If you haven’t had a chance to see Jurassic World yet, (although box office numbers would imply that you have), we’ve got another dinosaur movie to tide you over. Remember how much fun you had playing with action figures as a kid, creating characters and stories and entire new worlds to play in? Yeah, turns out the whole time, you were just phoning it in. We’ve now all been shown how playing with toys is supposed to be done thanks to the release of a 1993 home movie where two friends recreated the original Jurassic Park using their toys and hand-drawn backdrops. Check out the video for a 6 minute edit of what they created.
Dangerous Minds has the story about two friends, David Chakris and Michael Raisch, who got together in 1993 with a VHS video camera and created a faithful retelling of Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking film in their basement. This isn’t their first take either, they filmed multiple versions of the movie over a six month period until they got something they were happy with. While the dialogue is a little rough ("I think this park has to do with dinosaurs") what they’ve put together is impressive considering their, we assume, zero dollar budget. They used fishing line to create "effects" like the helicopter landing on the island or the automated jeeps moving down the track and through the park. They also have a fantastic sense when it comes to the music. John Williams score is used to hit all the key moments, just as it was in the original film.
The kids were obviously huge fans of the original film, not just because they went to the trouble of filming it, but because they had a lot of the toys between them. Seriously, they had most of the major characters, two of the jeeps and the Electronic Command Compound playset. Not that anybody here is jealous or anything.
Essentially what we’re looking at here is an incredibly early fan film (or possibly the earliest known Robot Chicken pilot). In the modern era where technology allows people to have much easier access to the tools necessary to create homages to their favorite movies or TV shows, Chakris and Raisch just took what they had access to and did what they could. It shows a singular dedication for a couple of young kids. The editing work alone would have been fairly difficult to do for a couple of kids given 1990’s VHS technology. We’re guessing they accidentally erased stuff they wanted to keep more than once.
We’re still waiting for the complete version however. The scene with the toy Tyrannosaurus eating the toy velociraptor has got to be epic.
