Babbletrish’s Prequel idea sounds great to me. I’d love to see that. People need to remember though… part of the reason Jurassic Park was so good, was because of our age at the time.

Supposedly the writers of 4 say it’s going to be nothing like the others which at least gives us hope of something enjoyable. Let’s imagine JP movies like Batman movies or the James Bond series

Lastly, let me throw my dinosaur movie idea into the mix…

Many comments have been made here about how much better the CG is today versus ’93. I also saw some great dinosaur artwork on this website…looked REAL. At what point can society not discern between real and man made illusions?

We currently rely on our 5 senses, maybe a 6th, to ground us in reality, to live in this world and experience it in a way that we know is real, that keeps us sane. These senses go back to the beginning of man. Are they close to being obsolete? What happens when we create a world where the senses don’t keep us safe any longer? Can I trust anything on the internet? Did that politician REALLY commit a crime? I see proof, but can I believe my own eyes? Every generation relies on the previous generation to get a first hand account of the truth. How precious is that?

How about a movie where a company convinces an entire future generation that dinosaurs DO actually exist and that they always have. Think of the monetary potential for the company to control a story line like that.

Create from that an adventure movie where a group of children set out for “dinosaur island,” only to find there are no dinosaurs, and I think it makes for a great dinosaur movie. At what point are they certain the dinosaurs don’t exist? Were they better off to have believed in something false? So many great societal questions to consider.

What does everyone think?

I said this in an earlier post. I’m a small time director, but if any millionaires want to team up, let’s make a dino movie together

Yeah, at this age, I don’t even know if I really even want a fourth “Jurassic Park”. (A) There’s a lot of good dinosaur-involving fiction (yay “Dinosaur Summer”!) yet to be adapted and (B) isn’t it about time we show some other geological periods some love?

There are only two scenarios a fourth “Jurassic Park” could do that would be at all interesting:

1) My “dream” JP sequel: BBC Earth goes to the island to film a documentary and (here’s the twist) because they are professionals, NOTHING goes wrong. Nobody does anything stupid and the humans and dinosaurs essentially leave each-other alone. The documentary team leaves the island in peace and the rest of the movie is their documentary.

2) Prequel! I’m serious. This may be one of the few franchises where the story of how they got where they are in the original movie might work. What story did John Hammond tell the Costa Rican government? What was it like raising the dinosaurs to adulthood? Just how did they learn the velociraptors and pterosaurs were so dangerous? WHY did they settle on frog DNA when they had all those emu and ostrich eggs lying around? There’s a lot of fascinating stuff to be mined from the original books too.

I would love, I would love love love a good book-accurate animated Raptor Red adaptation. If Luis Rey was brought on as visual consultant and Dr. Bakker had the last word on every decision the studio makes? Hell and yes.

Unfortunately, the only studios I can ever see pulling such a crazy, barely marketable, uncommercial thing off are the team who did “Watership Down”, the team who did “The Last Unicorn”, and *maybe* Don Bluth or DreamWorks in their respective early “Doing it for the ART” stage. As it stands, we’d probably just get an even more painful version of “Disney’s Dinosaur”, so why bother?

As an aside, there’s also a story in the anthology, _The Ultimate Dinosaur_ entitled “The Green Buffalo” with the general plot Cody’s describing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesh_(comics)

Another reason is Jurassic Park was essentially the easiest way to get humans and dinosaurs together and still remain relatively realistic. Lost worlds have generally fallen out of favor now that we know the location of nearly every landmass on the planet, and time travel tends to not only be “soft” science, but tends to get tied up in ontological paradoxes (case in point, Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”). But now that we know more about cloning and genetics, Jurassic Park would be a lot harder to pull off.

As for Raptor Red and the “Rivers of Time” series (a.k.a. A Gun For a Dinosaur), oh man, don’t get me excited about adapting such awesome series. Someone actually tried to adapt A Gun For a Dinosaur once, though they changed the setting from Turonian Missouri (which would have been a lot different than de Camp portrayed it), and moved it to the middle Cretaceous fauna with Giganotosaurus (well, the form that’s now Mapusaurus) and Argentinosaurus.

That said, an original dinosaur film would be a welcome change from another remake. Greg Bear’s “Dinosaur Summer” is a good candidate. While far from his best work, there is a nice framework there for building an enjoyable movie. The comic “Xenozoic Tales” (aka “Cadillacs and Dinosaurs”) has plenty of great material for a series of movies, even if its premise is a little on the wild side. (But no more than most comic book movies.)

Or how about a “time travelers hunt dinosaurs” movie? I didn’t care much for David Gerrold’s “Deathbeast” — a book filled with stupid, unlikable characters — but the basic plot about a hunt for a T. rex going horribly wrong would be a fun one to explore. L. Sprague de Camp and David Drake also penned some decent dinosaur hunting stories.

That’s partly why Raptor Red should be made into a movie (E.g. See the following quote).

Quoting Noe ( http://www.ctraces.com/Circuit_Traces/CT2_1/raptor.html ): “It is never erotica since “the act” was a perfunctory once-a-year matter of seconds. Both male and female Utahraptors focused on relationships rather than sex. Perhaps “Raptor Family Values” (the title of a final chapter) possesses a quaint special appeal in today’s social climate.”

Wish I could remember the author and the title of the story, though. Was 10 when I read it.

There’s plenty of other books or even fresh ideas out there to be had.

‘Raptor Red’ had been tossed around as a movie idea a while ago, which I expect could work if taken seriously and made by the right set of people, sort of a Mesozoic equivalent of ‘Quest For Fire’.

A lesser known book I rather enjoyed was ‘Cretaceous Dawn’. The creative license the authors use on some of the Dinosaurs in the book aside, it’s a fun book about time travel and could make a good movie.

Similarly, ‘Bones of the Earth’ is an interesting book also involving time travel.

Do you know L. Sprague de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur”? It’s classic 1950s SF about time-traveling big-game hunters (shades of “Thunder”), but de Camp takes it in a different direction, a sort of Men’s Adventure pulp story with a twist. AFAIK, it’s never been brought to the screen.