The Jurassic Park franchise isn’t subtle about its central themes. From the lectures of Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm to scenes of dinosaurs devouring the humans who seek to exploit them, the message is very clear: mankind shouldn’t recklessly play with the natural order of things, otherwise there will be consequences for our hubris. This is hardly a revolutionary concept, seeing as it’s a tale as old as Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein”, but the ingredient that makes Jurassic Park so appealing boils down to it’s premise: “What if genetic engineers could bring back dinosaurs?”
The first film (and by extension the Michael Crichton novel it’s based on) dove into a fictional process where incomplete dinosaur DNA was extracted from mosquitos in amber, the gaps in the genetic material were filled with frog DNA, and the complete sequence was used to clone dinosaurs. Of course, the DNA being a mixture of multiple creatures led to an unforeseen consequence: the dinosaurs could change sex, and what was supposed to be an all-female population began to breed.
The original Jurassic Park movie didn’t touch every big name in the fossil record, leaving many dinosaurs that could be introduced in sequels and spin-off material, but the “science gone wrong” angle always left the door open for something a little more weird and twisted. If lab-grown dinosaurs could abruptly grow dicks, then what other abilities could they acquire with the right mix of genes? If it was possible to merge frog DNA with dinosaur DNA, couldn’t the DNA of two or more dinosaurs be mixed together? Wouldn’t it be possible to make all kinds of ungodly beasts with this sort of technology?
For wider audiences, this idea wouldn’t be touched until the fourth installment of the film franchise, 2015’s Jurassic World, which introduced a mash-up apex predator known as the “Indominus Rex”. While this was the first time a hybrid dinosaur had been depicted in a Jurassic Park film, the franchise had played with the concept many times prior in comics, toy lines, theme park events, and various unused plans for television shows and movies.
The first time a bit of extra mad science was thrown into the Jurassic Park franchise was in Topps’ 1995-1996 comic series, Return to Jurassic Park. Issues #5 and #6 (written by Tom and Mary Bierbaum and penciled by Armando Gil) take place during the events of the original film, and follow InGen scientists Derrick Hoyle and Abby Nakajima as they discover the secrets of their sinister colleague, Dr. Gustavus.
The two scientists find Dr. Gustavus’ off-the-books laboratory filled with tiny, caged dinosaurs whose genetic makeup has been heavily modified. Gustavus barges in and holds them at gunpoint, bragging that he’s created “a smaller and quite trainable pterodactyloid”, “the Leaellynosuarus, displaying heightened intelligence and dexterity”, “the avimimus, with plumage”, and “a watchdog-sized triceratops”. With the exception of the tiny triceratops, none of these genetically enhanced creatures sound particularly impressive or exotic, but regardless, they’re meant to be the first steps in Gustavus’ master plan. “Dinosaurs of hyperintelligence,” he muses as he begins his villainous monologue, “Beings destined to exist. I’ve met them, conversed with them in my dreams. And make no mistake, these dreams will become reality. My techniques have produced super-mutators who’ll experience eons of evolution within a few generations! The world will know at last what dinosaurs were destined to become.”
However, a storm (the same one from the movie) causes the foundations of the lab to break apart, and the mutated dinosaurs escape in the chaos. Dr. Hoyle and Dr. Nakajima briefly escape, but wind up back in the lab, once again cornered by Dr. Gustavus. The story abruptly comes to an end when Gideon, the tiny, genetically enhanced Leaellynosuarus, gets a hold of Gustavus’ gun and shoots him by accident. Hoyle and Nakajima flee in a helicopter, and the whole situation is wrapped up as Gustavus’ experiments drown in a flood.
This Return to Jurassic Park storyline seems to be fairly inconsequential, but it is an early example of a Jurassic Park story leaning a little harder into its science fiction themes. The novel and movie had both addressed scientists abandoning morals in the name of scientific advancement, but this was the first time the franchise had a proper “mad scientist” character with an insane, bigger-than-life scheme.
At one point, the sequel to Jurassic Park, The Lost World, was possibly meant to introduce an “enhanced” species of dinosaur. A collection of interviews with Steven Spielberg (appropriately titled “Steven Spielberg: Interviews”) features a fleeting reference to a “super-raptor” that was planned for the film. “The super-raptor was a little too much out of a horror movie,” the director said. “I didn’t want to create an alien.”1 It’s unclear based on this two-sentence quote whether the “super-raptor” was supposed to be an existing species or some kind of freakish monster designed by crazed researchers. Spielberg’s concern that this creature would be too excessively scary and weird definitely seems to suggest the latter.
Regardless, if Spielberg thought The Lost World’s proposed “super-raptor” would have been the point where the franchise jumped the shark, then the creatures planned for the movie’s spin-off cartoon series would have leaped a goddamn megalodon.
During the production of The Lost World, Spielberg commissioned the newly-formed DreamWorks animation to make a cartoon that would be released after the film. This was the second attempt at creating a Jurassic Park cartoon, following the scrapped Escape From Jurassic Park that was originally planned for 1994. Not much was known about the canceled The Lost World: The Animated Series until 2019, when artist Phillip J. Felix shared concept art he worked on for the show.
Most of the concept art is what you would expect from a Jurassic Park/The Lost World show: dinosaurs stalking humans, dinosaurs attacking humans, and dinosaurs attacking other dinosaurs. Surprisingly, two pieces show bizarre, mutated Tyrannosaurus Rexes covered in spikes and extra heads and limbs. One sports tentacles, while the other is a colossal beast labeled “Doomsday Rex”.
Outlandish and extreme as these designs are, it at least makes more sense to go this route in a Saturday morning kid’s cartoon than a theatrically released film. Still, for reasons unknown The Lost World: The Animated Series went extinct in its early stages of development, taking it three-headed, tentacled T. Rex with it. However, the franchise still wouldn’t let go of the idea of mutated dinosaurs, and this time it would (mostly) make it past the drawing board.
Following the release of The Lost World, Kenner, who held the rights to making Jurassic Park toys, had seemingly made a figure for every big-name species of dinosaur, including ones that hadn’t appeared (yet) in any of the Jurassic Park films, including the Carnotaurus and Spinosaurus. They were running out of popular dinosaurs to make toys out of, and this problem called for an unorthodox solution: make up new dinosaurs.
In 1998, Kenner released its Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect line of toys, featuring hybrid dinosaurs in flashy colors- “Genetically Mutated Dinos Gone Bad”, as the tagline described them. The Chaos effect toys were hyper-stylized mashups, such as the Compstegnathus (Comsognathus + Stegosaurus), the Ankyloranodon (Pteranodon + Ankylosaurus), the Amargospinus (Amargasaurus + Spinosaurus), and the Paradeinonychus (Parasaurolophus + Deinonychus).
Some of the Chaos Effect dinosaurs weren’t even hybrids, but rather they were “genetically enhanced” (recolored) versions of existing figures, such as the “Omega T. Rex”, the “Thrasher T. Rex”, and the “Raptor Alpha”. What advantage did these psychedelic looking theropods have over their standard counterparts? That’s uncertain, but they definitely don’t seem stealthier.
The crown jewel of Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect was a toy that never really hit store shelves: the Ultimasaurus. The Ultimasaurus was meant to be an unstoppable monster made up several dinosaurs. It had the build and jaws of a T. Rex, the claws of a velociraptor, the horns and crest of a triceratops, the spiked tale of a stegosaurus, and the armored back of an ankylosaurus (which was removable, continuing Jurassic Park toys’ signature “dino damage” gimmick). Basically, it was Jurassic World’s super ultra mega apex predator over a decade and a half before that movie came out.
Multiple prototype figures of the Ultimasaurus were made and it was heavily featured in the toy line’s promotional material, but, along with several other Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect prototypes, it never made it to mass production. The exact reason why the Ultimasaurus was never sold is unknown, though it is speculated that its sharp horns would have been a safety hazard to small children. If this is why the Ultimasaurus was never available, then it makes the whole situation more frustrating, because a weird dinosaur toy that doubles as a stabbing weapon sounds really fucking kickass.
The Ultimasaurus prototypes have acquired an almost mythical status among both Jurassic Park fans and toy collectors. The few that have escaped into the wild sell for around $600, and like any valuable item, there are multiple fakes on the market. An infant version of the Ultimasaurus was packaged with the Roland Tembo Chaos Effect action figure (which actually had an official release). However, whether the little tyke is loose or sealed with the unopened action figure, it still goes for around $150.
The new dinosaurs created for Jurassic Park: Chaos Effect all had very cartoonish features compared to other Jurassic Park toys. Tim Bradley, an artist who worked on the line, elaborated on the bold design of the figures in an interview for JP Toys: “For Chaos Effect, that would have been more like the Star Wars ‘Clone Wars’ cartoons, where the visual style was very exaggerated, and colors were pushed a lot farther than they would have been for one of the JP films. The Chaos Effect line was aimed squarely at young kids, so the sculpts and colors were really dynamic, and the emphasis on being scientifically accurate wasn’t really a factor, as far as I was concerned.”2
Another big reason why the dinosaurs of Chaos Effect looked like something out of a cartoon was because… they were originally envisioned as being part of a cartoon. The toy line was supposed to be accompanied by an animated series, but like the last two attempts to make a Jurassic Park television show, it never materialized into anything.
The Jurassic Park franchise fully entered the new millennium with the release of Jurassic Park III in 2001. Despite the third movie doing respectably at the box office, it marked the beginning of Universal Studios not really having a clear idea what they wanted to do with the brand. It would take them fourteen years to finally put out another movie (Jurassic World), and in this period of dormancy shit got really, really weird as Universal decided that the future of the blockbuster franchise was going to be freaky hybrid monster dinosaurs. Of course, mixing dinosaurs with other dinosaurs wasn’t enough anymore. Jurassic Park was going to mix dinosaurs with humans.
Jurassic Park’s human-dinosaur hybrids didn’t make their debut in a film, but rather a theme park. In 2002, the Universal Orlando Resort hosted its twelfth Halloween Horror Nights. The event was usually hosted at the original Universal Studios Florida park, but this year it took place at the resort’s relatively new second gate, Islands of Adventure. Subtitled “Islands of Fear”, the event took advantage of the park’s existing intricately themed lands, giving a spooky twist to properties like Marvel Comics and, of course, Jurassic Park. The franchise was a perfect fit for the event. While most wouldn’t consider the Jurassic Park films to be horror movies, they definitely share the same DNA: the original film features a group of characters that are killed off, one by one, in elaborate ways by monsters. The Jurassic Park themed scarezone, known as “JP Extinction”, would start with the basic premise of “the power has gone out and the dinosaurs are on the loose”, but it needed a secret ingredient to make it a definitively extra scary take on the franchise.
The answer was simple: lean into the mad science angle and introduce mutated dinosaur men and other ungodly experiments.
The backstory was fleshed out a bit more in promotional material and the scarezone’s main haunted house, “Project Evilution”. A Jurassic Park scientist named Dr. Burton had secretly created human-dinosaur hybrids, and, shockingly, something went wrong and the creatures escaped. Why he did this in the first place is a bit ambiguous, but there seems to be suggestions that the plot is tied to the main icon of Islands of Fear, a sinister man known as “the Caretaker”, who was trying to gain loyal minions. Dr. Burton’s ultimate fate was revealed at the end of Project Evilution: he was hung in his lab by his own creations.
The lab coat-clad dinosaur-human hybrids both wandered the scarezone and lurked within Project Evilution. It’s unknown whether these creatures were supposed to be humans mutated with dinosaur DNA or dinosaurs mutated with human DNA, but their attire and decision to hang a man they have grievances with instead of devouring him suggests they’re the later. Only one type of dinosaur-human hybrid appears in photos and videos of the event: a man that’s part dilophosaurus (the spitting dinosaur with the frills). Concept art of triceratops and pteranodon human hybrids exists, though it’s unclear if either actually appeared, as much of Halloween Horror Nights 12 wasn’t thoroughly documented and a lot of reported details about it lack solid evidence to back them up.
Dinosaur-human hybrids weren’t the only bizarre genetic experiments haunting the jungles of JP Extinction. The event produced the single most bizarre creature in the Jurassic Park franchise: the Grebnedu, which appeared in the form of a puppet that would jump out of the foliage shoot compressed air at unsuspecting guests. The creature’s name is “Udenberg” spelled backwards, as a nod to its designer, Jim Udenberg, who served as Universal Orlando’s Prosthetics Supervisor for nearly a decade. Little was known about the Grebnedu until YouTuber Klayton Fioriti reached out to Udenberg and revealed his findings in a video. Apparently, Udenberg had been instructed to create a serpentine creature with some resemblance to the graboids from Tremors. Udenberg took heavy inspiration from marine life when making the Grebnedu, giving it the beak of an octopus and appendages reminiscent of an anglerfish’s lure.3
It’s not entirely clear where the Grebnedu fits into the whole “bringing dinosaurs back to life” premise of Jurassic Park, as it’s unknown whether or not the monster is part dinosaur at all. Perhaps this is a Ship of Theseus situation where the base DNA of the Grebnedu was that of a dinosaur, but so much of it was swapped out for the genetic material of other creatures that it became something else entirely. It seems that every answer about this mysterious beast just spawns even more questions.
While 2002 wasn’t the last year that Halloween Horror Nights was hosted at Islands of Adventure, it was the final time the event really tried to fully incorporate the themes of the existing lands. The next year saw the Jurassic Park era turned into “Jungles of Doom”, which had a story revolving around cannibals and zombies, but no dinosaurs, let alone mutant hybrid ones.
Meanwhile, Universal was struggling to put together a fourth Jurassic Park film. The most we know about the film’s development hell comes from the second of two drafts penned by screenwriter John Sayles, which was leaked in its entirety. In this 2004 draft, Isla Nublar has been bought by the sinister Baron Herman von Drax, the Swiss owner of the Grendel Corporation (it’s named after the monster from Beowulf, because again, Jurassic Park doesn’t love subtlety). The dinosaurs are reproducing at an alarming rate and even escaping onto the mainland. John Hammond (the only returning character) hires ex-military man-turned-mercenary Nick Harris to sneak onto the island and retrieve the Barbasol can full of embryos dropped by Denis Nedry in the first movie. Hammond plans on using the embryos to create new dinosaurs that are genetically engineered to be sterile, so that he can introduce them to the existing dinosaur population and slowly guide them back into the warm embrace of extinction. This plan is bad for multiple reasons, the most notable of which is that the dinosaurs in the original movie were also designed to not be able to breed, and yet they did anyways.
After some close encounters with various dinosaurs, Nick retrieves the embryos and hides them in Mexico. The film takes a hard left turn when Nick is kidnapped by the Grendel Corporation and taken to von Drax’s castle in the Swiss Alps. Nick is introduced to a pack of genetically altered raptors, interchangeably referred to as “Deinonychuses” to get people to shut the hell up about how real Velociraptors were significantly smaller than the raptors seen in the movie. To make them more intelligent, the raptors have a bit of dog mixed in them, and a bit of human DNA from the Baron himself. Additionally, they also have the ability to change the color of their skin to camouflage themselves, an idea that first showed up with the Carnotaurus in the original novel of The Lost World and was carried over to the arcade game based on the film based on the novel (but not the film itself). The raptors also have devices implanted in their heads that allow their creators to release certain chemicals into their brains to influence them and freaking battle armor, which honestly is a pretty shameless way of revealing that this movie would’ve existed to sell toys.
The Grendel Corporation more or less forces Nick into their employment, where he is tasked with training the raptors for military applications. Nick names each member of the pack after various Greek heroes, and the rest of the film is him training the raptors and taking them on a hostage rescue mission. All the while, the raptors’ implants become less and less effective, and they become increasingly unpredictable. The finale sees the raptors annihilate a drug cartel before ripping the implants out of one another and killing everyone from the Grendel Corporation except for Nick and his scientist love interest.
There’s a surprising amount of restraint in the portrayal of the genetically altered raptors in this unused Jurassic Park IV script. The human DNA doesn’t really do much besides making it easier for Nick to give them commands, and their peculiar camouflage ability is only used twice: once to establish it when they are introduced, and another time during a mission. When the concept of an ex-military guy training raptors was transplanted from this draft to what would become Jurassic World, it makes a bit of sense why the human-raptor hybrids were changed to regular raptors. Still, it’s easy to see why they felt the need to explain how the biggest threat in the last three films could basically be domesticated (at least, for a while until their betrayal).
In 2016, Carlos Haunte (an artist known for creature design for films such as Men in Black, Prometheus, Godzilla, and Detective Pikachu) revealed concept art for Jurassic Park IV that featured much more exaggerated human-dinosaur hybrids that had vaguely human-like builds. These images are often associated with the leaked John Sayles drafts, even though they don’t match the description of the human-dino hybrids from that script, suggesting these more drastic designs were for an earlier or later draft.
These designs are remarkably creepy, but at the same time laughably absurd. This is especially the case with some of the hybrids that manage to push the sci-fi elements even further with cybernetic components. The raptor-man with a gun for an arm feels goofy enough to be self-parody. In an interview with HN Entertainment, Haunte admitted that maybe these hybrid monsters weren’t a great fit for the Jurassic Park franchise specifically, though he would like to see the concept explored as its own thing: “I’ve heard people get really upset over it, but I think it’s because they’re geeks of Jurassic Park. But I still think that this idea of the hybrid man dinos is still kind of a fun thing to do, as a tangent story that isn’t Jurassic Park, it’s something else, and if they did it as a Rated R kind of horror story, it could be pretty cool.”4
At one point, it was decided that the fourth Jurassic Park film needed some kind of new, vicious dinosaur that was bigger and scarier than a T. rex, even though this was met with mixed reception when Jurassic Park III tried to do this with the Spinosaurus. This time, the main dinosaur was going to be something completely made up for the film- a completely fictitious super-predator. The first iteration of this monstrosity was the Malusaurus. Interestingly, the Malusaurus wasn’t supposed to be the result of genetic tampering, but rather it was supposed to be a previously undiscovered species of dinosaur that was found in China and only recently introduced to the fossil record.
The next iteration of the “made-up dinosaur” concept was the Diabolus Rex (Latin for “devil king”). The Diabolus Rex marked the stage where this creature was imagined as being the result of heavy genetic engineering. This design is certainly very striking, with its yellow and blue color scheme, quills, iguana-looking bits, and pattern emphasizing its skull. In a way, it almost feels reminiscent of one of the Chaos Effect dinosaurs.
The Diabolus Rex seems to have made it pretty far into Jurassic World’s development. Concept art shows it in scenes that made it into the actual film, such as the gyrosphere chase. There’s even a part in the movie where the Indominus Rex is being tracked on a monitor, which designates it as “Asset DRX. 134-60E”. This suggests that the name change from “Diabolus Rex” to “Indominus Rex” was a bit of a last minute decision.
Eventually, the fourth Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World, was released, introducing theatergoers to a concept the franchise had been circling around for years- a hybrid dinosaur. The film presented a world where a functioning park with living dinosaurs has opened to the public, but guests’ interest in dinosaurs is waning. Management intends to introduce a new, scarier dinosaur that Dr. Wu (a scientist who played a major role in the Jurassic Park novel, but only made a small appearance in the first film) has created by combining the DNA of a T. Rex, a velociraptor, a treefrog, a cuttlefish, and other assorted creatures. The result is the Indominus Rex, a pale, spikey dinosaur whose genetic makeup gives her abilities such as turning near-invisible, rapidly adjusting her body temperature to further avoid detection, and communicating with raptors so that she can remind them that by turning on the humans, the only thing they have to lose is their chains.
Naturally, the very dangerous dinosaur that Dr. Wu created turns out to be very dangerous. The Indominus Rex wreaks all kinds of havoc until our human protagonists get some other dinosaurs to attack her, and then a Mosasaurus pops up and drags her to her watery death.
Just before the final battle, the protagonists discover Dr. Wu’s secret lab. Among tanks with bizarre reptiles and amphibians and spines suspended in fluid, computer monitors show off various hybrid dinosaurs, hinting that Dr. Wu isn’t done with his twisted experiments, and that he’s learned absolutely nothing from all of his endeavors going to shit.
Jurassic World definitely opened the floodgates for hybrid dinosaurs in the franchise, as new ones were introduced in video games and in the form of toys following the release of the film. Dinosaurs such as the Stegaceratops and Spinoraptor appeared just as frequently as classics like the Brachiosaurus or Dilophosaurus.
Jurassic World: The Game, a park-building mobile game, has been particularly notorious for introducing a lot of hybrid dinosaurs. In the seven years that the game has been active, over fifty hybrid dinosaurs have been created specifically for it.
2018 saw the release of the sequel to Jurassic World (and fifth film in the franchise overall), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The film introduces a new hybrid dinosaur, the Indoraptor, which is the result of Dr. Wu mixing DNA recovered from the bones of the Indominus Rex with raptor DNA. As stated before, the Indominus Rex is already part raptor (this was a big plot point for part of the last film), so either the Indoraptor is the result of making something that is “part raptor” even more “part raptor”, or the writers of this film just kind of forgot about that detail. The Indoraptor is significantly smaller and quicker than its predecessor, though it seems to lack any of its special stealth abilities.
Rather than being created to be a thrilling attraction, the Indoraptor was made for military applications. It’s trained to follow a laser pointer attached to a gun and kill whoever it’s pointed at, though there certainly is a more efficient way to kill a person by pointing a gun at them that doesn’t involve sending a dinosaur after them. Dr. Wu at least has the sense to protest against the Indoraptor being sold on the black market, as he views it as a prototype that is too difficult to control. However, Wu’s superiors ignore his warnings and put the Indoraptor up for auction. It escapes and… is too difficult to control. The Indoraptor’s rampage comes to an end when it fights Blue (a raptor who is on the side of the protagonists), and falls on a Triceratops skull, which impales the Indoraptor.
Concept art for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom shows a variety of different proposed directions for the Indoraptor. Some pieces show it with bits of pink patterning on its black scales, while other depict the Indoraptor with fleshy boil-like growths on its face. One image even gives the Indoraptor frills on its neck like a Dilophosaurus. The final design isn’t as outlandish, but still feels sinister and otherworldly, like it could be the “super raptor” Spielberg rejected back in the 90’s.
Hybrids also play a large role in the animated series Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, which is fitting considering two of the three previous attempts to make a Jurassic Park cartoon centered on them. The show follows a group of teenagers who are stranded on Isla Nublar following the events of Jurassic World. At the end of the second season, the teens unknowingly deactivate the cryonic chamber of an experiment designated “E750”. Throughout Season Three, the beast goes on a killing spree, until the teens eventually encounter it. They find the lab where “E750” was created, and video footage sheds some light on the mysterious monster. It is the Scorpios Rex, Dr. Wu’s first attempt at a hybrid. The Scorpios Rex proved to be mentally unstable and extremely dangerous, thanks to the poisonous quills it had because it possessed scorpionfish DNA. Ironically, Jurassic World’s management ordered that the Scorpios Rex be euthanized not because of it was hazardous, but because it was “too ugly for display”. Going against orders, Dr. Wu secretly froze his creation instead of exterminating it.
The teens learn that the Scorpios Rex is even more dangerous than they thought when they discover that there are somehow two of them now, leading the group to conclude that the original was able to reproduce asexually. The teens realize that they need to stop the monstrous hybrids before they continue to reproduce unchecked, and they kill the pair of Scorpios Rexes by leading them to the abandoned Jurassic Park visitor center and collapsing the building on them.
Season Four introduced another pair of hybrids, albeit much more docile ones. The teens finally mange to escape Isla Nublar, but get stranded on another island full of dinosaurs- a facility owned by the clandestine Mantah Corp (get it, it sounds like “Manticore”, the Greek monster). The teens face many threats on the island: a saber-toothed tiger, the Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park III, and robots, but thankfully not everything on the island is trying to kill them. They find and befriend two Sinoceratops/Spinosaurus hybrids, which they dub “sino-spinos”, and name them “Rebel” and “Angel” based on their personalities. The group tries to find out which of the island’s artificial environments the sino-spinos are most comfortable in, and they discover that it’s the glacial habitat, because their genetic engineering allows them to regulate their internal body temperatures.
There’s no doubt that hybrid dinosaurs will continue to play a role in the future of the Jurassic Park franchise, though after all of the heavy focus on them, it appears the films and other associated media are going to take a bit of a step away from the idea for a little. In an interview with Screen Rant, director Colin Trevarrow was asked if hybrid dinosaurs would appear in the upcoming Jurassic World: Dominion. He said there wouldn’t be any hybrids, elaborating: “I just felt like we’d done it. We had hybrids in the first two movies and we have them in Camp Cretaceous. I don’t know, it didn’t feel tonally right with this movie. This movie is much more of a science thriller than the others. I really wanted to focus on dinosaurs that really existed. That’s what made me fall in love with this franchise in the first place.”5 This “back to basics” approach seems like the best route to take. Hybrids in Jurassic Park, for better or worse, were always at their most interesting as something on the fringes of the franchise. Introducing more and more of them just diluted the special “weirdness” that the concept holds and lead to really repetitive storytelling. At this point, the best way for Jurassic Park to do something that feels fresh and new is, ironically, to go back to where things started.
Citations
- https://books.google.com/books/about/Steven_Spielberg.html?id=5E80Tv7F3zIC
- http://www.jptoys.com/jptoys-files/interviews/tim-bradley-interview/index.htm
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IQCQnlBfpM
- https://hnentertainment.co/exclusive-jurassic-park-4-creature-designer-carlos-huante-talks-his-dinosaurs-human-hybrids-jurassic-park-4-and-wants-to-see-an-r-rated-jurassic-park/
- https://screenrant.com/jurassic-world-dominion-interview-colin-trevorrow/
