In the early 1980s, Michael Crichton decided to resurrect the dinosaurs. His first attempt was a feature screenplay about a grad student reverse-engineering the DNA sequence of a pterodactyl fossil. There was just one logistical question he couldn’t answer – who would foot the bill?
“Because it’s not a cure for cancer,” said the author in an interview included among the special features of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. “The only thing I could think of was that it would be some form of entertainment.”
The answer was theme parks.
Jurassic Park: The Ride was only a matter of time.
In 1989, Steven Spielberg was working with Crichton on a medical drama that would eventually turn into ER when he caught wind of the work-in-progress. The mix of hard science and old-fashioned adventure hooked the former dino-kid immediately. It also provided a unique opportunity to bring his blockbuster reign full-circle: “I was really just trying to make a good sequel to Jaws, on land.”
He had to have the rights. And he did, momentarily.
In the mid ‘80s, Crichton sold the mere idea of his novel Congo for $1 million after a ferocious bidding war only for the winner, 20th Century Fox, never to make it. Jurassic Park was different. He wrote it because he wanted to see a dinosaur. That mattered more than the competing paychecks.
Spielberg told Crichton, “I’d like to make this.”
Crichton told Spielberg, “I’ll give it to you if you guarantee me you’ll direct the picture.”
Despite the author’s request to set the property at a firm $1.5 million so Jurassic Park went to the right filmmaker and not the richest, the agency that represented him pounded a very loud gavel. Everyone wanted in. Studios lined up with their hottest directors – Tim Burton for Warner Bros., Joe Dante for 20th Century Fox, Richard Donner for Columbia. James Cameron made a play for the rights independently.
Ultimately, Universal listened to Spielberg and paid up.
In May 1990, it was made official – Jurassic Park would be a Steven Spielberg production. But for the past four years, the company had been looking to its brightest star for more than just box office receipts. It was his suggestion of a Back to the Future attraction that brought plans for a Universal Studios Florida back from the dead and earned him an on-the-books position as executive creative consultant for the park. Directing so many cinematic roller coasters served him well – Spielberg knew a good ride when he saw it, and this one was almost too obvious.
In November 1990, it was made unofficial – Jurassic Park would be a Universal Studios attraction.
Work on the film and ride began simultaneously, with MCA Recreation Services getting the latter ball rolling. Before long, they’d need an entertainment design and production company to do what Crichton did almost a decade before in that very first script – bring dinosaurs back to life.
The Landmark Entertainment Group was an obvious choice.
Under the direction of co-founders Tony Christopher and Gary Goddard, Landmark had closed the technological gap between Universal Studios Hollywood and Disneyland. In 1983, the company sketched an explosive blueprint for all Universal effects shows to come with The Adventures of Conan: A Sword and Sorcery Spectacular. In 1986, it revitalized the world-famous Studio Tour and changed the scale of theme park storytelling with King Kong Encounter, the attraction that first inspired Spielberg’s pitch for Back to the Future: The Ride. In the summer of 1990, Landmark handed over the keys to the Ghostbusters Spooktacular.
Obvious as the company was for Jurassic Park: The Ride, it still won the project on a gamble.
In both the novel and the film, then working between drafts from Crichton and Hook scribe Malia Scotch Marmo, the key attraction in Jurassic Park is the automated safari. No matter the make or model – Toyota Land Cruisers on the page, Ford Explorers on the screen – it was the easiest possible adaptation, almost one-to-one for a theme park environment.
With access to the script limited to the Amblin offices, the Landmark team instead took inspiration from the biggest setpiece lost in translation – the Jungle River Cruise.
The sequence lasted long enough for storyboards – Dr. Grant and the kids board an inflatable raft to escape the T-Rex only to discover it can swim – but the last screenwriter on the project nixed it. David Koepp, fresh off the arduous production of Death Becomes Her, considered it, at best, redundant and, at worst, eye-wateringly expensive. It survived in fragments among the tie-in video games and sequels. For the time being, however, it was scrap.
Which is why the pitch for what was then called The Jurassic Park River Adventure surprised Spielberg. More importantly, though, it excited him. Nevermind the technical limitations that informed Landmark’s direction – there was and, to date, is no physical way to compellingly replicate the T-Rex chase from the film in a theme park environment – the River Adventure offered the filmmaker expansion. It wasn’t just playing the hits of his movie, but fleshing it out, making it real beyond the credits.
Water was the way, and there was no time to waste.
Production began on Jurassic Park in August 1992 and wrapped in November. The simultaneous work, sometimes on the same backlot, allowed for chicken-egg assistance. In the film’s lunch scene, a concept painting of the River Adventure can be seen projected on the screen behind Richard Attenborough. Universal left the Visitor Center set standing on Stage 12 for almost a year after the film’s release and the Landmark team snuck in two weeks before demolition to shoot the preshow.
In between, plans changed.
Early concepts called for an awning over all outdoor scenes. A massive aviary for the island’s flying residents, another excised sequence from the novel, was worked in as the last scene before boats floated indoors. The industrial climax saw the most tweaks and reductions. At one point, a live actor would’ve attempted evacuation only for raptors to attack and riders to slide backwards, a prelude to Revenge of the Mummy’s false exit. One particularly grisly sketch shows a massive spine-backed dinosaur decomposing in manmade effluvia.
The biggest change was geographic.
The River Adventure was always intended as a multi-park installation, to be built at both Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Studios Florida. In Hollywood, it would take up half of the guest-accessible Lower Lot. In Florida, it would replace the Swamp Thing sets in the plot now occupied by Men in Black: Alien Attack. After all, neither park had a water ride.
Cartoon World, the company’s planned second gate in Florida, had several, but not enough characters to populate them. Negotiations with Warner Bros. for the theme park rights to Looney Tunes and D.C. superheroes fell apart. Universal already had some catalogs signed, but there just weren’t many recognizable cartoons left to fill out an entire world.
Then Spielberg suggested moving the River Adventure next door and giving Jurassic Park its own island. “Isla Nublar” was suddenly on the drawing board and Islands of Adventure was suddenly on the horizon.
With the premiere looming – June 11th, 1993 – and no theme park attractions to show for it, Universal improvised. The Hollywood River Adventure was only a few years off, so most of the marketing blitz was aimed at Florida.
In March 1993, a thatch-roofed shack appeared on the corner of The Boneyard nearest The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera. It was the first dedicated piece of Jurassic Park in Universal Studios Florida, but not the only place to buy little plastic Laura Derns. Dinosaur merchandise hit the Ghostbusters Paranormal Store like a stampede. Plushes. Colorforms. Wristwatches. Baseball caps. Fannypacks. If it could bear the logo, it did and it sold.
By May, two picture cars from the production joined the settlement, Explorer #05 and Jeep #12. If anyone missed them, parked on Plaza and Sunset respectively, they certainly wouldn’t miss the new strollers, modeled after the latter vehicle’s sand beige, red stripe style.
The movie opened and promptly became the highest grossing of the year.
Nicer digs were in order.
Jurassic Park: Behind the Scenes moved into the Pantages lobby, offering guests something to look at between showings of The Phantom of the Opera Horror Make-Up Show. The most iconic costumes and props were displayed like museum pieces. A making-of featurette played on constant loop. Most of the space was taken up by a star on-loan: the robotic triceratops treated by Dr. Sattler.
A smaller outpost, Jurassic Park Visitor Center, was added to the Upper Lot in Hollywood, taking over the Sound Tracks Recording Studio. A static brachiosaurus head loomed over the entrance to survey the surrounding hills.
When the movie became the highest grossing of all time, Universal doubled down.
Hollywood received a counterpart exhibit, called the deceptively similar Behind the Scenes of Jurassic Park, that included many of the same sights as the Florida exhibit but on a much grander scale and much tighter schedule. Assembled in a soundstage on the Lower Lot behind Backdraft, the walk-through attraction featured an indoor jungle, a video presentation on the film’s pioneering special effects, and dedicated dioramas for each prehistoric performer, including the brachiosaurus from the Visitor Center roof. There was even enough room to keep that park’s picture car – Explorer #04 – out of the rain.
For a while at least – Behind the Scenes of Jurassic Park only ran from January 1st, 1994, to the end of May.
Florida’s new addition, as well as its older Behind the Scenes exhibit, lasted a while longer.
A thicket of palm trees sprang from the asphalt behind The Boneyard hut. Electric fence held back the vegetation but was no match for a 1:1 scale fiberglass sculpture of the T-Rex pulled straight from Stan Winston’s legendary creature shop to menace whichever vehicle happened to be parked there that day.
The Jurassic Park T-Rex Attack! would eventually prove to be the resort’s most enduring photo-op, outlasting its original name, location, and canonical chronology.
But Hollywood didn’t need any more boosts – everybody knew what was coming.
Construction on the attraction, finalized as Jurassic Park: The Ride, began in spring of 1995. The specs were impossible to ignore. 67,015 square feet. $80 million. Even the project code number spelled jackpot – 777. By the time ribbons were cut, the real numbers were even wilder – The Ride ended up costing between $110 and $120 million, double the budget of the blockbuster it was based on.
Universal admitted what it was building but offered no juicier details. The summer of ’95 belonged to another E-ticket based on a Steven Spielberg film, Indiana Jones Adventure over at Disneyland. The dinosaurs would have their day soon enough.
On June 21st, 1996, Jurassic Park: The Ride opened in high style with Steven Spielberg and Jeff Goldblum crossing torches to light a ceremonial pyre. On his first trip through the world he co-created, years after walking through Landmark’s head-level miniature, he got off before the drop. Despite a fear of heights, his review was glowing. Just like everybody else’s. Lines stretched across the Lower Lot and snaked through the famous Phantom of the Opera soundstage, 28, all for the chance to spend seven minutes among the dinosaurs.
This time, the story went, John Hammond got it right. After the mishaps on that island, he regrouped and built another Jurassic Park smack-dab in the middle of Universal Studios Hollywood. Richard Attenborough reprised the role, promising in his wistful way that nothing like that power outage could ever happen again in the “Hollywood park.”
Three months later, Spielberg, Goldblum, and Attenborough would be on set, devising further means by which something like that could happen again in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Minus a few of the more troublesome effects, the exact same thing would be happening not long after in Florida as the centerpiece attraction of an area now-called “Isla Nublar: Home of Jurassic Park.” The River Adventure name would finally stick, but what could possibly stand beside it?
As they always do, concepts started big. A complementary Jeep Safari was sketched up for the plot beside the River Adventure, where Skull Island: Reign of Kong looms today. The ride would’ve finally allowed guests to board those iconic Explorers (despite the name) and pass in the shadow of those iconic gates. That keyword – iconic – was the problem; all the narrative beats were so indelible that the River Adventure already used most of them. Both would’ve opened with brachiosauruses for scale and ended with T-Rexes for terror.
HelicopTours lasted longer, due in no small part to its novelty. Outwardly themed to an active helipad, the attraction would not have actually taken riders anywhere. Foreshadowing the angle and approach of Soarin’, HelicopTours employed simulator technology for an aerial tour of the island. Par for the course, the sight-seeing ended in disaster, but with Pteranodons attacking for once.
Though both plans ultimately fell off the drawing board, their memories still live on in Islands of Adventure. A scale model of Isla Nublar sits in the middle of the River Adventure’s entrance rotunda. Among the tiny red buildings and placards devoted to the attractions that did survive, weather eyes can spot placeholders for both the Jeep Safari and HelicopTours.
With the design as final as it’d ever be – River Adventure, Pteranodon Flyers, Triceratops Encounter, Camp Jurassic, and a Discovery Center straight out of the movie – Universal announced its line-up for Islands of Adventure on May 6th, 1997. On the 23rd, The Lost World: Jurassic Park opened wide.
It was going to be a busy year.
The dinosaurs vacated the Pantages lobby for a brand-new showroom in Stage 54, the former MCA Recording Studio. Befitting the bigger advertising push for Lost World, the picture cars became a picture fleet. Unimogs, Hummers, and Mercedes-Benzes, all olive drab and bearing the InGen logo, swarmed the alley between Alfred Hitchcock: The Art of Making Movies and Hercules and Xena: Wizards of the Screen. Inside, a span of the film’s ill-fated Mobile Lab was cut open for a closer look. That’s not counting the more extensive collection of props, costumes, and special effects demonstrations, like a water-filled footprint rigged to ripple. The triceratops from the first film returned in disguise as one of the tranquilized animals ready for export.
The Lost World: Behind the Screams was a hot enough ticket to make the front of the park map that summer, but it wasn’t the only Jurassic Park entertainment within walking distance.
The Islands of Adventure Preview Center claimed the corner of New York formerly occupied by Screen Test Home Video Adventure and presented the future. Each land received its own immersive room designed for one thing and one thing only – hype. The Jurassic Park room began, appropriately enough, with the gates. Beyond them, dinosaur eggs incubated behind glass within reaching distance of attached gloves. A steel roll-down door separated guests from the Raptor Pit, sturdy enough to hold the predators in but not so strong they couldn’t rattle it once in a while. A video loop hosted by Mr. DNA provided a “Jurassic Park Special Update” on the coming attractions. The latest, greatest concept renderings hung in the Jurassic Gallery, a hallway capped by tropical canopy. Stop to admire in the wrong place, though, and a hidden T-Rex growled from above.
Behind the Screams didn’t last the year, but the Preview Center and T-Rex Attack! kept the park prehistoric until Islands of Adventure was ready. Not that anyone needed a vacation to notice it was coming.
The T-Rex quickly became a b-roll staple of Universal Orlando advertising. Triceratops Encounter earned its own ad spot in the “Universal Studios Escape” campaign. Jurassic Park was already an unofficial part of the resort. That T-Rex was already stomping its way onto logo tees. But soon the franchise would transcend the novels and the VHS tapes and even the boat ride.
Soon it would actually exist.
On May 28th, 1999, Islands of Adventure finally opened.
Jurassic Park finally worked. The Discovery Center replicated the original sets down to the Barbasol can. The towering skeletons in the atrium weren’t even copied, but borrowed – their spines still hide the eyebolts that suspended them on-set. New dinosaurs were born hourly and if a guest didn’t buy that, they could go pet an ailing triceratops next door. Hammond still introduced the River Adventure, but without mention of Hollywood or California. This was it. This was the dream come true, at least in the lore.
Attendance didn’t meet expectations for the new park. Before long, Universal started weighing salvage operations. In the case of Jurassic Park, that meant a thrill ride. That meant a roller coaster.
The first attempt, in early 2001, was called Raptor Racers, a woodie themed around outrunning the island’s most dangerous inhabitants. All that’s left of this pitch is artwork showing trains painted like the two famous vehicles from the original film. Later that year, another design made it farther along. The current Skull Island area could’ve been home to Universal’s first hypercoaster, tangled through a heavily themed amber mine.
Around the same time, on July 18th, Jurassic Park III released to respectable box office and disappointing reviews. There was little confetti spilled for the sequel around Islands of Adventure, though the Hollywood ride did add 240,000 gallons of water for a Summer Splash promotion. Times had changed, as a single commercial made clear.
See The Movie dared the first half, dazzling with highlights like the Spinosaurus doing its best Jaws impression. Then Live The Adventure sold the second, dazzling with different highlights. Cascading waterfalls over Camp Jurassic. Pouncing spitters on the River Adventure. Hatching velociraptors in the Nursery. “Explore the real Jurassic Park, only at Universal’s Islands of Adventure.”
Fact superseded fiction.
Michael Crichton was right.
It took a theme park to bring something like Jurassic Park to life.
And for 22 years, not much changed. Triceratops Encounter closed, reopened as Triceratops Discovery Trail, then closed again. Somewhere in the middle, the queue was used for a Jurassic Park-themed Halloween Horror Nights maze, featuring a cameo from the decapitated head of the first film’s trike. Harry Potter took the HelicopTours plot and King Kong took the Jeep Safari. The raptors got tame enough to pose for pictures. One of them was even the star of a new Jurassic motion picture.
Velocicoaster marks the first major Jurassic World addition to Islands of Adventure. It queues behind the Discovery Center and empties almost directly into it. The interior, plus or minus some souvenir stands, remains as it did in Jurassic Park.
The franchise is forever entwined with Universal theme park history, especially in Florida. Just as Back to the Future pulled the original park from the brink, Jurassic Park guaranteed the success of the resort. If Crichton never asked the question, there would be no Islands of Adventure and, at least in any recognizable state, no Universal Orlando. As the films find new audiences, the attractions age further into inspiration, no longer the belated spin-off but the genuine source.
Almost 30 years later, Jurassic Park remains both the perfect showcase for the magic of movies and the magic of theme parks. It was, is, and forever shall be the ultimate Universal Studios attraction.
As rumors fly about the River Adventure going the way of The Ride and getting a rebooted makeover, it’s easy to get defensive or, worse, nostalgic. But adaptation is only natural.
Consider the fiberglass T-Rex in the trees beside the Burger Digs, menacing either Explorer #05 or Jeep #12, since repainted as #23. It’s the same animal that posed for photos so long ago in an unnaturally lush corner of The Boneyard. Still smiling. Still surviving.
Life, like novelists, filmmakers, and savvy theme park designers, finds a way.
