cinemas International venues such as the Empire at Leicester Square (where the film's UK premiere was also staged). Later merchandising (early 21st century) would focus on limited collectibles and movie prop replicas, including raptor eggs and claws, as well as items from the park's technical side. Further reading The Science of Jurassic Park and The Lost World. Or How to Build a Dinosaur. Rob DeSalle and David Lindley. BasicBooks, New York, 1997. xxix, 194 pp., illus. $18 or C$25.50. ISBN 0-465-07379-4. Trivia See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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