Gravel crunched and spit into the air as the green van groaned off the neighborhood road and into the driveway. With barely a second to spare, the doors flung open and a six year old child hopped excitedly out the side. Jumping up and down, he implored his mother, “B-but what is it about really?” The simple response was enough to elicit another excited skip from the boy. “Dinosaurs in a park. I told you that honey.”
At the time, the child’s spinning thoughts could hardly formulate into sentences, a limited vocabulary failing to express the speculative images of dinosaurs amidst playground equipment and masked by the nebulous mists of the unknown. For this child, the concept of a park was limited to schoolyard swingsets and dented metal slides. Who would possibly make a movie about dinosaurs riding a see-saw? Were there kids at the park? Were they riding the dinosaurs? How did they keep from being eaten?
A half hour later, mother and child, freshly tanned from a beach camping trip, walked over the threshold into the move theater and sought to purchase two tickets to 1993’s blockbuster hit, “Jurassic Park.” The child’s excitement was cut short with theater staff’s declaration that the movie was unfortunately sold out.
A child’s smile went upside down, eyes glistening with disappointed tears yet to be shed. Through parental trickery, a lapse in theater policy, and maybe a sudden burst of empathy on behalf of a manager, the impossible happened. Only minutes later, mother and son sat in the aisle of the movie theater on two fold out chairs.
And the rest my friends, was prehistory.
When those iconic safari type words thumped onto the screen set to the thrum of John Williams’ score, my fascination took hold along with that of the world. Steven Spielberg had crafted a dinosaur epic the likes of which the public had never seen. For children everywhere like myself, they were finally getting the chance to see their rubber toys and picture books come to life. It’s a fascination born of the mystery of a creature past, left in the charred dust of meteor impact and the genes of the bird out the window. Dinosaurs were enormous, unknowable but without a doubt, dangerous.
The parallel reality presented in the film had first been imagined by Michael Crichton in his earlier novel, ravenously adapted to the screen by Spielberg in the few years following. The novel, steeped in scientific realism with a dash of science fantasy, conveys Crichton’s belief that the cloning of dinosaurs would be first and foremost a money making proposition. Humanity’s desire to dance with the devil would lead entrepeneurs to take advantage, and stockholders to fall in line. Like in Crichton’s “Westworld” before it, this hubris would find reckoning manifested in blood and terror.
In the years since, the original Jurassic Park has spawned 5 sequels, an animated series, video games, comic books and other spin off material. A seventh film, “Jurassic World: Rebirth” will bare its teeth on July 2nd, 2025. Quality of the storytelling notwithstanding, there is little doubt that dinosaurs on the silver screen, theme park animals that they are, or could be, are still a money making proposition.
Entertainment takes many forms, and society will naturally try its darndest to serve up new forms to appeal to the masses. Theme Parks, like the fictional Jurassic Park, at their core have always been about thrills. They are thrills more achievable than extinct saurians, but exciting nonetheless. Roller coasters have been a tenant of theme parks since Coney Island first erected its first frame. Further back, man has taken risks for the sake of adrenaline or pride, since his dawn. He walked on hot coals. Foolhardy thrillseekers squeezed themselves into barrels to eject over Niagara Falls with nothing but a prayer. They leap off of cliffs, soars in a squirrel suit through canyons, or jump from a plane. Before each jump, step, or plunge, one considers the risks, evaluates his experience, and then teeters at the edge of his own mortality. He knows that the very real outcome could be his own death.
The beauty of carefully manufactured theme parks is that they offer these thrills with more reliable certainty you will come out the other side alive. Still, the first time you strap yourself into a seat or fold yourself into the clutches of a restraint comes with a trembling sense of mystery. What is over that next hill, or inside the next tunnel is unknowable until the instant you experience it, hurtling at high speed to the cadence of butterflies beating in your stomach, and the adrenaline coursing through your veins like a fire unquenched.
Mystery, terror and thrill mixed in a blender, form a delectable recipe. Man was never meant to fly, or from great heights fall. There was a time where such attempts meant instant death. When we ride a coaster, or drop 200 feet in a box, we are defying death and flipping it the bird. Our primal physiological response is a defense mechanism telling our gut that we are quite frankly, about to die. But somehow, we survive. Of course there are terrible theme park tragedies that do occur, but they are the exception rather than the rule. “If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the Pirates don’t eat the tourists.” And it is this dance with death that keeps us coming back for more.
Whether it be a man peering through an electric cage at the slobbering jaws of a velociraptor, or jetting weightless along magnetic rails through a loop, fiction or fact, the emotion is the same: Fear.
But in our reality, corporate synergy and multimedia drip feeds find a way to keep us consistently entertained, and afraid, if we so desire. Perhaps the greatest culmination of this theme park thrill has reared its toothy head in Universal Studios’ aptly named “Velocicoaster.” The theming is imbeccable and its meta placement within a theme park within a themepark is mind bending in itself. The Jurassic Park area of Islands of Adventure is host to the fan favorite River Adventure, and is manicured in such a way to allow fans to immerse themselves into the jungled canopy of Isla Nublar. It presents itself as not the Jurassic Park, but a satellite operation plopped in the middle of Orlando. It is a fun and imaginative proposition to be sure, but with River Adventure showing its age, and the brand itself trending towards Jason Bourne-like escapades, the Orlando area itself was missing one thing that the fantasy park provided; Sheer unbridled terror.
“Velocicoaster” has this terror in screeching spades, and the synergy of theme park-meets film- meets theme park has come full amber circle. The cold metal hill, like the crest of a crowing raptor, peeks menacingly above the tree line, beckoning with its promise 65 million years in the making. This fresh attraction toes the plot line that Jurassic World management has quite literally set a roller coaster in a velociraptor paddock, electric fences and all. Waiting in the queue line, guests can view Blue, Delta, and the other saurian animatronics panting and heaving at their metal collars, hungrily eyeing their prey and ready to pounce when given the opportunity.
The coaster itself is a mad, spiraling endeavor that puts you face to face with the titular velociraptors at insane speeds. You are held in place by nothing but a lap bar restraint, no over the shoulder baby stuff here folks. Designed by a sadist, the set-up lets you slip just far enough out your seat to make you feel as if you are about to fall to your doom. Its most maniacal turns and flips, suggest that you are about to drop and take a final face plant into concrete, water, or raptor maw. I have experienced many roller coasters in my life time, and I myself have jumped out of a plane, but my friends, there is truly nothing like this ride.
During my most recent trip to Universal Studios Orlando, I found myself peering once again between the gaps of the electric barriers of this raptor paddock. I stared at the rails of the coaster, and marveled at the architecture at play, but most of all, I sought a glimpse of the raptors inside. They are hidden behind ferns and concrete rocks, tucked away to save the surprise for the ride, not real of course. But this writer is sometimes still that 6 year old boy sitting in a cinema on a folding chair, breathless at the thought of viewing a live dinosaur for the first time. And there is a part of me that half expects the greenery to part, and witness a living, breathing predator come stalking out of the shadows.
Wonder and fear are great bedfellows; They easily morph and fold into each other, a twisted embrace that inexplicably draws us back again and yet again. This dark choreography defies our most basic survival instinct, but our engineers, creators, and story tellers will ever strive to serve us up a new rendition of the ballet for us to take in with giddy joy. A fresh course of raw fear, the lambs led to laughter. It begs the question, what will we come up with next? What new creative torments will we unleash and survive with feigned impunity?
Well, life finds a way, as a friend once so eloquently put it.
~R.A.
The Nostalgia Chronicle 