Racing Turtles

#dr henry wu is very handsome and did his job extremely well#its not his fault his job was science being abused by capitalistic hubris#he did in fact make some bomb ass dinosaurs just like he was hired to do#maybe get better security for your murder monsters

As an ex-animal welfare student I should watch the jurassic parks films and list every animal welfare violation I can find

Off the top of my head, the Indomunus Rex exhibit in Jurassic World is severely lacking in space, a human-sized entrance-exit, and a double-door system. All of those are very basic things every enclosure needs.

Not to mention the electric fence failure in Jurassic Park one. The fence had no backup power source and it was literally the only thing separating the dinosaurs from the visitors. At least use fences that can't be ripped through by a t-rex's teeth like scissors through paper. And add a freaking ditch, that's such a normal thing in zoos.

The Jurassic Park franchise has never been a warning about bringing dinosaurs back, it was a warning about following basic fucking zoo and animal welfare guidelines.

Anyway…

I have to point out that “this painting” was not made specifically for Dinotopia. It was an illustration for an article about dinosaur families by Bob Bakker in the June 2003 issue of Discover magazine. It was reused more than a decade later in the third Dinotopia book.

I know. I bought that magazine when it came out and then I wrote a long and enthusiastic email to Bakker with lots of questions and got no answer.

Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?

not gonna lie that still looks intimately real

I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.

Fucking witchcraft, man. 

fucking look at this shit though

Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:

THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.

amazing

And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.

They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

And the raptors were dudes in suits. I shit you not.

One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.

(link to said post about malfunctioning t-rex)

Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.

So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.

This is getting better and better.

I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI

I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.

@spinosaurus-the-fisher is this the kind of content you love?

Realism comes at a cost, it seems.

i mean ok but why has nobody posted this:

It’s a three piece raptor suit.

Old movies had the best special effects

The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.

@jurassicparkandrecreation

@shepfax

Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time.  They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers.  Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before.  It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them.  Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass.  They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that.  And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that.  One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking.  Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”

Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent.  Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.

That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Padian

This post just gets better and better with time

If you’ve never heard of it before, this is your PSA to watch Phil Tippet’s 1984 short film Prehistoric Beast

(CW for blood and animal death)

Words honestly cannot sum up how much I love this film, it is absolutely dripping with atmosphere and character. It literally is a natural history museum diorama come to life, and it’s a bit rough around the edges in places but that only adds to the raw, untamed feeling of the film. It’s a masterpiece of tension, animation and cinematography that was made by legendary animator Phil Tippett and a small team of artists in an actual garage in 1984.

You might have heard of Phil Tippett as the “Dinosaur Supervisor” of Jurassic Park (people died, Phil), but what that title actually means is that he was in charge of supervising the motion and animation of the CG dinosaurs in the movie.

And why did he have the role? Because Phil Tippett’s stop motion animation was legendary, especially his stop motion dinosaurs. The original plan for Jurassic Park was to have the dinosaurs animated using stop motion, and Tippett was brought on board while this was still the plan. However, when the decision was made to switch to CG dinosaurs, his expertise with stop motion rigs was incredibly valuable.

The team created a stop motion rig that translated movements onto a CG model specifically to keep Phil Tippett on board because stop motion or not, he was the master of making dinosaurs move! Before he worked on Jurassic Park he was creating stop motion short films featuring dinosaurs in the Cretaceous, the most famous of which is Prehistoric Beast.

This is an absolute gem of dinosaur media history, and I cannot recommend it enough!

i do think it’s interesting that in less than a decade after reviving both the jurassic park movies and star wars franchises, universal and disney, respectively, have fucked up what could have been never-ending theatrical cash cows to the point where the jurassic franchise is ending in critical disgrace and star wars has been relegated almost exclusively to disney’s streaming platform. how badly do you have to fumble bags that are mostly just “people and aliens in a far off galaxy and space” and “dinosaurs! what would happen if dinosaurs?” that the franchises became so devoid of any redeemable value that people are eh about seeing a cultural icon like darth vader wield his lightsaber or a website like rotten tomatoes, which grades on a heavy curve, especially for nostalgic projects, has your film at a 37% critical favorability and is being accused of making dinosaurs “uncool”. it’s fascinating. i hope the bubble bursts for marvel next.

Okay, don't get me wrong here. I LOVE Jurassic Park. I love seeing their dinosaurs. But after watching Prehistoric Planet, and going back to look at this...

And then looking at this...

Notice how much healthier the second set looks? Their lips cover their teeth, they actually have fat on their bodies, their skin doesn't wrinkle like they're dehydrated. You can't see every single tendon and muscle move because you aren't supposed to. Dinosaurs are animals, not reptilian body-builders.

THIS is the kind of change I want to see in how we create realistic depictions of not only dinosaurs, but all prehistoric creatures. Paleoart has always had a huge issue with shrink-wrapping and making these animals look terrifying instead of making them look like, well, animals.

Well done, BBC.

STOP BACKYARD BREEDING YOUR DINOSAURS

Get your Tyrannosaurs from responsible, DKC registered breeders! Anyone who says your rex should be skinny or 'thats just how they are' is lying to you.

Jurassic Park except they provide proper enrichment for the animals and they therefor don’t feel the need to hunt slow, small humans.

“We stuffed this pumpkin full of live goats for the T. rex watch him try to get them out with his little fingers.”

“Turns out the raptors are cage breakers, so we’ve gotten them a series of door handles to manipulate. Little guys just love it.”

"The Rexes are incredibly affectionate pack animals, so we were careful to breed multiples. Be sure to come during spring time to watch them go broody over anything even vaguely egg-shaped." "We put the Raptors through target training and now if they are bored, hungry, or just want a scratch under the chin they go to spot near the bars and ring a little bell for attention." "Imprinting after hatching was so common that we now have keepers under contract to care for the animals well into adulthood to prevent them from pining." "The Gallimimus turned out to be just giant Canada Geese, and so fear nothing. Their keeper regularly has to stop them from trying to attack fences, guests, feeding buckets, and the now traumatised pack of Ceratosaurs in the next paddock."

"We also fired Dr. Henry Wu."

I have questions for OP either about how big they think a pumpkin is or about how small they think goats are.

In a fictional genetic theme park, we play by Roger Rabbit rules. They’re however large they need to be to make my joke work.

I respect that. Question withdrawn.

Watching Jurassic Park and I have Opinions on this place as a zoo. Feeding the predators live prey?? There's other ways to provide enrichment! Also that enclosure is way too small for multiple large animals like that! Electric fences? Ha! Electric fences won't stop a fucking goat! Where's the zoo experts? Who designed these enclosures?? Were all zoos this shitty in the 90s???

This t-rex is so happy to be tearing a car apart and pushing it over a cliff! She's got so much energy! She needs healthy outlets! Where the fuck is her enrichment team???

Yeah there’s an AU fanfic here where people with actual knowledge of how to handle captive animals run Jurassic Park and manage to get through the whole crisis with only two fatalities and the park still intact. 

Speaking of Frankenstein-like stories that approach masculine™ appropriation of feminine™ creation with a gasp of reverential disgust, I rewatched Jurassic Park the other day and it stood out how Nedry placed the stolen embryos inside of the Barbasol can, of all things. What with explosions of shaving cream being ejaculatory in Homestuck and what not. Computer coding is a mode of “creation” in Jurassic Park’s psychosexual parlance, as indicated by the GCAT sequence projected onto the CGI velociraptor’s face, so Nedry’s proficiency with code would seem somewhat related to the moment when Lex symbolically confronts (?) her dislike of the “other kind” by using her computer skills to hold back the velociraptor head shoving its way into the door. The moment has a rude precedent when the brachiosaur sneezes all over Lex.

Not sure if that makes Lex gay, but the question is certainly on the table… the sequel has a lesbian tyrannosaur couple, and the first film has a joke that foreshadows the discovery that the “all female” dinosaurs started breeding somehow: when the helicopter’s landing, one of the paleontologists tries to secure his seatbelt, but ends up vainly clanking together two receiving-end belt buckles. Rather than futz around looking for the complementary half, he just ties himself in with the straps from the receiving-ends. “Life finds a way.”

You might even say the first film deals a bit with how parents respond to having gay kids? Nedry’s has the fetal shaving cream, but there’s also the fertility imagery of his being surrounded by sweets in his introduction, and his death upon being sprayed in the face… Hammond rejects his son, while Grant comes to love and protect the boy who’s obsessed with him and the girl indicated to have a certain phallophobia? Though it seems off to negatively structure lesbianism around penises like that, the “I don’t like the other kind” comment certainly seems to suggest as much within the movie’s vocabulary.

Another for the pile: I think light/electricity is probably a masculine/phallic signifier in Jurrassic Park, same as Homestuck. Again, the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park are all female; this is ostensibly a measure of population control, but the “control” half takes priority here. The dinosaurs are aligned with the feminine in general, as indicated by the above screen cap, in which Dr. Sattler is seated between bones embedded in the pillars as she speaks to Hammond. In contrast with the dark in which Sattler finds herself, Hammond is aligned with the warm light on the left. This gendering of dark and light carries over to the electric fence: the formal means of restraining the feminine-dinosaur is masculine-electricity. (Also consider the famous shot of shining a light at the T-Rex’s eye, upon which her pupil contracts angrily)

On the periphery of the psychosexual symbolism, there’s a nice little joke that supports the notion that the kids are gay: why doesn’t Tim let go of the masculo-electric fence in time, causing him to get zapped and launch into the trees? Apparently, because he likes boys.

So the footage of Owen training the tiny raptors in the new Jurassic World kind of (inadvertently, I think) confirmed something that always bugged me about the social dynamics mentioned in the first film.

Owen’s using the term ‘alpha’ wrong.

Of course, the concept of pack alphas is rooted in a lot of erroneous studies anyway. But if we take his actual assertions about it and Blue’s behaviour at face value, then Owen is wrong. He’s not the alpha. Blue is the alpha. The pack follows her cues, that’s why they go with her when she decides to follow the Indominous, and it’s also why they listen to Owen - because Blue does. If Blue stops, so do the other raptors. They’d don’t just wait it out to see who’ll win, they immediately follow Blue’s lead.

Blue’s the leader. 

Owen is, actually, the mediator.

He is the one who stops disputes between the raptors and defuses tense situations. He is permitted this status precisely because he’s physically weak (compared to raptors) but socially important. His social importance was created by rearing the raptors and forming emotional bonds with them. But they know full well that he’s squishy and beatable (though they probably don’t realize just how lethal some behaviours might be for him, comparatively). Blue knows she can kill Owen and that Owen is not strong or very useful at leadership decisions for a velociraptor pack. She accepts his input because he’s dad.

So since Owen actually isn’t even in the running for pack leader, and challenging him would be pointless because then you’d just hurt him and cost the pack a socially important member, and also probably get beaten up by Blue, he is the ideal mediator of disputes. His intervention de-escalates situations by reducing the amount of violence that’s permissible. 

But because he was using so much containment and physical force (even if it was through equipment, obviously) to keep the raptors in check, I think Owen misjudged his placement in the raptor social group. Especially since he actually was tougher than them when they were babies. He thought they listened to him because they believed he was stronger than them, and that this was an illusion he had to maintain.

That was never actually the case, though. Blue knew Owen was way weaker than her the whole time. She just valued him anyway.

There’s probably a metaphor about toxic masculinity in there somewhere.

You had me until the last line.

Would it still work for you if you removed “toxic”?

Nope. One bloke misunderstanding his social role in a group of bloodthirsty, primitive monsters is not a good or accurate metaphor for men.

Not a good one for women either if we’re the aggressive monsters, hmm?

Actually, what I was alluding to was the concept of Owen fixating on the assumption that he had to protect his social position via force and a misrepresentation of his own physical power, as having some allegorical similarities to masculine expectations of leadership and authority.

It’s not so much that he misunderstands his role in the social group that’s relevant, but why.

And that doesn’t actually require that the raptors be allegorical stand-ins for women. Because the dynamics of or composition of that social group is irrelevant, the salient point with regards to the toxic masculinity quip is Owen’s preconceptions about authority in the animal kingdom.

But, if we do want to look at the raptors as an allegory for women, it’s still not all bad. Because one of the major themes of the Jurassic Park movies is that the dinosaurs are not monsters. The monsters are the scientists and businessmen who seek to profit from their existence, who have made them, manipulated them, fenced them in, etc..

The reason why the dinosaurs are a problem in the movies is because they break free of the confines constructed around them, and then it’s no longer just about what the humans want, but about what the dinosaurs will do. And the messages of the movies, overall, is that responsibility still lies with the people who built the cages and manipulated the living things into forms and shapes they found pleasing, not with the creatures who then proceeded to liberate themselves.

But that’s a bit more of a stretch.

Still, that’s why I was deliberately vague with that last line. There’s always more than one way to read a story. Or piece of meta, as it happens.

I think this post is a great example of how some people seem to think masculinity happens because femininity exists– if someone says that a behavior is due to toxic masculinity, obviously it must be because a man is threatened by an allegory for human women or something. But that’s not what OP was talking about– Toxic masculinity has to do with the messages served to men that direct hierarchical dominance is of the utmost importance.

This isn’t a post about “one bloke misinterpreting his role among monsters representing all men,” but certainly it is one about that men are encouraged to think of themselves as on some rung of a straightforward power hierarchy rather than inhabiting some softer or less intuitive social role that isn’t really on a continuum of prestige. And that Owen, as a fictional character, can definitely model (and definitely does model) the expectations writers and the audience take for grated for his role.

(Image reads: #there would be fewer catastrophes #and boring movies #but I’m here for this)

Oh no no, we could have the best movie ever.

We just need a really good, enthusiastic, Steve Irwin type character who just thinks these dinosaurs are wonderful, let him do whatever he wants, and make Ian Malcom follow him around.

Steve: This is a T Rex.

Steve: She’s a beauty.

Steve: I’m going to wrestle her.

Ian: I, uh, must politely protest.

Sometimes I remember that there’s a massive beef in the paleontological community between Jack Horner and Robert Bakker and it’s so big that when they both worked as advisers on the Jurassic Park films, Spielberg made 2 characters based on them and had a T. rex eat Bakker’s character as a favour to Horner.

“The bearded paleontologist Dr. Robert Burke, who is eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex in Steven Spielberg’s film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, is an affectionate caricature of Bakker.

In real life, Bakker has argued for a predatory T. rex, while Bakker’s rival paleontologist Jack Horner views it as primarily a scavenger.

According to Horner, Spielberg wrote the character of Burke and had him killed by the T. rex as a favor for Horner. After the film came out, Bakker recognized himself in Burke, loved the caricature, and actually sent Horner a message saying, ‘See, I told you T. rex was a hunter!’.”

God this is still funny

Academia is very serious

It’s worryingly easy to picture a version of Jurassic Park created and run by Cave Johnson from the Portal series instead of John Hammond. It’s one of those situations where the crossover just writes itself.

“Welcome to Jurassic Park. Paleontologists, lawyers, chaoticians–you’re here because we need the best experts in the expert business to sign off on this project, and you’re it. Now, you already met one another on the helicopter ride over, so let me introduce myself. I’m Cave Johnson. I own the place.”

“Now, as you may have heard, we ran into a slight hitch with dinosaur DNA retrieval. The stuff’s full of holes, apparently. No quality control standards in the late Cretaceous. But it’s okay, Cave took care of it. Plugged all the gaps up with frog genes. Worked like a charm. Lab boys told me not to, said I should use reptile or bird DNA instead. But nobody tells me how to do my job! Amphibians are cheaper, and they don’t keep escaping. Mostly.”

“If those programmers think I’m going to pay them more money to make this park safe, they’ve got another thought coming. And that thought is ‘you’re fired,’ and it’s coming directly from me. Science doesn’t need to be safe, anyway. We’re pushing the envelope here. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”

“I’ve got bad news and good news. Bad news is your scheduled tour of the raptor paddock has been indefinitely postponed due to unforeseen circumstances. Good news is, we are pleased to announce a brand-new, exciting, hands-on way for you to meet our raptor pack. Just pick up a rifle and follow the yellow line. You’ll know when the tour starts.”

Some weird shit is about to go down…

@arrows-for-pens :|

life finds a way

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

orignal post x

this is good