The reason few people remember Last Action Hero is because of one major monster movie that came out one week before it: Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs were eating up the box office reviews, ticket sales, and summer blockbuster buzz. Even Arnold can't walk away from going toe-to-toe against a tyrannosaurus rex.
Perhaps ten is when my memory truly began to coalesce. I have manifold and distinct images in my mind of that time--and most of it comes from Jurassic Park. I can vividly recall how confused (and excited) I was to see the McDonald's cups that depicted moments from the film. I hadn't seen it yet, but I loved Happy Meals and dinosaurs, so the cups fascinated me. I definitely remembering feeling a chill when I looked at the cup of Dennis Nedry getting attacked by the dilophosaurus. I seem to recall a triceratops cup, too, but I don't see it online.
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| (I wish I knew where mine went. It's tempting to spend the money to get them.) |
Memories abound from that summer. Not only was I in the interim between fifth and sixth grade, but everyone I knew was a fan of Jurassic Park. We talked about it, we reenacted it, we roared at each other. Jurassic Park was everything.
My cousin and her father (my mom's oldest brother) visited that year from Chicago. He asked if he could take me and my older brother to see it. Then, when they left, he bought a copy of the book from the airport and gave it to Jesse to read. Because of that, I've always had this bizarre assumption that the best books are for sale at airport bookstores.
After seeing the film, I went to my family's cabin with my grandparents. I spent most of the time regaling them about the different dinosaurs featured in the movie (they, much to my dismay, hadn't seen it), and I explained enthusiastically about the selfsame dilophosaurus. "It has this thing that pops out around its neck, like a cobra! And it spits poison, like a cobra!"
"That's just made up for the movie," said Jesse. His twelve-year-old disdain was palpable and, served up from the back seat as the car chugged ever southward, it did a great deal to quash my enthusiasm. Still, I was rapturous by the movie.
Being in the mountains of Sanpete county soon after watching Jurassic Park led to intense daydreams of seeing a tyrannosaurus breaking through the pine forest and lumbering down the road. I remember looking into the cerulean sky framed between the branches like some sort of inverse canyon, picturing what the tyrant lizard king would look like roaring at the audacity of the clouds.
When night came and the absolute darkness of nature sans technology reigned over, I believe some of my energy waned. Who wanted to be attacked by dinosaurs at night, after all? But night time, like brotherly scorn, faded and I returned to my delight.
Later that summer, my father took his boys--Jesse, twelve; me, ten; and James, five--to go see it. I spoiled the entire movie for my little brother so that he wouldn't be scared--the last thing I wanted was to have to leave early just because James was scared of a little bit of velociraptor on the screen. (It turned out that the movie scared him so badly that he would later imagine dilophosaurus heads beneath the Miami Dolphins helmets that made up our bedroom décor. I think that's a perfectly fine result.)
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| (You have to picture a dilophosaurus wearing this to get what he was freaked out by.) |
Summer slid into the school year and I began to spend time with one of my best friends, Chris. Much to my envy, he owned not only a SEGA Genesis, but a velociraptor action figure. I cannot express how badly I ached to buy one of those.** For some reason, though, I never did.
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| (Oh, I wanted so badly. Hooray for caring spouses!) |
Chris had all sorts of cool Jurassic Park related merchandise. He had a behind-the-scenes book that showed the puppets, actors, locations, and concept art of the film. One page, in particular, literally made me jolt with surprise every time I saw it. It was a picture of the t-rex roaring, his eyes glowing with malice. Chris would laugh at me whenever I did my startled jump.
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| (This isn't the actual picture I was startled by. It was kind of like this, but startling-er. I guess.) |
As the school year went on, Jurassic Park love continued. Classmates carried lunch boxes plastered with the logo (in a haunting result to Malcolm's prescience in the movie), wore t-shirts with velociraptors, put up posters (like the one in my room that continued to scare James), memorized the lyrics to "Weird" Al's spoof song, and shared hints on how to hunt down Dr. Grant in the Genesis game (you could play as either Dr. Alan Grant or the raptor; I always chose the latter). Despite it releasing in early June, Jurassic Park continued to pull in people--particularly ten-year-old boys.
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| (I was really bad at this game.) |
To give you an idea of how much interest there was in this movie, my dad--no bibliophile--purchased a copy (at an airport bookstore, no less) of the book and read it while traveling. So it was natural that I would want to read the book myself.
I don't know if my mother pre-read a lot of the material I brought home. (I have only one memory of her censoring a book; that was a scene from an Anne McCaffrey book. I peeked under the paper-clipped 3x5 cards anyway.) But, matronly reservations notwithstanding, there was little she could do to prevent me from reading the book--especially since there were two copies of it floating around my house.
It must've been in the fall when I finally managed to snag the paperback copy. I think it was my dad's copy--Jesse had guarded his jealously, even after taking it into our tent that one night when we camped in the backyard and he read some of the book by flashlight and letting me look at it a little. As a good Mormon boy from a good Mormon household, my dad didn't have a stash of dirty magazines for his impressionable sons to siphon away and clandestinely ogle. Instead, he had a six dollar paperback sitting on his dresser--unguarded and, likely, forgotten after having finished it. And, like a prelapsarian Adam, I stole into the forbidden area of my house (the master bedroom) and thieved the knowledge of genetically engineered dinosaurs.
I carried that with me everywhere. As I said, it was fall, so I got to wear a leather jacket. I remember this distinctly, because Jurassic Park could fit into the inside pocket of the coat. That allowed me to keep it handy for reading during lunch, while waiting in line to go to an assembly, or to read while I walked home. I stole the book from Dad on a Friday and finished it after church on Sunday.
I can't imagine that my mom didn't notice my nose buried in a book that was, by pretty much every count, not intended for children. But, then again, I was always reading. She may not have noticed after all.
Anyway, I probably shirked chores on Saturday. I know that I curled up on the blue couch, Sunday afternoon sunlight slanting through the bay window, and squirmed with worry and fear as Lex and Tim tried to evade raptors in the kitchen (still one of the most taut and gripping scenes I've ever seen written).
One of my greatest achievements in elementary school was reading "an adult book" in three days while in the sixth grade.
I do remember dreading the chapters called "Control", as they didn't have dinosaurs and had a lot of talking about computers and lysine (whatever that was), but on the whole I really, really enjoyed it. In fact, I loved it so much, that I reread it later--probably in the spring or summer of '94. As I sat down to lunch, I opened it up and began reading. Cheetos stained my fingertips--if you find the old, cover-less, beaten up copy that I read as a kid, you'll likely find orange smudges on the early pages--as I imagined Costa Rican jungles and beaches, gory wounds, and the exotic chirps of compsognathus. The heady smell of a paperback triggers one memory for me: Jurassic Park.
So I guess it's not a surprise that I am still totally enamored of the books, movies, and video games. They can do no wrong--even though there's plenty wrong with each iteration of the franchise--because they're fueled with nostalgia. In many ways, Jurassic Park is my childhood. I may not have ever done much with this passion for dinosaurs, but it has become one of my defining characteristics. You can probably imagine my disappointment when I learned that I had missed an opportunity to write an article for an upcoming book Jurassic Park and Philosophy. To make up for that, I'm writing an article that I hope to present at the next Life, the Universe, and Everything Symposium in February 2014.
I'm excited for when I can finally watch these films with my own boys. There's something special about shared entertainment, especially those which touch you so permanently and so lastingly.
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*I'm probably one of the few who feel this way about Last Action Hero. It's pretty poorly regarded among film critics and the like. I think it was unexpected, and its schlock shtick is less about poor crafting and more about deliberate creation. But most of Rotten Tomatoes disagrees with me, so...
**Gayle bought me one this last Christmas. She found it online and had it shipped to me in a trashy little envelope from Texas. I've rarely been as surprised or delighted by a gift.
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