Ep120 – Maybe We Shouldn’t Go To Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park will always be one of not only Stephen Spielberg’s well known movies but one of the classic movies of all time. The film that came out in 1993 was the first film that showed us what was capable when you combine animatronic creatures, visual effects and special effects. Sam Neill and Laura Dern are the leads of a full cast of  talent including Richard Attenborough, Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Samuel L. Jackson and Wayne Knight. For the few people who may not know the film is about a couple of paleontologists tour a unfinished theme park on a Central American island and is tasked with protecting not only the designer’s grandkids but the world from a bunch of dinosaurs who are accidentally released.

Timecodes

• 00:00 – Introduction
• :17 – The Film stats
• 6:00 – Life Finds a Way
• 8:08 – The Pickup Line
• 9:15 – Trivia about the Candy/Spielberg partnership
• 14:32 – Did the computer graphics hold up?
• 22:14 – Dr. Grant’s role in the film
• 26:48 – An different type of chase scene
• 30:49 – Sets and Sound editing
• 34:06 – Head Trauma
• 34:26 – Smoochie, Smoochie, Smoochie
• 36:13 – Driving Review
• 37:37 – To the Numbers

To guess the theme of this month’s films you can call or text us at 971-245-4148 or email to christi@dodgemediaproductions.com You can guess as many times as you would like. Guess the Monthly Theme for 2023 Contest – More Info Here

Next week’s film will be UNCLE BUCK (1989)

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Brennan 0:00
You’re listening to Dodge Movie Podcast. Your hosts are Christi and Mike Dodge the founders of Dodge Media Productions. We produce films and podcasts. So this is a podcast about films. Join them as they share their passion for filmmaking.

Christi Dodge 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to the Dodge Movie Podcast. Before we get into this week’s episode, we are kicking off a new month so there will be a new theme to guess. But before we do that, I want to announce that the winner for May was Superfan RJ, congratulations RJ you now get to pick two films for next year because you are a previous winner. Remember, if you want to participate in this contest, simply text or call your guests of the theme for the month to 971-245-4148 or email Christi christi@dodgemediaproductions.com. And all of this will be found in the show notes throughout the month.

You can guess the theme as many times as you want. Mike has made June very very hard. So good luck, everybody. I just want to say the rules are on our website and you can see everything you get and at the end of the year for every correct guess we will put your name in the hat to win $100 Amazon gift card. All right on to this week’s episode we watched Jurassic Park which came out in 1993 on Apple for $3.99 So unfortunately we could not find it on any streaming service for free. It’s directed by Steven Spielberg.

Mike Dodge 1:40
That name sounds familiar and he done other stuff?

Christi Dodge 1:42
A couple things .

Mike Dodge 1:43
okay.

Christi Dodge 1:43
He did like a sweet little movie recently called The Fablemans about him his life and his grown him growing up and being coming a filmmaker.

Mike Dodge 1:52
Oh, a jew.

Christi Dodge 1:55
The writer is Michael Creighton, who I actually have met

Mike Dodge 1:58
You have met Mr. Creighton.

Christi Dodge 2:00
Yes. I mean, it was very brief.

Mike Dodge 2:02
Like six and a half foot, wasn’t he a tall bloke?

Christi Dodge 2:04
6’9″

Mike Dodge 2:05
Woof, that’s a tall drink of water.

Christi Dodge 2:07
He was very tall and he will never remember that we met.

Mike Dodge 2:13
Especially I think he may not be with us, but

Christi Dodge 2:16
Oh, that’s true. So I could say oh, no, we were buds and nobody would be the wiser,

Mike Dodge 2:22
but nobody could fact check you on that

Christi Dodge 2:23
Right? But since I’m honest, they’ll tell you. It started Sam Neill, Laura Dern. Jeff Goldbloom, Richard Attenborough, Bob Peck, Martin Ferrero, Pharaoh, Pharaoh, how you say ro ro Pereira. We just leave him out. BD Wong Joseph min modelo. Ariana Richards I’m getting deep in the woods. But

Mike Dodge 2:46
Yeah, there’s some real big name that’s like this is one of their first Bay movies that we saw them in.

Christi Dodge 2:51
Sam Jackson and Wayne Knight.

Mike Dodge 2:55
Do you think he had enough of those dinos on that island?

Christi Dodge 2:58
Right? Again? Really? We stepped foot maybe that’s why he got on a plane instead of the island.

Mike Dodge 3:03
Right? Yeah, he’s like islands and dinos are bad. Maybe planes or snakes is better.

Christi Dodge 3:08
Yeah, the DP on this was Dean Candy. He also did Apollo 13.

Mike Dodge 3:13
Oh, good work, huh?

Mike Dodge 3:15
The filming locations for this film are Hawaii and California. The synopsis if you’ve been living under a rock, I will tell you but a pragmatic paleontologist touring an almost complete theme park on an island in Central America is tasked with protecting a couple of kids after a power failure causes the parks cloned dinosaurs to run loose.

Mike Dodge 3:39
So when I first saw this film, I was less experienced in life. And I totally didn’t remember the premise the setup of getting Sam Neill and Laura Dern there, it was just like, oh, they had these people at this park dinos are trying to eat people is pretty straightforward. But watching it this time, the whole stick about his bank was going to pull funding unless he got somebody to sign off on it. I was like, Oh, I totally get that get her Creighton, because that actually is unbelievable setup, why he would let strangers onto his island, just because of bank who’s gonna pull the money? That’s about the only thing you’ll get him to do that.

Christi Dodge 4:17
Oh, you’re right. Now that you say that. I remember them talking about it. But early on, it was I thought it was just kind of Hammond wanted to be able to say, well, these experts, right, approve it.

Mike Dodge 4:33
Yeah. And so it puts a time pressure. So it’s good writing because it puts that ticking clock and raises stakes. So that’s pretty well done

Christi Dodge 4:43
Very much. So and I believe that I mean, Creighton was already trying to send a message and I think even more so he’s like, see, it’s all about the money. But like he Hammond didn’t want them to come and say is this a good idea? Is this safe?

Mike Dodge 4:57
No, he just wanted a rubber stamp?

Christi Dodge 4:59
Yeah,

Mike Dodge 5:00
So it is my belief that Jeff Goldbloom’s character. I don’t know if you remember the name Malcolm,

Christi Dodge 5:06
I think his name. Yes, that is correct.

Mike Dodge 5:09
I think that’s basically Creighton’s voice throughout this, because there’s this line, which I really love. And I have to sign off on I agree with He says, Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should. And I think that’s ultimately the message of the book and the film

Christi Dodge 5:26
it very much is I watched, I really wanted to understand because I remember reading the book back then.

Mike Dodge 5:34
Oh, wow.

Christi Dodge 5:35
And, and then the person who knew Michael Creighton, who introduced me to him, also gave me some backstory to but I really wanted to kind of hear some interviews with him personally, and just to get to know, you know him better. And he very much said that he feels like science, and couldn’t have said it better than you. But basically, science is moving faster than our wisdom to know if we should be doing these things.

Mike Dodge 6:00
Right. And I think that could have served as a great pickup line in the film, and sadly comes later in Act One.

Christi Dodge 6:10
Oh, yes. You’re 100%. Right. Yeah. But out of context.

Mike Dodge 6:16
I don’t know how that would have got there. But man, that would really make my point.

Christi Dodge 6:20
It really, really would know it very much. What Okay, I have many taglines, I’m sure it’s all marketing. Do you want to hear them? Yeah. Okay. Let’s see. 1234567 taglines.

Mike Dodge 6:32
They were busy. Yeah. Okay. Life finds a way. That’s a really good one.

Christi Dodge 6:38
Welcome to dot dot, dot. That’s horrible.

Mike Dodge 6:42
Yeah, that is it could be any movie. Yeah. Welcome to Wong Foo. Thanks. Familiar. Oh, yay.

Christi Dodge 6:49
Unleash the beasts.

Mike Dodge 6:51
Nah.

Christi Dodge 6:52
We don’t want to

Mike Dodge 6:53
That could have been Days of Thunder.

Christi Dodge 6:54
Right.

Mike Dodge 6:54
Need a new one.

Christi Dodge 6:55
Caution alive inside? That

Mike Dodge 6:58
No, Uh, no, no.

Christi Dodge 7:01
The park is open.

Mike Dodge 7:03
It could be a Disney movie.

Mike Dodge 7:07
Set in Disneyland. An adventure 65 million years in the making.

Mike Dodge 7:12
a little bit better. Okay. The problem with that one? As I hear it, right. Today is I think 65 million years was that Adam Driver time travel science fiction dino movie. Life finds a way is my favorite. But to be clear, that is an iconic line from the movie. I think that is the most recognizable line from the movie. So having already seen the film, maybe it wouldn’t have made much sense when I hadn’t seen the film. Just trying to be fair.

Christi Dodge 7:45
And here’s the last one. And these are in no particular these are an order as they appear on IMDb. So I did not save the best for last. So I can’t promise,

Mike Dodge 7:53
Basically arbitrary.

Christi Dodge 7:54
Okay, but it’s the longest, the most phenomenal discovery of our time becomes the greatest adventure of all time.

Mike Dodge 8:04
Okay, so Okay, marketing thought that up. No, Life finds a way down. Yeah,

Christi Dodge 8:08
I agree. I agree. That’s the winner. Okay. kick us off with your pickup line.

Mike Dodge 8:14
So this one was actually difficult. There’s a lot of mumble, and I went back and use the captions. And the first recognizable line I get off screen is keep it there. Which kind of works

Christi Dodge 8:27
Right there. They’re unloading. It’s, it’s when we first

Mike Dodge 8:31
it’s one of the Dinos

Christi Dodge 8:32
We’re introduced. But not, we know they’re unloading something major, we know they’re unloading a live creature of some kind. We are we’re sitting in a film called Jurassic Park with a picture of a dinosaur. So we know.

Mike Dodge 8:46
But it was very interesting, because we didn’t see hardly anything of the dyno at all. We did see at one point, an extreme close up of an eye. And that was it for that first dyno, which is fascinating because dinos look realistic, and are present in the rest of the film. So they obviously could have put a dino there, but Spielberg made the decision to keep it off screen. And I love it. I think that worked. Well.

Christi Dodge 9:15
Yeah, I agree. So a little bit of trivia about the cinematography. So Dean Candy and Steven Spielberg work together on Hook.

Mike Dodge 9:23
Oh, Hook was not the most successful?

Christi Dodge 9:26
No, in fact, they were over budget, and they were late and Universal, who also this this movie is through Universal. They were very nervous and said they didn’t want to really hand over $63 million to these two, to do what they did on Hook, you know, so they said, you absolutely have to come in on budget and be on time. So they had many, many, many production meetings. And Dean felt very confident because he worked on Roger Rabbit, so he knew how How to film an actor. While they’re pretending that something is there, they were to the ILM. And the people there. And Stephen says, Okay, how are you going to do this dying? They at first they were going to do it all stop motion, right? And then they said, no, let me let me show you something.

So they showed it to him. And it was a running dinosaur, but it was just the skeleton. And he’s like, okay, great, except for it to look like a real dinosaur. So the guy goes, I’ll be back in a week. Then he brought it back. And it looked a little bit more like it almost had like the muscles, let’s say, and Steven was like, Okay, that’s great, but I need it to have skin. So he goes, I’ll be I’ll be back in a week. He came back. He showed him what, like pre-vis of what we see today, it’s it even wasn’t as good as what we saw because they were able to perfect it. They came in under budget and 12 days under schedule. Spoiler for our numbers segment, it made $1 billion.

Mike Dodge 11:05
And they got their money back. So speaking of the rendering, I will mention that a Silicon Graphics workstation is used as a prop in the film. And in that era, that was probably what they’re using to do rendering of the dinos. And that leads to the segue that even though it was 1993, there’s absolutely no excuse for the hideous inaccuracy of all software depicted in the movie, not even remotely close. It was written by somebody who had never even been in the same room as someone who knows something about software.

Christi Dodge 11:37
So you paused it once someone’s reading the code, and that’s what you’re speaking to right now.

Mike Dodge 11:42
That was actually not so bad. But they just threw some terms out there that made no sense. And then there’s this weird, very badly animated three dimensional model of an operating system. No.

Christi Dodge 11:55
So they nailed the dinosaurs but fell short. On the computer

Mike Dodge 12:00
Total faceplant on the computing side. I mean, okay, it doesn’t ruin the film. But he said, anybody with any knowledge is just takes you out of the movie, it’s so bad.

Christi Dodge 12:12
So I made a note here at the very beginning. They go and get Grant, and Ellie, they go get them and they bring them to Jurassic Park. And they show and they bring them in, and they’re going to feed a Velociraptor. So we have the scene at the very beginning, where we don’t really see the dinosaur until it kills somebody. Right. And then we see Dr. Grant and Ellie viewing this feeding. And what I thought was really well done, even though they’re going to go to great pains to show us the dinosaurs later and how realistic they look. Yeah, we see their faces, and there’s their faces are in the background. There’s foliage in the foreground. And they’re reacting to seeing this Velociraptor eat a cow.

Mike Dodge 13:03
So this is the business of show. This is why well, in addition to making award winning films, Spielberg gets to keep making films because this was brilliant, because he found a way to not have to pay to animate a dinosaur. And it still worked, right? Just like that opening scene, these two scenes, he saved tons of money and time by not having an enemy. They just had grips down there shaking the palm fronds, right.

Brilliant filmmaking from like a production standpoint, that was because the story it actually I think, is more it builds more tension than if we’d seen the dinosaur. Yeah, because all enact one, no dinos, it’s only things rattling. And then also in that scene, this makes no sense logically, but they have like some lower it down in this way, like a belly strap thing, only just so that they can raise it up and the ends are like frayed right? That’s what that was for you would you just…

Christi Dodge 14:06
You just throw the cow in?

Mike Dodge 14:07
You would tip it in. It’s about to be eaten now. You don’t have to give it a dance. But that serve to to show that we as a viewer, like holy cow, this thing is must be powerful. If it shredded these cables. , Like, like high five to Steven Spielberg on that one. Because it’s the double whammy it I think it makes more tension and it saves him a ton of budget. What a brilliant idea.

Christi Dodge 14:33
Yeah. Now this, this is a good one or the fun one.

Mike Dodge 14:37
So since we were talking a little bit about CGI, one of the questions that we that I braid raised before we watch this was would the CGI hold up? And I was amazed at how well held up and it’s like okay, this is why I made a billion dollars. Because in 93 This is 30 years ago, this film and those graphics are still like. I mean, that’s, that’s pretty stunning. For all the crap we’ve done since as an industry. That still looks that good?

Christi Dodge 15:09
No, it’s very, very, very realistic. And it’s a combination of there are some computer graphics but like I watched an interview with the kids on the Today Show, and the fear in their eyes when they’re in the car and the T Rex busts through and there’s only a piece of plastic between them. And that’s real, because the T Rex was animatronic. There’s a machine basically that looks to these kids, like, you know, a T rex with large teeth. And it’s coming down towards them,

Mike Dodge 15:45
Right. It’s a machine that’s going to fall on them.

Christi Dodge 15:47
Yes. Yeah. And so they said it was pretty, pretty intense. Yeah, at one point, I think when it breaks the plexiglass, like that wasn’t supposed to happen or something. But at one point, the kid got hit on the head on accident. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Like they, they took safety very, very seriously talked about it. They had many safety meetings, and everybody was aware and you had to watch out for the tail. And, you know, I mean, it was an accident and it the kid was pretty, you know, light hearted about it. So I don’t think he was terribly he did mention it was on my birthday, too. I can’t even imagine being those kids in that car looking up at what they were looking up at.

Mike Dodge 16:28
And again, I want to bring up to everyone including the cast and crew Jurassic Park didn’t exist yet. This was the first time this was just probably mind blowing to the people on set, just like I was testing the theater. And it is rare in my opinion, that older movies hold up especially special effects films. I was stunned at how well this played 30 years later.

So again, huge credit to Spielberg and Candy at how they shot this because they did us You could tell like from a filmic perspective, it wasn’t all CGI and I was thinking of the scene where the Dinos are like running from the T Rex and some of the characters have to like run and then hide on the other side of the log and that was so brilliant because you have the tension the audience but then it’s excused to be close up so then you get the actors can act and we can see their face but we don’t have to necessarily see a lot of dino and doesn’t have to be animatronic even says like the fact…

Christi Dodge 17:37
I believe those were CG

Mike Dodge 17:39
They were but then they use the sound, right the rumblings of sound design. And the filmmakers like that was kind of a masterclass in how you could seamlessly enter. Leave those different parts of moviemaking to make it feel so freakin realistic. And that to me, I was I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t you’re thinking, Oh, this could look kind of dated. And nope. If I think if that came out today, it would play perfectly fine.

Christi Dodge 18:06
Yeah, I was trying to think I don’t think we saw this together. Because I think it was…

Mike Dodge 18:11
No I actually saw this with…

Christi Dodge 18:13
I think it was Memorial Day weekend maybe of 93

Mike Dodge 18:18
with with my buddy who likes to take his clothes off. And he didn’t take his clothes off during the film though.

Christi Dodge 18:25
Yeah, I think this was just before I met. But I remember seeing this one in the theater. I mean, this was one of those epic. I mean, it’s Steven. So you know, why would we think otherwise? Jaws, E.T.

Mike Dodge 18:38
We stood in line out of doors? Yeah. In Southern California and the blistering heat to go see this? No, this this was a big deal. Big Hairy deal.

Christi Dodge 18:49
Allright. Anything else in cinematography before I moved to the writing?

Mike Dodge 18:53
Okay, so cinematography, a lot of extreme close ups in the opening scene, as I mentioned, which I like, as I’m now sensitized to fog machine when Hammond first meets Grant and Ellie, although I’m gonna say I’m not really sure why they were that dusty. I mean, they were really really dusty.

Christi Dodge 19:14
They had just come off a dig. And the helicopter stirred up a ton of death.

Mike Dodge 19:21
Yeah, that must have been it. I really liked how when Hammond was showing them the like, cheesy, short film educational film, how the head Sam Neill blocked where he stood up. So the projector was the halo lighting. I thought that was a clever, clever trick there. And then several times the DP put the characters in silhouette. The DP found clever ways to put the characters in silhouette, which I really thought that was nice, his different techniques, and it was a variety of really wide shots when they wanted to establish the vista and extreme close ups. So it’s really well done. And to credit to him.

Christi Dodge 20:01
Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, we’re just gonna keep gushing under writing. I think it’s funny because you were talking about Malcolm being the voice of Critchton. And I have Malcolm flirts with Ellie. So yeah, I think Crichton liked. I mean, provided he wrote this before. And I’m sure I’m right. I’m sure in the book, and I wrote also Chrichton is speaking through Malcolm, I liked the line, “Item 15 on today’s glitch list”. Which tells us this park is not ready to open, hey, we have a lot of bugs we need to work out. And then I like the line from Malcolm just kind of playing to his arrogance. “Boy, I hate being right all the time”,

Mike Dodge 20:41
But that might also have been the author.

Christi Dodge 20:43
Right? I and then we both discuss the shirtless Malcolm, that was unnecessary. And I saw and I watched an interview with Goldbloom. And he said, Yeah, I didn’t really understand why I was supposed to be shirtless in that scene, but I didn’t mind.

Mike Dodge 21:01
I would have normally push back on that to say that mathematicians are rarely shirtless, but I have to eat a bit of humble pie after seeing a beautiful mind. It really bumped me that Russell Crowe was so jacked, playing Nash, who’s a mathematician until I saw photos of Nash. And apparently he was just he didn’t work out. He was just naturally ripped guy. Yeah. So I was like, Okay, so maybe, maybe Malcolm was one of those as well. But I have to say, I don’t know if Crichton had any casting authority or participation.

But I I was surprised at how well I think Laura Dern kind of holds your character in this film. I mean, obviously, she’s known to be an attractive actress, right. But she was able to bring to it I thought, kind of an earthiness where it felt like this person actually, like worked out of doors all of the time. I remember her as just being pretty, but I think she had more of a I think an appealing kind of girl next door character than necessarily just the Hollywood leading lady love interest kind of vibe. So I was, I was pleasantly surprised that her role was was a little different than I remembered.

Christi Dodge 22:21
I, I liked her character because she wasn’t just like, kind of the dame thrown in. So that we, I felt like early on, you know, she was kind of she was the one where Sam Neill was very much his character. Dr. Grant was the one who’s just in the weeds, like his head is down in the dirt, literally. Yeah. And she’s the one who kind of sees like, she’s taking care of everyone else on the dig and everything. And then once we get to the park, and but even then she gets a little kind of down in it, because quite literally, when she’s taking care of the triceratops, I believe, I don’t know, I really liked how they didn’t make her just the dumb name. Yeah. And she was very smart in her way.

Mike Dodge 23:06
Like I said in my memory, I think because she’s so pretty. I remembered her as being more of a dumb name. But the scene that sticks out my mind is so not that. She has a scene with Hammond at like, a dinner table, everything is going horribly wrong. He’s like in the in the cafeteria area, and they’d had the big spread and he’s eating ice cream or something. She sits down. He says something stupid, and just her whole reaction was like, yeah, she was Sam Neil’s character of Grant, he was, like you said he was the typical boffin. He was all about the knowledge, the IQ, the trivia and all that stuff. She was like, maybe Goldbloom. But she was like the one dialed in character of all the main characters, right? But even Goldbloom’s characters a little, little crazy.

Christi Dodge 23:56
I was honestly surprised watching it the second time thinking, why isn’t Grant objecting? Because he knows these animals, as best as anybody on the planet. We’re told like Dr. Grant is the premier expert on dinosaurs. I was surprised that his character didn’t sooner kind of go like, wait, you shouldn’t have done this. This shouldn’t have, you know, or how did he not even hear about it? Because to have bred that many different species.

Mike Dodge 24:26
So to me, this is a little bit like, if you’re one of the world’s foremost experts on big cats, and somebody says, Hey, would you like to come over for charcuterie and you show for your charcuterie and there’s six adult tigers in the backyard, you would lose your mind, right? Like right now these are giant apex predators that will eat us immediately.

But there’s this character who by the way from the a costuming, has some really short cargo shorts. But they’ve got this guy Muldoon, who’s the Australian hunter guy. And he immediately is kind of like, yeah, these are big time predators, we should not mess with these things. So that, I think is a valid question. Why would Grant not be able to do that? Because almost anybody half a brain would. And I think of all the guys with no names or credits that are helping Muldoon, with those dinos art, they would also for their own self preservation, just be like, dude, this thing is the size of a rhino that’s got bangs, like we should not be doing this. Right.

Christi Dodge 24:27
So we digress a bit.

Mike Dodge 25:41
We did.

Christi Dodge 25:41
I liked and maybe this is kind of I don’t want to say a trope, but a technique in action movies, the maladies that these people were facing, or growing in intensity, like First it started raining. And then things like the system was offline. And now cars are getting ruined. Oh, now people are dying. Like it just kind of kept intensifying. The what the the stakes are.

Mike Dodge 26:10
And what I liked about that about the writing, so maybe in the original book, but also in the screenplay is it started out believable, right? And one of the things that bothers me is when they start so high that it just gets like ridiculous, like, oh, and aliens come, right. But it was like, first it was just like, Oh, we’ve got a couple of glitches, like you said, 151 on the report. And you know, just starts is like, okay, you know, we can get past this. And then yeah, like you said, right, it starts raining and you’re like, well, it’s no big deal. Okay, there’s a lot of rain like, they they really paced the raising of the stakes very well.

Christi Dodge 26:48
I forgot this from watching it the first time. I want to know if this was in the book, or this feels like a Steven Spielberg thing, but Sam Neal’s character, Dr. Grant and the boy are in the tree. There’s a car that is high up in the tree.

Christi Dodge 27:07
Well, yeah, it’s gonna fall.

Christi Dodge 27:09
The boy was in the car. And so Dr. Grant comes down and gets the boy out. And now they’re trying to climb down the tree. But the car starts basically chasing them. Yeah. And so now here’s once again, another obstacle that they have to overcome is to get how are they going to get away from this car? And just the tension in that scene? Because they scrambled down a bit and then the car comes? Right plunging, like six or eight feet just narrowly stopping before it gets to them. I mean, it was just even

Mike Dodge 27:45
But see I liked that because it’s it’s a fresh take on a chasing.

Christi Dodge 27:49
Exactly. That’s what I yeah, I loved it.

Mike Dodge 27:51
Yeah, so cleverly done.

Christi Dodge 27:52
Yeah. When she was at her I think she Yeah, she (Ellie) had to run down to that second location. And she had to charge up the line. It reminded me of a bomb detonation, because it was like the tension and will she get it right. And good. Yeah, good tension there. Okay. Anything else in writing that you made note of?

Mike Dodge 28:18
The one thing which is probably on purpose is the well I’m going to say two but the one is that Hammond is remarkably blind to the Dinos and we see that in a couple of different places. So one of them is that you have dinos that split poison, but the windows go down on the Explorers and the other is his he’s more worried about his kids touching the cars than being eaten by dinos, his grandkids so I mean, he obviously has a blind spot for it but one thing that and this could be the filmmakers is could have maybe not been crying but this I feel duty bound to bring this up. CPR never ever restarts a stopped heart ever. All it does is try to keep the blood flowing until somebody who knows what they’re doing shows up.

Christi Dodge 29:07
And we didn’t even have, what are they called?

Mike Dodge 29:10
The the automatic defibrillators.

Christi Dodge 29:12
Yeah, they didn’t have those in 93.

Mike Dodge 29:15
They didn’t so that was a dangerous factual error in my opinion movie shouldn’t show that it’s not accurate.

Christi Dodge 29:22
It’sinteresting you bring up Hammond and he definitely was not the mustache twirling, “I’m only in this for the money”. At least I didn’t get that. I think I got he wanted to maybe do something that has never been done. He wanted to…

Mike Dodge 29:38
Okay, this is the same douche nozzle that came up with self driving cars. The same mindset of Oh, I think we can maybe do this well, it’s gonna kill people. Yeah, but it’s cool technology. This is happening right now all over again, right people that’s why I love that line. Just your focus. It’s more on whether you could than whether you should,

Christi Dodge 30:02
Right. That’s true. But I kind of the way that at least Richard Attenborough portrays him or that was in the script, it seems like he’s just like this, like a Walt Disney. Right? He’s like this sweet grandfather character that just wants his grandchildren to experience dinosaurs like, but I see, I hear what you’re saying. And I do think that maybe his own ego is a little bit too wrapped up into it, because he wants to be the one to do it.

Mike Dodge 30:31
That’s what he’s saying. He’s obviously blind to the consequences. Yeah, of what he’s doing. And I think it’s the same thing with the people who promote self driving cars he gets so obsessed with again, can we do it? They forget about should we do it?

Christi Dodge 30:47
Right? Yep. All right. I don’t have anything for editing because I mean, I think the whole thing is just mass for masterfully edited, but I do have a couple of things under sets and sound. How about you?

Mike Dodge 30:59
Yeah. Regarding sets, the one note I have is I said it was very convenient that all of the dyno DNA vials were so clearly labeled.

Christi Dodge 31:10
Well, you don’t want to get it mixed up. You don’t want to end up with like a Brochia-Triceratops,

Mike Dodge 31:16
Right. Yeah, but what I liked about it was, I would have expected it to be like Velophecourous batch 14, vile seven, It wasl just in big letters Velophecourous

Christi Dodge 31:30
I thought it was a little too on the nose that Wayne Knight’s character, Nedry was his last name, that his desk was just like messy and full of soda cans and trash and candy wrappers. And…

Mike Dodge 31:48
I actually I think that’s part of the written by somebody who had never interacted with a software development team. Right.

Christi Dodge 31:58
So are you saying the desks were messy? Or they were tidy?

Mike Dodge 32:02
They weren’t, they weren’t that messy. Your messiest guy wouldn’t have been that. I mean, that was ridiculous. I mean, there’s trash on the floor, no one would put would put up with that.

Christi Dodge 32:12
Okay, I, whoever did the sound design on the dinosaurs? They they sounded almost, you know, they were like alien mixed with like elephants mixed with our sounds, because we don’t really know what they would sound like.

Mike Dodge 32:26
We don’t and in fact, to be nerdy. Some people have questioned what color they would be. Right? Some people say they would be, you know, typical, like, brown, camo colors. And other people say no, they would be bright colors. We don’t know. Because all we have are the bones, and sometimes some impressions. And so they they’ve tried to reconstruct what they think the musculature would be like, and how they would move. But for a long time, for example, they thought that T Rex’s would be standing up more, but now the thinking is it tail is a counterbalance, so they’d be more horizontal. But we just don’t know, right?

Christi Dodge 33:05
I mean, we went to the zoo last year, and when you look at an elephant or like a hippopotamus, you kind of do feel like you’re looking at, a type of dino, you know, like, Oh, I get it.

Mike Dodge 33:18
Like one of the interesting things I didn’t think about until I’ve watched it this time, it just came up again, too, is I had read an article that they think that there was more oxygen in the air at that time. So the plants were different. There is more plant or something. So when you think about how big a T Rexes, compared to like you said an elephant, I don’t know if they could get enough food, or would their lungs would it be like they’re always in Denver, you know, they’d be wheezing. They couldn’t, couldn’t get enough to breathe. But it is kind of interesting to think of. Yeah, we’re like a giant saltwater Croc. It’s a lot like a dinosaur.

Christi Dodge 33:54
Yeah it’s cool. Okay, it gets it gets all of a sudden, I didn’t think I was a dinosaur person. Any trauma. in this film?

Mike Dodge 34:06
There is one instance of head trauma. Gennaro Gennaro, he’s the attorney that seems to exist only for exposition. He hits his head on the lumbar crosspiece in the mind at 4:45. Pretty standard gag, right? That’s it. That’s the head trauma

Christi Dodge 34:26
Okay, did we get a Doctor Grant and Ellie kiss?

Mike Dodge 34:30
Smoochy smoochy smoochy. I didn’t make note of any smoochy between them.

Christi Dodge 34:36
Because they were clearly a couple of early on. They even like she even puts her hand on him in a way that it’s clear that they’re a couple. And then she lets it be known early in the film that she wants children and he has no interest. But then she observes I very much feel like it’s a female gaze, as she observes him being paternal towards the child. Children and she, I think kind of gets like a (gasp)

Mike Dodge 35:03
Yeah, I did. I did note that and she did. This was a little bit, I think 50s era where she kind of tricks him into being alone with the kids in the car. And that’s very much like, oh, well, he just needs to be exposed to children, and then he’ll love them.

But yeah, this kind of segue a little bit into my department of couldn’t be made today because as I mentioned out loud when we watched it, in kind of the first scene where we see Grant and Ellie, he appears to grab a good ol handful of ass when she walks by, and then later, he grabs her by the head, and twists her head for her to look at a thing instead of just pointing like a normal person. And furthermore, Malcolm played by Goldbloom is pretty handsy and so there is some uncomfort this, I didn’t feel like they that Ellie’s character and it made me for 93 archaeologists would tell you that was that was standard. But it made me a little nervous watching at this time.

Christi Dodge 36:07
We know we have those two, what were they like Jeep Cherokees or whatever. But do we have a driving review?

Mike Dodge 36:12
We do a little bit of a driving review. So most of the cars were Ford Explorers. Fair enough. They’re a very common vehicle at the time. And then there were also some Jeeps again, fair enough. I did mention why would the Windows ever go down if you had dinos that spit poison? That seems to me not particularly bright. They were supposedly on this track. And very few people other than me, maybe paid attention, but There didn’t appear to be anything between the vehicle and the track. Like normally you would expect there to be like a post or something. There wasn’t. So I don’t know how that was supposed to work.

Christi Dodge 36:48
They didn’t consult the folks that Autopia.

Mike Dodge 36:51
They didn’t. And the last little bit that I noticed is Dennis or Nedry, or whatever. Wayne Knight’s character, horrible driver. And he gets the ambition exceeded adhesion award, but he ran out of ideas halfway through turn six. So it’s kind of his own dang fault.

Christi Dodge 37:12
He was the, I don’t know, the buffoon of the whole film.

Mike Dodge 37:15
He really was. And you know, it’s interesting. I remember that character having a bigger part than then he did.

Christi Dodge 37:21
Well, his but his he was very vital.

Mike Dodge 37:25
Yeah, but I mean, in terms of number of minutes on screen. Here’s the thing. I remembered him as being the one in the kitchen with the velociraptors not the kids. Oh, isn’t that amazing? Yeah. So

Christi Dodge 37:37
All right. Shall we go into the numbers?

Mike Dodge 37:39
Let’s go to the numbers.

Christi Dodge 37:39
Okay. Like I said, this came out in 1993 with a budget of $63 million and I already spoiled it domestically, it made $402.5 million today, that would be like $842.3 million and worldwide is where they got they got it over the to be a “B” and they made $1.45 Billion, which is 16.6 times the initial budget.

Mike Dodge 38:07
And one would hope that Stephen got a few points on that.

Christi Dodge 38:10
I bet he’s doing okay, because of this film. What went on to have some sequels. So

Mike Dodge 38:16
Wouldn’t it be great if he has like, still the Jurassic Park lunch box, right?

Christi Dodge 38:21
Yeah, this one. Let’s see its IMDb score is 8.2 out of 10. Critics give it 91% And the audience’s agree. They give it 91% too. And I mean, it’s definitely in A movie.

Mike Dodge 38:34
Oh yeah. This is Yeah. Like AFI Top 100. It’s amazing.

Christi Dodge 38:39
It’s just over two hours, which I don’t think you really feel it.

Mike Dodge 38:44
I didn’t notice that.

Christi Dodge 38:45
Yeah, two hours, seven minutes. It’s rated PG 13. It’s labeled as a action adventure sci fi movie. And as I said before, it’s a Universal Pictures, Amblin entertainment. It won the Academy Award for Best Sound, Best Effects, Sound Editing, Visual Effects. It won a BAFTA for Best Sound and Best Special Effects. And it won a People’s Choice Award for the Favorite Motion Picture of that year. So I mean, audiences were, you know, very pleased with this film.

Mike Dodge 39:15
So am I

Christi Dodge 39:16
I not sad to watch it again? Huh?

Mike Dodge 39:20
No, I was surprised to how much I enjoyed watching it.

Christi Dodge 39:22
Yeah, it was good. All right, everybody that kicks us off for June. So this is your first clue. Next week, we will be watching Uncle Buck and talking about that film. So let me know what you think our theme is for this month. And I will just alert you that when Mike came up with this. I went this one’s going to be a hard one.

Mike Dodge 39:45
Yeah, I will say I will be surprised if someone gets it. Even our super fans. Yeah, you surprise me though, so it’s possible.

Christi Dodge 39:54
So send us your guesses for what it could be. And join us next week for Uncle Bob. luck, but never forget

Mike Dodge 40:01
Dodges never stop and neither to the movies.

Brennan 40:03
Thanks for listening to Dodge Movie Podcast with Christi and Mike Dodge of Dodge Media Productions. To find out more about this podcast and what we do, go to dodgemediaproductions.com. Subscribe, share, leave a comment and tell us what we should watch next. Dodges never stop and neither do the movies