rahulvictor

austinkleon:

Great piece on the fanboy cult of Jurassic Park. (I wrote about seeing Jurassic Park when I was 10 in Steal Like An Artist).

The plot of Jurassic Park was recycled. Crichton was an expert recycler. His Congo (1980) is King Solomon’s Mines (1885) with an ape-voice synthesizer and the racism dialed down. Sphere (1987) is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). And Jurassic Park is a reboot of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) — a title Crichton stole for his sequel. It was Conan Doyle who dreamed dinosaurs were hiding somewhere in Latin America; Conan Doyle who sent an egomaniacal academic to find them. (Then, Professor Challenger; later, our Dr. Malcolm.) What Crichton did, in literary terms, was like taking a classic automobile and installing a newer, more powerful engine.

Crichton did something else smart at the moment of conception. He realized previous dino nuts — from Ray Bradbury to the creators of Land of the Lost — had fallen head over heels for the T. rex. The big guy. But man versus tyrannosaur is just a replay of David versus Goliath. Man versus velociraptor — that’s different. That’s smaller.

Thanks, @calebhannan!