It's been nearly 30 years since "Jurassic Park" first arrived in theaters, but director Stephen Spielberg's blockbuster is still as innovative today as it was back in 1993. With "Jurassic World: Dominion" now in theaters, there's never been a better time to give this sci-fi flick a revisit. Here are 20 fast facts you might not have known about the film, which generated roughly a billion dollars at the box office.
1. Spielberg found out about "Jurassic Park" while working on "ER."
When director Steven Spielberg and author Michael Crichton were working on a screenplay that would eventually become the television series "ER," Spielberg asked the writer about the plans for his next book. Crichton told him about "Jurassic Park," and Spielberg immediately tapped Universal to buy the film rights in May 1990 — before the book was even published. He was so excited that he began storyboarding scenes from the book, even though there was no screenplay written yet.
2. "Jurassic Park" almost took a backseat to "Schindler's List."
Though excited about "Jurassic Park," Spielberg wanted to direct his dream project — "Schindler's List"—first. But MCA/Universal President Sid Scheinberg would only green-light Spielberg's Holocaust film if the director agreed to make his dinosaur picture first. Both films were released in 1993; "Jurassic Park" in June, and "Schindler's List" at the end of the year.
3. Chip Kidd is behind that iconic logo.
Most books that lead to movies end up taking the film's poster as their cover art, but for "Jurassic Park," it was the other way around: The iconic logo on the poster was adapted from designer Chip Kidd's T. rex skeleton drawing that was used for the original novel.
4. A King Kong ride inspired Spielberg's original plan for building the dinosaurs.
The logistics of Spielberg's original plans to bring the dinosaurs to life were inspired by the Universal Studios "King Kong Encounter" ride. Disney Imagineer Bob Gurr designed Kong as a full-size animatronic with an inflatable balloon-like skin surrounding a wire frame. Unfortunately, the plans to build all of "Jurassic Park's" dinosaurs as similarly full-size animatronics proved too costly.
5. To pull off the dinosaurs, Spielberg had to get creative.
Because the dinosaurs couldn't be life-size animatronic recreations, Spielberg had to think a little differently — so he assembled a group of special effects legends to create his vision for "Jurassic Park."
Stan Winston and his team, which created the exoskeleton from "The Terminator," built and operated the live-action dinosaur robots. Some creations, including the T. rex, were full dinosaurs, but most were just the upper half — including the head and torso of certain dinosaurs — while others were just the bottom half, including the legs and claws. The footage of the 7.5-foot-tall Brachiosaurus puppet, which included just the head and neck, is featured above.
Michael Lantieri, special effects supervisor on "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" and the two "Back to the Future" sequels, supervised the interactive elements on-set. For instance, in the final scene where the CGI T. rex throws a CGI raptor into a practical T. rex skeleton, Lantieri was responsible for making sure the skeleton reacted, in a realistic manner, to the yet-to-be-included CGI elements.
Phil Tippett, who received an Oscar for his special effects work on "Return of the Jedi," used his "Go-Motion" technique — an updated method of using miniatures and stop-motion animation to add motion blur to each frame for smoother and more lifelike movement — for dinosaurs in wide shots.
Finally, Dennis Muren, who had previously supervised special effects on the Star Wars films and Spielberg classics like "E.T." and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," led the effects team at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) in seamlessly combining all of the effects elements in post-production.
6. "Jurassic Park" broke new CG ground.
Spielberg wasn't 100 percent happy with the wide test shots of the dinosaurs — they just weren't photorealistic enough. So Muren and his ILM team, spurred by their revolutionary experience in designing and incorporating fully computer-generated characters into films like "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," showed Spielberg an early CGI dino test of a group of Gallimimus skeletons running through a field. Spielberg was in awe of the ease of movement and realism of the effects, but he was still wary that they wouldn't hold up under intense scrutiny — and he didn't want to scrap Tippett's practical animation talents altogether. So the director urged Muren and ILM to go further. When they came back with a CG test of a fully rendered T. rex walking across a field in broad daylight, the director decided to go full CGI for some shots.
7. One Ian Malcolm line was inspired by a member of the effects team.
While viewing Muren's complete CGI test with Spielberg and the other members of the effects team, Tippett said, "I think I'm extinct." Spielberg incorporated Tippet's comment into the film in an exchange between Sam Neill's Alan Grant and Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm, when Grant says, "I think we're out of a job." Malcolm replies, "Don't you mean extinct?"
But instead of leaving the production and wasting the animal motion research he had done, Tippett served as a consultant, helping the CG animators create realistic movements in their digital creations.
8. To create realistic dinosaurs, effects artists had to get into character.
The digital artists took video of themselves acting like the Gallimimus herd for reference before they animated the stampede scene; it helped them create more realistic instinctive behavior. Meanwhile, Stan Winston's crew built raptor suits, and got into them, based on the video above.
Combined, all of "Jurassic Park's" CG dinos have just 6 minutes of screen time, while total dinosaur effects shots make up only 14 minutes of the 127 minute film.
9. Other big names were up for roles in the film.
Casting is everything: Other possible candidates for the roles in the film included William Hurt and Harrison Ford as Alan Grant, Christina Ricci as Lex, Sean Connery as John Hammond, and Robin Wright or Juliette Binoche as Ellie Sattler.
10. "Jurassic Park" brought Richard Attenborough out of retirement.
Richard Attenborough, who plays InGen CEO John Hammond, was on a 15-year hiatus from acting when Spielberg approached him about taking a role in "Jurassic Park." Attenborough had been directing — in fact, his film "Gandhi" beat Spielberg's "E.T." for Best Director and Best Picture at the 55th Academy Awards — but said he agreed to end the semi-retirement because Spielberg had "the charm of the devil."
11. A huge hurricane hit the set during production.
"Jurassic Park" shot on location in 1992 on Hawaii's Kauai Island. Hurricane Iniki — the most powerful hurricane to hit Hawaii in recorded history — struck during filming. Attenborough apparently slept through the worst of it. When asked by cast members how that was possible, he replied that it was nothing — after all, he had survived the London Blitz during World War II.
12. Jeff Goldblum liked to read his lines out loud on set.
In 2011, Ariana Richards — who played Lex — recounted a fun Jeff Goldblum story to Interview magazine: Between scenes, she was sitting in a helicopter with Joey Mazzello (who played Tim) and Goldblum, who had his script in his hands. "I was struck by the fact that he wasn't studying it like most people I'd been around that were actors, who'd study quietly [and] kind of unobtrusively," she said. "He was speed-reading them out loud!" That's chaos — just like Ian Malcolm would want it.
13. Spielberg had paleontologists serve as consultants on the film . . .
Famed paleontologist Jack Horner was used during production to ensure the dinosaurs exhibited scientifically accurate behavior, and Robert T. Bakker — also a paleontologist — gave animators information about the dinosaur's physical characteristics.
In the forward of his 1995 novel "Raptor Red," Bakker had nothing but praise for the animators creating the dinos: "The artists . . . wanted the latest info on all the species they were reconstructing. They wanted everything to be right. They'd been calling me once a week for months, checking on teeth of T. rex and skin of Triceratops. I'd sent them dozens of pages of dino-details." He told Popular Mechanics in 2012 that the dinosaur artists working on Jurassic Park were "better animal morphologists than most tenured professors."
14. . . . but he didn't always take their advice.
Still, Spielberg insisted on using dramatic license when it came to some of his prehistoric stars' appearances. Take, for example, those T. rex teeth. Bakker sent over diagrams of the chompers — which, in reality, were banana-shaped — but "the powers that be didn't like the real tooth shape," Bakker told Popular Mechanics. "The CGI rex and the robot had their fangs sharpened."
The most famous example is probably Spielberg's Velociraptor, which more closely resembles the Deinonychus. A major source for Crichton's book was Gregory Paul's "Predatory Dinosaurs of the World," which labeled the Velociraptor as a Deinonychus subspecies; real Velociraptors weighed less than 50 pounds and had feathers.
But in a bit of good fortune, a new, much bigger species called the Utahraptor was discovered during Jurassic Park's production. In the forward of Raptor Red, Bakker wrote about a call from Dr. James Kirkland, who was part of the team that discovered Utahraptor:
"Jim!" I yelled. "You just found the giant raptor Spielberg made up for his movie." Jim thought I was daft. He didn't know about the other phone call I had gotten about giant raptors that morning. It was from one of the special effects artists in the Jurassic Park skunkworks . . . the artists were suffering anxiety about what was to become the star of the movie—a raptor species that had never been documented by a real fossil. . . . Just before Jim called, I'd listened to one artist complain that Spielberg had invented a raptor that didn't exist. . . . He wanted hard facts, fossil data. "Yeah, a giant raptor's possible — theoretically. But you don't have any bones." But now Jim's Utahraptor gave him bones.
That dinosaur, discovered in January 1992, was almost exactly the same size as "Jurassic Park's" big female.
15. Only one robotic dinosaur actually made it to the Hawaii set.
Winston's team worked from highly detailed drawings to create their robots — first making small-scale and full-scale clay models based on the drawings and then constructing the remote-controlled skeletons that would move underneath the robo-dino's latex skin. Above is a mini-documentary from the Stan Winston School on the construction of the T. Rex, which, according to the crew, was as dangerous as a real dinosaur.
And check out some behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage of the animatronic dino in action:
According to Entertainment Weekly, only one of Winston's machines was used on location: the sickly Triceratops that the characters come across while on their tour. All of the other robots, including the one used for the famous T. rex attack and the raptors in the kitchen sequence, were used on sets and sound stages.
16. It took many different animals to create the T. Rex's roar.
The sound design of the T. rex's roar was reportedly a composite of tiger, alligator, and baby elephant sounds. The deadly Dilophosaurus roar was created by combining howler monkeys, hawk screeches, rattlesnake hisses, and swan calls.
17. Grant and Lex probably would have been T. rex food.
Even though the T. rex could have hunted based on smell, at the time "Jurassic Park" was made, it wasn't known for sure whether the giant dinosaur's vision was based on movement. Because some reptiles are known to exhibit the trait, consultant Jack Horner didn't object to having Spielberg include it in the film. More recent research suggests, however, that T. rex probably had pretty excellent vision. Oops.
18. Robert Muldoon's weapon of choice was a SPAS-12.
Game warden Robert Muldoon, portrayed by actor Bob Peck, uses a folding stock variant of the Franchi SPAS-12 combat shotgun to hunt the Velociraptors in the film. The firearm — which gets its name from "Sporting Purpose Automatic Shotgun" — was a dual mode shotgun that cycled between semi-automatic mode at 4 rounds per second and pump-action mode for low pressure ammunition; it was manufactured from 1979 to 2000. Its effectiveness was limited to close range fire, but even then, this gun didn't help Muldoon. Clever girl.
19. One iconic moment was inspired by listening to Earth, Wind & Fire.
The idea for the rippling water and rattling mirror in the tour vehicle caused by the approaching Tyrannosaurus was inspired by Spielberg listening to Earth, Wind & Fire with the bass turned up at full volume in his car. On set, special effects supervisor Michael Lantieri plucked a guitar string underneath the cups to create the ripples; a vibrating motor above the windshield made the mirror shake.
20. After filming wrapped, another famous director took the reins so Spielberg could start work on "Schindler's List."
Spielberg and his crew completed filming on "Jurassic Park" on November 30, 1992 — 12 days ahead of schedule — but he had to quickly shift gears and concentrate on shooting and completing his next film, "Schindler's List," which would go into production in March 1993. Because of the tight shooting schedule on that film and the extensive post-production needed for "Jurassic Park," he handed over some post-production responsibilities to friend and frequent collaborator, George Lucas, who owned ILM. Lucas was given a "special thanks" credit in the final film.
This story was originally published in 2015 and has been updated for 2022.
