JPIII: Horner's Raptors & JP4

["Gavin Rymill" <gavin@gavinrymill.com>]

I read a bizarre comment from Jack Horner in an interview on the net. I
really will try to track it down and reference it but, in the meantime, I
shall be naughty and paraphrase -

He said something like, "When we made Jurassic Park we didnt have much to go
on when visualising the Velociraptors, but now we have new finds and so, for
JP3, we've been able to make them more accurate."

That statement was made as if to defend the giant Deinonychus-style of JP,
and also to justify the relatively minor changes made for JP3. However I
shall pick a book at random - "The Prehistoric World of Dinosaurs" dated
1989 - this contains beautiful schematics of Velociraptor which appear to me
to be no different from contemporary renderings. Am I wrong?

On a different point...

HP Mickey Mortimer made the perfectly valid comment that "being internally
consistant is much more important to a science fiction film.  The models
should be kept very similar, any differences from the actual taxa should be
explained as genetic errors or perhaps unknown, but related, species".

I totally agree with this. If you've created an inccuracy then stick to it
within the fictional framework. Giving the "raptors" feathers based on
recent finds would be akin to a character in JP4 saying "Oh, wait - Did we
say that InGen had created these dinosaurs from DNA found in Amber?  Ohhh,
nooooooo, sorry we never did that at all. It was a slip of the tongue...
Everyone knows that's not possible... We actually reverse-engineered all the
dinosaurs from Chicken DNA..."

Changing the raptors would be a visually implausable contradiction of equal
magnitude. We *know* the whole thing is fiction, so just lets play in the
fictional world. Lets just make a movie in which dinosaurs come back to
life. But what did they do? They gave the "raptors" little head crests which
look more like reptillian spines than the avian fluff which new finds
suggest. They've managed to fall nicely between two stools: Neither
remaining consistently inaccurate nor scientifically accurate.

Anyway, I loved JP3. I thought it was the best fun I've had in the cinema
since I fell asleep during Mission Impossible and dreampt that I was in a
field of Brachiosaurs.

I hope they do make Jurassic Park 4 in the same style. Ripping slashing,
romping FUN. The formula works in its own right.

Jurassic Park was never trying to be the "2001: A Space Odyssey" of dinosaur
films, it was the "Star Wars". So, instead of trying to correct JP's
cinematic faults, let us pray for a *brand new* dinosaur cinema treat with a
fresh idea, a fantastic script, and a HUGE scientific team aruging over
every creative decision that's made!!!

Gav

www.gavinrymill.com/dinosaurs        ICQ: 33916140  /  AOLIM: ExtinctGav