How old were you when you first watched this movie? Be honest, how scared were you?

The T-rex scene was created through a brilliant mix of life-size animatronic and early CGI. For example at 17:08 this is the animatronic standing over the car, then the camera pans down so it's no longer in frame — then the CGI rex walks into the shot. It's perfectly seamless. They combine this with the rain and high contrast lighting to hide the primitive CGI, and use flashes of lightning and splashes on the ground (which don't even always match the dinosaur's footsteps, but it doesn't matter because the viewer never notices) to further ground the animal into the scene and make it feel absolutely real. Put all this together and you end up with a scene from 1993 that holds up better than most modern CGI.

The frenzied popularity of Jurassic Park when it came out can't be understated. It was everywhere. Clothes, toys, coffee mugs, video game, parodies and references everywhere. "Weird Al" Yankovic did a parody of the song "Macarthur Park" called "Jurassic Park" and the album cover art for "Alapalooza", which the song is on, was a parody of the Jurassic Park poster. The video for the song is in claymation form.

I was 7 when this came out. It was definitely intense in places, but I actually wasn't all that scared in the theater. However, there was a thunderstorm the night I saw the movie. I woke up around 2-3 am and kept watching the flashes of lightning outside my window ... expecting that the next flash would reveal the silhouette of a Raptor outside of my house. Pretty sure I was up for more than a hour staring at that window. I still remember it like it was yesterday. That being said, I went back and saw this movie 4 more times while it was in theaters. I'd never seen anything like it.

The upright t-rex is an old fashioned and out of date reconstruction. Back in the day they would often be depicted standing upright and balancing on their tails in a sort of tripod configuration. The posture in this movie is still relatively accurate.

They are all worth watching, for the real stars, the visual artists. But they will never have the same impact as this one.

I was 19 when this came out. I was working at an oil storage facility in Bayonne, NJ but I was staying with my Aunt/ Uncle and 3 small cousins between semesters at College in PA. Up to the point of Jurassic Park Spielberg did a lot of movies with kids as the focal point. I never had the patience for kids so when my aunt & uncle invited me to go with them to the theater to see the movie I thought it was going to be like ET and all mush.
WELL!!!
They got back, one cousin was crying, one refused to sleep alone in his room etc etc. My Aunt & Uncle said: "We had no idea it was going to be like that! DEFINITELY not meant for small kids!"
The next day I went to the theater by myself to go see it.
The rest is history.
I grew up in the 70's so I saw things like Jaws, Alien, The Thing, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scanners, Silence if the Lambs, etc etc just A LOT of graphic horror. The movie really did take me by surprise but... I kinda grew up on that schtuff!
Still a great movie, in my opinion anyway.

The tyrannosaurus’ roars were a combination of a dog, penguin, lion, alligator, and elephant sounds.

What made this movie the groundbreaking flick that we know today, was the use of Practical Effects with CGI mixed in. If this movie was made today, CGI would have been used for everything and it wouldn't have looked good.

Fun Fact: Michael Crichton said that his views on science and genetic engineering are largely expressed by Ian Malcolm. Steven Spielberg saw many parallels to himself in the character of John Hammond. Fittingly, he cast a fellow filmmaker in the role, who begins his tour of the park by showing a movie in which he also acts. While Malcolm is dressed entirely in black, Hammond wears all white.

Bonus Fact: The guests' encounter with the sick Triceratops ends without any clear explanation as to why the animal is sick. Michael Crichton's original novel and the screenplay, however, include an explanation: the Stegosaurus/Triceratops lacked suitable teeth for grinding food, and so, like birds, would swallow rocks and use them as gizzard stones. In the digestive tract, these rocks would grind the food to aid in digestion. After six weeks, the rocks would become too smooth to be useful, and the animal would regurgitate them. When finding and eating new rocks to use, the animal would also swallow West Indian Lilac berries. The fact that the berries and stones are regurgitated explains why Ellie never finds traces of them in the animal's excrement.

Probably one of the best JP reactions I've seen and I watch them all. This movie has a very special place in my heart, but the terror and everything you commented about was on point. This was pretty much me through the entire movie in 93. We were all blown away. Two and Three are ok but nothing is quite like this one.

That theme music is the GLORIOUS work of John Williams. The man has done scores for so many franchises. Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, ET: The Extraterrestrial are examples.

Many theropod dinosaurs are known to have feathers. The largest-known species with direct fossil evidence of feathers is Yutyrannus. There are some 60 species or so with direct fossil evidence of feathers including velociraptor.

"You're gonna need a bigger goat."

;)

If you go back to the 80's and earlier dinosaurs like T-Rex were shown as more straight up with their tails dragging the ground.  We now know they used their tails for balance and their gait was similar to birds.

Your never fully dressed unless you have a smile on your face...  Thank you for always making me smile Jess🙂🙂🙂

The entire Jurassic franchise is worth watching, in my opinion. I don’t think any of the sequels are as iconic as the first film, but they all have genuinely thrilling moments that make watching at least once a fun experience.

This and its sequel, The Lost World, are based on the Michael Crichton novels of the same name, though a number of changes had to be made for time, budgetary and rating reasons. As with many franchises, this one includes films, novels and videogames. This franchise includes soon to be six films, a short film and a Netflix animated series. The composer, John Williams, also composed the Star Wars films

I highly recommend the books. I also recommend watching the rest of the movies first. This movie is great. The rest are fun. The books are a thousand times better. The books are so phenomenal, better storytelling, more fleshed out characters, all while still getting the science right, which the movie did not do well.

In the T Rex scene with the cars, Rexy's head was not actually scripted to have broken the roof window on the car, so the kids screams when that happens are real, as they weren't expecting it

You mentioned wanting to read the book, I recommend it. It’s sort of a combination of events from the first two movies, but also different enough to be just another story within the Jurassic universe. It’s a really fun read.