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Going Jurassic - Jurassic Franchise Deep Dive w/ Tansy Gardam and Asher Elbein · CinemaHounds - A Lorehounds Podcast

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hey everyone, David here.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you've been a listener to the lorehounds for any length of time, you know that one of my favorite things to do is find interesting people on the internet and talk to them about interesting topics and this podcast kind of fits that bill.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: The features two of my most favorite interesting people,
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tansy Gartam from the Going Rogue podcast and Asher Elbine who is an author and journalist and Part of the heat death the website magazine.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure how to reference that exactly But Asher had this really cool idea to talk about the Jurassic film franchise so the three of us got together
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we got to talk about the ecology of dinosaurs.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: We got to talk about mega-frame-chines moviemaking.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: We got to talk about social and cultural issues that are wrapped up in the storylines of the Jurassic Project.
• 1:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: and generally just had a really fun time talking about this really fascinating, massively massive franchise.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this particular podcast was recorded in October of 2025 and for lots of reasons, mostly mundane.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: I never got around to getting it put together and published, but Tansy's new season of going rogue is about to drop, and I thought, oh, this is a perfect time.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can front run that a little bit, get her a little bit of promotion, because she has put a ton of work into this new season, and I'm really excited to listen to it.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: You might hear some outdated references to things relative to you know when this podcast is recorded, but you know It's all good.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's evergreen content So definitely go check out Tansy's Patreon and throw her some support also check out heat death and subscribe over there There are both great
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: excellent products and great people and stay tuned because Tanzia and Ashren I are talking about Westerns.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: The McCabe and Mrs. Miller of it all.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, we're talking about going Western.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: So stay tuned for that.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Otherwise, enjoy the conversation and we'll talk to you soon.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asher, Tansy, welcome back to the Lower Hounds.
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Great to see you both.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having us.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thanks so much.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I hope things are well with you and your family.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: You had a busy little while there, a little spell.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Very much, though.
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got married and went on a honeymoon and have been working every possible week around those two joists about.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, congratulations.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's great news.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tansy, have you been?
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have not gotten married or had honey married or anything, but I have also been a bit busy.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, no, I'm doing well.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you can just have a honey, you don't even have to get married.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you can just go traveling like that's true.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no law against it.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can tell people you just got engaged to get stuff off the bill at the restaurant.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could be an influencer who just got engaged and get even more.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Although I think influencer probably has a little bit of a black strike against us.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've not to check you follow a numbers.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the real thing.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's great.
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tansy what's new on going rogue.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: We just put out a new episode, which has been my, as opposed to the demon on my back for a couple of months now, it was about the Artemis foul movie that they made in 2020 that no one remembers exists.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was, I saw it pop up in my feed and I was like, what is it talking about?
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was a 170 million dollar Disney family film that they dumped on Disney plus essentially without any promotion.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very bad.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can understand why they dumped it, but also
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: it's kind of a fascinating film in that everything about it is wrong, a lot of that is because they tried to massively rewrite it in post.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I actually cut this from the final episode, but the way I would describe it is if George Lucas had shot his original draft of Star Wars and then during research he tried to turn it into the film that we all know and love, that is the level of dissonance going on between principle photography and final cut.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Pretty intense.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I have never heard of that.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I saw that.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was like, what is she on about?
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is this?
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Or a bit spell.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's got Kenneth Brona.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Kenneth Brona was the director.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has Dame Judy Dench playing a gender swapped ancient fairy elf cop.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's got
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nozone Nozzi, who I normally love to see, I did not love to see in this one Colin Farrell, certified QD Petudi, Colin Farrell is in it.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was added entirely in research.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's definitely a real story of a film, even if it's not a particularly interesting film.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sounds like it as we say in the US, right over the plate for you.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nice, nice floater for you to knock out of the park.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sure, I know what sport that is.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Definitely.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asher, uh, what is new on heat death quite a bit.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: We, um, just recently actually had Tanzion for a real heater of a piece about, uh, it's still been Star Wars.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: So good.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of ideas all at once.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the heat death promise.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: We also, my brother Saul, who is my sort of co-editor and co-creator of the newsletter, produced a really, really incredible piece of writing about a trip you took many years ago down the Marneon River with raft guides and sort of a brush with the spirit world and death that is something I've been.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: sort of talking up a lot because I think one of the best things that he's ever written and I'm super proud that we were able to run it.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I got the email notification.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: I started to read it.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: and it hit me so hard in just the opening paragraphs that I actually had to put it down and say, okay, I need to prepare myself to be able to engage with this because this is so good.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I haven't gotten around to picking it back up, but we've got a little family trip coming up.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're gonna visit Montreal this weekend.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've got an extra couple of days from school holiday and it is definitely on my two read list.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the opening of that piece was exceptional.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I had to kind of talk him through it a little bit just because he's that story's been I think so close to his heart for a while that he's having a little bit of separation anxiety about letting it out into the water.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is this good?
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is this really good?
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like are we sure?
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was like, yes, it's really good.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been waiting years for you to tell this story.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fantastic.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm so happy with it.
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's great.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, and I also want to shout out, Tansy, your piece on costuming in Star Wars as part of the decline in fall running series on heat death was exceptional.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It really is one that's been in my head a long time.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: You mentioned it on our going road podcast conversation.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, any excuse to talk about costuming and in particular the way that costuming is an art form intersects without own human history really.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, we've been wearing clothes pretty much as long as we've been able to call ourselves humans and it gets cut out of historical discussions.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you really would think nobody was ever wearing anything based on how how to use the written.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no, we were always wearing furs or little linen tunics.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: No question about who made the linen tunics or how.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was recently on a Paul Thomas Anderson deep dive.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I didn't realize how thin my watch history for his movies was, so I was catching up following seeing one battle after another.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: and both in the master and Phantom Thread.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: You were not in my head, Danzy, but you were sitting on my shoulder and you were like, notice the material on his shirt in the master.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, they're calling at wood as well because I know she did one battle the costume design up, but yeah, I don't know.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fantastic design up.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, in the master, I was just really envious of the, just the basic clothing that people were wearing, just the material, the shirts, the men's shirts, the collars, and just, it just looked great.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like not this sort of nylon-y thing that I picked up for, you know, eat box or whatever.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, we are here not to talk about any of those topics, but to talk about an idea that
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asherhead brought forward, which was to discuss the Jurassic film franchise.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asher, you've got a little bit of background and paleontology.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll have an opportunity for you to fill us in a little bit more about that.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And as we were thinking about this project, it kind of turned into be a little bit of a three body problem because not a problem, or three body scenario.
• 9:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's because we're the old unity.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ab there you go.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: There you go.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're going to circle back to you on that one and we're going to pick that up and hit a home run.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: We are each kind of coming with,
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: some different, you know, a point of view that we can bring and specifically on the franchise.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it's kind of a unique intersection between heat death, going rogue and the lorhounds.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the lorhounds are sort of podcasting our way across the cultural landscape of television and movies and sort of pointing things out and doing a little bit of minor level of natural history and ecological understanding.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: deconstruction of the film industry, both from development of any given title, all the way through to composition and costuming and lens choices.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then of course we've got heat death, sifting the bones, casting the bones maybe.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know sort of once often.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, often.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know where all kind of seeking and looking, you know, discussing the signs and the tracks that we have.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: So today's conversation is going to be a little bit different than we might have normally like the one we did with heat death with you and saw ashore or the ones that tans of you and I've done in the past.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: So today we're going to have I'll talk a little bit about the franchise overall just to stake out some markers on the landscape and then I'm going to just give us a quick overview of the themes that we've all sort of brought that we're going to talk about and that'll just be a quick overview will take a break and then we come back I'll have each of you sort of present on your topic you know just sort of give us your insights here with the class.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, exactly, share with the class and we can ask questions and what not and then we'll take a break and then we'll get into the discussion and then we can just sort of free range and talk about all kinds of things and I'll try to help facilitate that as needed, but that'll be the lay of the land for today.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: So again, we're talking about the Jurassic franchise.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a total of seven films that spans 32 years.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's got a total production expenditure of about $1.3 billion, which I do want to ask some questions about where you got that particular number.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we can talk about it.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's part of my presentation, which I'll mention here in the second.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: The original trilogy, the park films, I guess we could call them.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the park trilogy.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Part trilogy from 1993 to 2001, so sort of an eight-year span.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: The second trilogy are the world films, Jurassic World Films, and those spans seven years from 2015 to 2022.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And an eternity in subjective time.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: some of them were more painful than others.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: The third is it going to be a trilogy?
• 12:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have one film out this year, Jurassic World Rebirth.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I believe, officially it's a reboot of world itself as opposed to a new trilogy, but that really depends on whether or not they want to do another.
• 12:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: and I was looking into a little bit what they've got planned and it seems like they do have some aggressive plans.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: The next round of films are potentially centered on Scarlett Johansson's characters or a Bennett.
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: All of the Jurassic properties are moving to peacock for streaming.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is bubblings, there are some of the prognosticators are predicting maybe a television series streaming on Peacock will see.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the other areas that we're not specifically covering in this conversation directly are the animated series video games or theme parks, I mean, that's part of our conversation, but our real focus is around the franchise the films.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anything I missed there or anything you want to add on the
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: All right, cool.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: So real quick, this is just a sort of a speed run of the major themes, just to set you guys up, and then when we come back from the break, we'll get into it.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Azure, you let me know that you're thinking about dinosaur representations and evolution and how the animals living animals versus IP characters and how that sort of operates in and out of universe.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a real question of accuracy, scientific accuracy, especially as we
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: have evolved our understanding of a dinosaurs and genetic sciences, there's something about franchise self-awareness that films were increasingly aware that dinosaurs were getting boring.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, and I should just mention spoilers for all things drastic, so if you know, there's no way that we can have these kinds of conversations without really getting into detail.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's your spoiler warning.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, that there are direct self-aware comments in the movies about, oh, dinos are becoming boring.
• 14:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And is that true in the franchise world, as well as the true in the story world?
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've got animal versus monster tension, right?
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Just things that are animals, but in the movies, they become monsters, things that we have to fear,
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we're always sort of pulling for that fear factor in the movies and how does that play out and how does that exist within our scientific understandings?
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know, I think it's the 50-year anniversary of jaws and maybe there's we don't have any real-life dinos to compare but people are shortly afraid of sharks so how might we think of dinosaurs if they were here with us today.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Eating, I missed there was that kind of a good broad,
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, that's great.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, Tanzi, help me with the pronunciation.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's Trevaro.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Trevaro to rhyme with tomorrow.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Got it, not Trevaro.
• 14:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Trevaro is what I thought it was forever, but then I certainly need to be whether you're open with, like, yeah.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's pronounced like tomorrow.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was like, oh, thank God you checked that.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Perfect.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we want to talk about the director and showrunner writer Chavaro.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's this word?
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was calling Chavaro.
• 15:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's right.
• 15:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this phenomenon of sort of young indie to mega franchise pipeline director writers and some of the creative dissidents that arises in the world trilogy because of that.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then this really interesting Star Wars cross connect that exists within the overall mega franchise
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: You also have identified some themes around nuclear family and conservative values.
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can look at Dr.
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Grants, his arc or evolution, the sexism that sort of seems to have sort of swung back into the show.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I have a question too about, I forget which one of the moves I've got in my notes about whether how much of a screwball comedy was included.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it was maybe Dominion.
• 16:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then Chris Pratt is an interesting person to discuss when it comes to conservative values and family value and family themes because there's a lot of family themes and yeah, and I think specifically really that point because I'm really focused on the world is about the way that world kind of mutated out of a lot of the things in park in a way which in many cases means that it feels like it's stuck in the wrong decade.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we see, I think, maybe a bunch of that with the own and Clare dynamic.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Get into it.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then there's this really interesting set of topics that you've identified, which are sort of the lost potential of queer and trans stories within the...
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: dinosaur worry old the in gen dinosaurs dinosaurs being able to reproduce without sexual dimorphism I believe would be the right way to say that in this among this species they can I know there's a scientific term I can't remember right off top but maybe asher can talk about it again
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a whole bunch of things that are never properly explained all about that, and there's a whole bunch of other missed opportunities, I think, which I think is in some tension with the family themes that we might see in some of the movies.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: All right.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anything I miss there or pretty good?
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, I think that's pretty much everything.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, cool.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: So when we started talking about this and we started looking at this question of mega franchises for me, I was like, oh, well, how many films are there?
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: How big are the budgets?
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: what are, how do people receive them?
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I end up doing this crazy deep dive thing where I've actually built out a whole dashboard interface of data.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've gone out and harvested data from the internet about budgets and about audience scores, normalize them for inflation and looking across a number of different audience score platforms and trying to normalize those numbers,
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then looking at this idea of inshitification, I'll talk about that more, but how do properties, what is inshitification relative to these kinds of scenarios, what might be normal, what might be abnormal, and how does that affect culture, because these mega franchises have a real impact around us on shaping modern culture.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so yeah, I've built this analytical framework that I'm
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I think there's some real interesting questions of when a movie's perception, how people are enjoying it, decreases, but yet budgets continue to increase and the studios throw more money at it and you get these really interesting patterns.
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I'll be bringing some of that forward.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think maybe at this point we'll just take a quick commercial break.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then when we come back, Ash are all throw it to you.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is sort of your idea.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm really curious about your paleontological background.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you can talk to us a little bit more about the world of dinosaurs.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're back.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asher, we're going to throw it to you first.
• 19:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was sort of your idea to talk about the Jurassic Project.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, hell yeah, let's go.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we got Tanzi wrote in.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I'm curious because as a journalist and as a writer, you also have a background in paleontology.
• 19:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: So to start off, I'm curious a little bit about that.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then I'm also curious because I just rewatch the entire rewatch.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's many of these I just watched for the first time.
• 19:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I watched the entire seven film franchise a couple of weeks ago.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's really interesting to see how the dinos have evolved as a storytelling device and the different dinosaurs across the film.
• 20:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: So maybe that's a good entry point for us to pick up what your perspective is on these films.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So to answer your first question, background that I have in paleontology is that I was a dinosaur kid growing up.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I shouldn't say what, I still am.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I studied paleontology in the sense that I have been a science journalist who focuses on paleontology and ecology for most of my career.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: since I tried my hand a little bit at fossil preparation and research and college discovered.
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I find both of them dreadfully boring, but I love talking to people who have done them.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I like the fact that there are so many scientists who will go off and do really incredible work and then tell me about it, so I can tell other people about it.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sounds journalistic in nature.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that in being an advertising and veteran snoop.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is, you know, I get to snoop on what paleontologists are doing and what long dead prehistoric monsters are doing, which is really the best of both worlds.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's fabulous.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think the thing that is always fascinating me about Jurassic Park is that it is
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: a time capsule of the way that Hollywood has both tried to change the, the, the, the sort of the vision of dinosaurs and then has pointedly stopped doing that and in fact worked really hard to sort of arrest
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's really interesting because, you know, Jurassic Park, the original Jurassic Park that's the Spielberg made was very much a product of what we sometimes call the dinosaur renaissance, which was this major sort of refocusing of attention and energy into dinosaur paleontology specifically built around the idea that these animals which
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: for decades in the sort of mid-century had been kind of written off as uninteresting and unsophisticated.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Many paleontologists started swinging back around and having a look at them.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: These sort of like younger paleontologists just like Robert Bakker and John Horner and saying, oh, well actually it seems like these things are really behaviorally complex.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like maybe they are more,
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: physiologically interesting and we think maybe they're warm-blooded, rather than the cold-blooded, although a side note, the idea that cold-bloodness is equated to having no interesting behavior is itself like a sort of a weird remnant bad idea that is just sort of stuck around.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, and the sun revolves around the earth and not the other way around, right?
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a lot of interesting thinking.
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because cold-blooded has always been about
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: letter G and stupidity and and this is this is the vision.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Although, of course, one of the things that is really interesting is that it's a tremendous amount of research happening now about reptiles, which are absolutely cold blooded, but also it turns out incredibly behaviorally Blacks a lot.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, all of this to say, the dinosaurs of most dinosaur movies up until Jurassic Park were overtly monstrous and kind of very much owing a debt to
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: classic paleo art of tyrannosaurus that are sort of stopping around with their with their tails on the ground.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And herbivorous dinosaurs that are spending all of their time in the water and sort of everyone's very sluggish everyone's very one note.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Cretan's Jurassic Park really was trying to get some of the scientific cutting edge understanding of dinosaurs into the mainstream and the film.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: really took that and ran with it and it was incredibly successful at that and you know for I would say the first three Jurassic Park films they have their you know they have their inaccuracies they have their sort of flights of fancy but they are pretty rigorous in the sort of like broad strokes about according to the sort of understanding of dinosaurs that people had and then you know they stopped making those movies for a while and then they came back and kept making them but they
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: they didn't move on with the times, you know, quite a lot had changed between the, you know, even the third Jurassic Park film, which I'm a one of the few defenders of, is I think it's a lot of fun as a sort of like a nasty little palpy monster movie.
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even that one was getting a little long in tooth with the choices of how it was depicting dinosaurs.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then when Jurassic Park comes back as Jurassic World,
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: there was this question of are they going to incorporate all the new things we now understand about dinosaur physiology?
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are the predatory dinosaurs going to perhaps have feathers?
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are the sort of ways that some of these dinosaur body shapes have changed according to new fossils?
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is that going to be reflected?
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the answer was a big fat.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely not.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely not.
• 24:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: By God, you came here to see a Jurassic Park film and you're going to see some goddamn Jurassic Park IP It's what you're going to say so all of the dinosaurs in in many cases they look worse Then they did in the original Jurassic Park there's a real like photocopy of a photocopy effect that happens in a lot of those movies and so
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: What I think is really interesting is that has happened at the same time that there has been a visible, persistent insecurity in the text of those films about whether or not anyone even cares about dinosaurs anymore.
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even though the films are betting quite a lot of money on the idea that you the audience do care about dinosaurs because they want you to keep watching these films with dinosaurs.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think I can't remember where it was, but I have described that as kind of the film equivalent of negging, where the film's like, oh, you wouldn't care about dinosaurs.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: You wouldn't buy a ticket to see a movie about dinosaurs.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, are you not like other audiences?
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you get dinosaurs?
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, yeah, it feels like the film is trying to guilt trip you into buying it a drink.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no that really is that really is the vibe and what is I think so interesting about it is that the Jurassic Park films do have a sort of an innate narrative problem which this I think Tansie will be something that you sort of touch on but I'll just bat at it real quick as I run past which is it's a little tricky to tell stories about dinosaurs that aren't all sort of the same story right
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would say that it's tricky to tell the same story that they want to tell about dinosaurs for the seventh time.
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thing is that I'd say it's a skill issue not being able to make a good movie about a dinosaur because you've got goddamn dinosaurs.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like you're starting with an absolute stacked deck.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the inability to do anything interesting with that.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I find fascinating.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and building off that I think the problem is they want to have a run in chase movie, which is fine.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's all kinds of ways to do run in chase movies.
• 26:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, God knows most action movies are run in chase movies and it's all down to the choreography, right?
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not really down to whether or not you're doing anything super new or fresh.
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they keep wanting to remake Jurassic Park and
• 26:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: they're not good at it.
• 26:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's a real visible, I think, sweatiness as the films go on about, is this Jurassic Park enough for you?
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are you, are you, is this Jurassic Park?
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are you enjoying this Jurassic Park?
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've served you a nice hot fresh bit of Jurassic Park.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: In a way that I think is, is hamstringing,
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: what they could actually do, which is the thing that made the original Jurassic Park such a revelation, which is the new dot, like, here, like, behold, I show you the new dinosaur.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I show you this vision of a prehistoric world that is convincing that you will believe.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not, hey, it's philosophy.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been using philosophy after years.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: They all kind of look the same.
• 27:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then you have that moment in Dominion where they're like, look, we put feathers on the dinosaur.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are you happy now?
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: We put feathers on him.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look at him go.
• 27:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Awful.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And particularly because as well, feathers are like there are texture that doesn't work great in CG.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like one thing that you can give them is that reptile skin for all of our CG modeling.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's easier than fur.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's really interesting is to compare it to something like prehistoric planet, which is a television show that was produced by John Favro and is good enough that it almost makes me forgive him for the Mandalorian, but it is, you know, this really well rendered really well observed beautifully animated.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: sort of like, Attenborough-style documentary, and really does kind of put the lie into the idea that like, oh, you know, some of these things are really difficult to render convincingly or won't necessarily look good.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, well, if you take the time to design an animal that looks like an animal and sort of plan your shots and like, really do the sort of classic craft of shooting rather than just shooting everything and being like,
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: This stuff can look really incredibly convincing and it is really remarkable to watch the recent Jurassic World films and by and large they don't look good.
• 28:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: The one I will sort of ride for a little bit is I think the Tyrannosaurus sequence in the most recent one is the best that the Tyrannosaurus looked in those movies for like four or five movies.
• 29:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Garth Edwards is a good hand when it comes to shooting an effects sequence and sometimes they're old magic sort of flickers back
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you've got your matherson behind the camera there as well.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So all of the real world cinematography looks quite good and it is matching his aesthetic.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there is kind of a high standard to meet for the CG team there.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to throw a total curve ball here.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where would you put the Adam Driver movie 65 on this ranking of failures to render anything resembling new dinosaur science?
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that 65 is a very bad film personally.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do know that some people in on this call like have more positive feelings about it.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have positive feelings because I love fat movies.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's how you have to always remember it, Tansy.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's looking for an angle.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's true.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, 65 episode of Going Rogue One.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not even just any movie that has the guts to make the big bad an asteroid that kills the dinosaurs.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's got, you know what, but that's a bold choice.
• 30:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not someone who's trying to like sell the dinosaurs to the military.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're not trying to sell them to Russian oligarchs.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is an asteroid.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like you can't, you can't reason with that guy.
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I admire that sort of guts to the story, Tally.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is the ultimate ticking clock, but to answer your question, what I think is really interesting is they were interviews that the creators of 65 gave where they were talking about how, yeah, we're really, we're going to get away from Jurassic Park, you know, we're going to show you dinosaurs the way that we've never seen them before and I was like interesting and then I watched the trailer was like, that's, that's your new dinosaur, is it?
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that looks like a Jurassic Park philosopher, after man, that looks like the Jurassic Park too, you just added more scales.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are we doing here?
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And like I will say I think that there is a tendency sometimes for people like oh you know you're just like a paleo nerd and you just want it to you you want every scale to be in the right place.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: First of all guilty.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But secondly, I think more somewhat more seriously.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It gets old to see the same designs of the same dinosaurs over and over and over again.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that, yes, you know, ultimately there's only so many ways to render a T-Rex, but within that only so many ways are a ton of different ways that you can present that animal in terms of color in terms of sort of beefiness and shape.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I've seen a lot of,
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: really incredible paleo art recently with the sort of discovery that probably a lot of the big predatory dinosaurs would have had quite extensive lips and gums covering their teeth.
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: What you would think would make them look less scary, but actually makes a transso or look like a grizzly bear in a way that's really kind of alarming.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And some of our understanding of dinosaurs is that they're probably a lot beefier than they're sort of presented as being in Jurassic Park when the sort of artistic tendency was to keep them very slim and sort of svelting a little bit like runway model.
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think there's a ton of stuff you can do with how much they're covered in feathers.
• 32:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: What color they are, like sort of the way that they move, like are they moving like birds or reptiles are they instead of like monsters?
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that there's a tremendous amount of Strangeness in the animal world is exist today and that can be extrapolated onto the sort of animal world as it previously existed and a real opportunity for creativity and The Jurassic World Films
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: buy in large do not take advantage of that they really do not want to show you dinosaurs as you never seen them they want to show you dinosaurs as you have seen them recognize and have bought the t-shirt of already and if they're dinosaurs that you haven't seen they want them to be weird made up dinosaurs that are
• 32:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Also still look like dinosaurs if you've seen them sort of like weird extrapolations of the aesthetic that crash McCurray the concept artist who did a lot of the dinosaur designs in the original Jurassic Park films did so there's a real like zerox of a zerox of a zerox quality where.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're really afraid to show you something new and there's a sense that they know it and they're worried about it and they're worried you're going to get bored.
• 33:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they won't change anything to stop you from getting bored.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, even on that tiny note of audience's accepting things are a bit different.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just think of the absolute delight that was experienced in a packed cinema watching the Dungeons and Dragons movie when you first realized that dragons are so chunky and it affects how we move, it affects the entire sequence, it adds like both an element of stakes and also delight to the entire thing because you're like, look at him go, he's so big!
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's rolling down a hill of gold because he's lost his footing.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's delightful and it's surprising and it's like, shit man, I never seen that before.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, what do we go to movies for if not to see things that we haven't seen before?
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think this is interesting because when you look at the monarch legacy with Godzilla and those monsters, those are monsters, right?
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're not dinosaurs.
• 34:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: They don't have a scientific basis as such, and so you have a lot more creative interpretation and creative license to do sort of what you want, where is, yeah, I noticed in watching these seven films,
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: the push to make the herbivores, the veggie sores, be veggie sores, and the carnivores be more deadly and dangerous in each iteration, which I think goes into franchise management.
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: What are we doing with this franchise?
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is a little bit of my topic when we get to it.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: which is how are we, what is a normal economic model for a movie like this over time?
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that gets into sort of my in-suitification paradox question.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, Ashard, did you have a little bit more otherwise we were going to swing over to 10 seconds?
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: One more thought to sort of bounce off your point about the sort of, the herbivores become more sort of friendly and the carnivores become more dangerous.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the things and real emotional touchstones for us when we see a T-Rex, or we see, I don't know what the ones with a really big long necks are called anymore.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: The store of pods, yeah.
• 35:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the shower pods are, you know, they're always milked for that first movie touchback.
• 35:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's not friend-wise, it's like friend.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, which is, which is so interesting because some of the most dangerous animals on the planet today are big herbivores.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, that's always my point whenever you're watching Jurassic Park and someone's like, well, why didn't they just make it with the herbivores?
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like motherfucker of you heard of a hippo.
• 35:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: have you heard of a kangaroo like a lot of these animals are large.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're very powerful.
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not prone to forgiveness.
• 35:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, and I think this sort of circles back to my point about the choice to are the dinosaurs going to be presented as animals, which is the first Jurassic Park film.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: by and large dust, even with the velociraptors, which are the most monstrous in that film, you know, the sort of implication in the film is that the velociraptors are monstrous because they've all imprinted on humans, they're all fucked up in the head.
• 36:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, there is, I think, one of the scariest movies that's ever been made about an animal is Grizzling Man.
• 36:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: By Werner Herzog using the Timothy Treadwell heritage of Grizzly Bears, which are
• 36:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: pretty nice as far as it goes, but they are also grizzly bears, and they do kill him at the end.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's not because they're monsters.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's because they are alien intelligences that have their own priorities and their own ways of viewing the world.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that the thing about monsters is that they're often predictable.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know what the philosopher after is going to do as soon as you see it on screen.
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the thing that I think made
• 36:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: the first three Jurassic Park film, and I will include the second and third one here because I do think that they kind of catch this magic is that you don't always quite know what the dinosaurs are going to do when they show up.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, even the Vloss Raptors in the third film, I think are kind of the best raptors in the series, even if the sequences are not quite as good as you get in that first film, just because there is that real sense that these animals have their own agenda, they have their own way of moving through the world.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that may involve
• 37:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: hunting you, it may involve killing you, or it may involve getting what they came for and then leaving because you really ultimately at the end of the day are not the center of the earth for them.
• 37:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think about my sister was recently chased by a shark while ocean swimming, but it was a port Jackson, which are harmless.
• 37:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're little guys, I think it was about a meter long and they're, you know, they're stripy and for the most part they're delightful to see.
• 37:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it happened to be breeding season, they swam a little too close and they got chased by them.
• 37:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And my sister made the point, she was like, I know they're harmless, you don't think that when they're chasing you.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the opportunity of Jurassic Park.
• 37:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I think, and I'll just leave it here because I know we've got a bit long, but it's a part for the course on the Laura Hunt Park House.
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I just, I think that what I really want to zero in on is that there is a tremendous opportunity when you treat these like animals, not to make them less scary, but if anything to make them more mysterious, more scary, more convincing, and
• 38:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Something that I will shout out that from the most recent Jurassic World film and the reason I think that that Tyrannosaurus sequence works as well as it does is because the Tyrannosaurus does not see them and then immediately go after them it yarns it stretches it goes and gets a drink it kind of like not really that engaged.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: until it really zeroes in on the raft is like, what's that?
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting, and then even then when it pursues them, I wouldn't say that it's not trying to kill them per se, but the sense is very much like a big cat that is sort of batting at something in a dangerous way, but there's a real sense of a mind there that is not
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: solely existing to put the characters in peril, even though on a narrative level, it is of course precisely there for that reason.
• 39:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that is the kind of opportunity that you can do with dinosaurs and sort of that's their Jurassic Park films could do if they wanted to.
• 39:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: They've shown that they can do it, but by and large that has not been the opportunity that they that has not been the road that they've taken.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there's a nice segue right here for Tanzi to talk about the mega franchise pipeline and how these properties are handled and when we look at somebody like Colin Trevaro tomorrow we can I thought we were doing it today.
• 39:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'll put in a little post, but we can think about creative vision and control of something like this.
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's something that we definitely have been touching on, which is this thing of them always reaching back to touch points in prior films.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And mostly the first film, if anything, but Tanzi, why don't you lead off from there and
• 40:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely, so I'll do a little poted history first.
• 40:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those who don't know Frank Marshall is a film producer.
• 40:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's got a long standing relationship with Universal.
• 40:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked on the original Jurassic Park.
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked on the Indiana Jones films, the born trilogy.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is pretty much everything massive.
• 40:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frank Marshall has had some kind of hand in.
• 40:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And while Spielberg is kind of creatively still a really strong lead in the Jurassic franchise, particularly with Rebirth, he just sort of decided that he wanted to do another one, had a chat to David Kepp, they wrote a screenplay, and then they delivered it to Frank Marshall and said, hey, you can make another Jurassic World movie now, and Frank Marshall was like, what?
• 40:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Marshall is yet the creative facilitator, I suppose, as the producer.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and definitely worth mentioning that Frank Marshall is married to Kathleen Kennedy, and has been working.
• 41:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked with her for a long time.
• 41:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had a company, the Kennedy Marshall company, and they worked together at Amblin.
• 41:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I think he was at Amblin.
• 41:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can't say that for certain.
• 41:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, so he is really the one who makes sure that there are drastic movies.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a very bizarre situation on Star Wars episode 7 where Brad Bird
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it would have coincided too closely with the shoot dates of his film tomorrow land.
• 41:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he proposed to Kathleen Kennedy that another director could prep episode seven and then he could come in very late in prep and jump in and basically take over the movie.
• 41:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: unbelievably thankless job for the other director.
• 41:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But birds suggested that potentially that other director could be Colin Travore, who had just made safety not guaranteed his first film.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had just aired at Sundance.
• 42:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It'd been a bit of a hit there and Brad Bird thought, hey, this guy's kind of like a young me.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Kennedy is immediately like, that's not going to work, buddy, but to humor him, she does watch safety not guaranteed at home with her husband Frank Marshall, who also needs a director for Jurassic World.
• 42:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's how Travoro ends up going from safety not guaranteed, which I think was about three quarters of a million dollars, not another budget, but pretty much nothing
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's fair to say that if you are making that sort of jump, you are not going to have creative control.
• 42:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You are essentially being put in a position where you're not necessarily grateful for everything, but you're probably not having fun or say on anything.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he and his writing punner Derek Connelly worked on the first film.
• 43:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was also a rewrite by Rick Jaffer and Amanda Silver, or maybe Rick Silver and Amanda Jaffer.
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I always get those two confused.
• 43:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, they did a rewrite on the script.
• 43:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trvoro did direct it and it becomes an enormous hit.
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was for a while the third highest grossing film of all time, the first Jurassic World movie.
• 43:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I say for a while about six months later, the force Awakens came out and knocked it off that perch.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that success can be attributed at any point to Travara, because he has made a product to sell a brand, which is Jurassic.
• 43:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've put world behind it, but they are still selling it entirely off the Goodwill for Jurassic Park.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ads all ran with like the park is open, the initial idea for the film came from Spielberg who was like, hey, it'd be cool if there was a park that was open and things went wrong and like, you know, the man can cook, but in this particular case, I think it's very bizarre that Travoro is the creative mind behind it, but at the same time he is serving other masters on almost every level.
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, I think that within that, you end up with a very strange trilogy that is constantly every movie and it is kind of trying to recreate Jurassic Park, they're all doing it in completely different ways.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: with varying levels of success, and I know Travore didn't direct Jurassic World Fall in Kingdom, which is the second in the trilogy, he was the onset writer.
• 44:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So J.
• 44:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: A. Bayona was the director of that, English is not his first language, so part of what Travore's role on set as the writer was was to be able to kind of adapt any lines on the fly as needed by the English language cast.
• 44:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that is a larger role than your writer would normally have.
• 44:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's described it as being, you know, kind of nice to not be in charge of everything, but he did probably have a greater influence on that film than you normally would as a writer.
• 44:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was meant to go on to Star Wars Episode 9 after that, certain events occurred, and he did not do that.
• 45:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: He ended up coming back for Jurassic World Dominion.
• 45:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it's so strange that the same man wrote all three of those films and directed two of them, but they seem almost as intention as the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
• 45:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, it seems like there would be a Ryan Johnson there in the middle.
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't.
• 45:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was always Colin Trevoro.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so you end up with this very bizarre trilogy and that is entirely trading off the franchise name.
• 45:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's fair to say.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even more remarkably, a film trilogy that keeps edging up to being about the premise that supposedly was the pitch, which was what if there were dinosaurs everywhere?
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then backing away from it, like it's touched something hot.
• 45:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like for three films in a row, it is remarkable.
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: every single time they sort of back away from any newness of the preposition.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I also think each film becomes more aggressively attribute act to Jurassic Park where you end up with dominion literally bringing back the cast of the original.
• 46:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And really,
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: drawing attention to its own inadequacies.
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because when you have Lordearn or Sam Neil or Jeff Goldblum on-screen, you are aware of what screen presence is and then they'll cut to the reverse and it's Chris Pratt and you're suddenly aware what avoidive screen presence is in a way that you're not as aware if there is not that direct comparison.
• 46:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I think it's a bizarre kind of mega franchise, and then the reboot of it with rebirth to sort of quietly put under the carpet, all of the things that had gotten weird with Jurassic World, and be like, it's okay.
• 46:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're just going to go back to dinosaur island and do all of the things that you would do in a parody of a Jurassic World movie.
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: look, there's a giant planet killing death ray floating out in space that needs to be destroyed.
• 46:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how hard it can be.
• 46:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, definitely.
• 47:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Definitely no relations.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: What?
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we have a to other franchises that might have family relations to the originals.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Speaking of family relations, it was very interesting in the world movies to really see a lot of family values stuff on screen, and so you had picked up on some of that, especially with Chris Pratt as an actor and as a person who has his own points of views of things and how that gets bent into the films in some interesting ways.
• 47:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I would say that world is the most overt in doing this, but it does continue quite textually throughout the trilogy, where you have that subplot in world where the kids parents are getting divorced, and that's why they've gone to Jurassic World, is to get them out of the house, I guess, while you do the divorce things, I don't think that's how you're meant to do a divorce, but it's clearly what they decided on.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is an implication at the end of the movie that because of this tragedy, the parents will now stay together for the kids.
• 48:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is an even stranger element where the mother played by Judy Greer tells Claire, who is her sister.
• 48:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Essentially says, you're not a real person until you're a parent.
• 48:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then that film ends with almost a mock wedding between Owen and Claire, where they're walking down the aisle of the emergency center.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's like a bright light coming down at Claire's dressed in white.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just, it's bizarrely like traditional Christian values.
• 48:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think all of this grows out of the subplot in the first film where Alan Grant is clearly a guy who doesn't want to have kids, but he's in a long-term relationship, Ellie Sattler probably does want to have kids, and that's been a tension on going in their relationship.
• 48:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is the implication by the end of that that maybe that's a discussion that's going to be opened because he's spent all of this time looking after the kids.
• 48:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's bonded with them.
• 48:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's kind of grown as a person.
• 48:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that was that particular character's
• 48:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: that have been a great gag that worked throughout the entire film.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, definitely.
• 49:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Guy who doesn't like kids stuck with two kids, one of whom really, you know, admire him, sees him as a hero and he's like, oh, God, this kid is right all of my books.
• 49:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: What am I supposed to do with him?
• 49:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, that's a fun character arc.
• 49:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's definitely one that could apply to a lot of people watching the film.
• 49:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that hesitancy to move a relationship to, you know,
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: species continuing stage, it's not the core theme of Jurassic Park and for it to become the core theme to the point where in Jurassic World the second film there is the very understandable subplot that Owen and Claire's relationship did not last.
• 49:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But throughout this film, their adventures together brings them back together to the point where they adopt a child.
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then in the third film, they are living together in the woods with that child.
• 49:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's such a bizarrely kind of traditional family values subplot to have in a movie that is ostensibly about dinosaurs.
• 49:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they're living with this child in the woods who then unleashes the dinosaur plague on the world, interestingly enough.
• 50:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: as you say, family values.
• 50:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
• 50:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's that tension between Claire and Owen.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: They think it's juxtaposed between Laura Dern and what's his name, Dr. Grant.
• 50:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it's very, again, that traditional family values where, you know, that relationship ended.
• 50:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: She'd gone off and married someone else.
• 50:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: She'd had kids.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you get to Jurassic World and they're like, by the way, the kids left the house and she's left the house when she's single again.
• 50:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fan Fiki.
• 50:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think he's the only way to describe it.
• 50:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we swing widely away from that in reverse
• 50:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh yeah, rebirth is a movie that is unwilling to have any sort of human relationships in it.
• 50:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: At any point, I'd say not of those people are real people.
• 50:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no relationship that you're rooting for, apart from maybe, hey, that dad's kids probably shouldn't die in front of him or vice versa.
• 50:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the extent of the relationships in that.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that one, it does have a more kind of mature edge in that you don't know where the mum is.
• 51:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's implied that it is a shared custody arrangement there.
• 51:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I, I, I'm not going to think it's implied.
• 51:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's stated.
• 51:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, which is, you know, I get it feels so bizarre to be like good on the Jurassic World franchise for acknowledging that shared custody exists.
• 51:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Although maybe in this case it shouldn't.
• 51:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, you've got work, mom, who make sure you go to the doctors and get to school one time and then you have fun dad who gets you killed by dinosaurs, like it's just traditional gender roles.
• 51:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, speaking of traditional gender roles, there's an inherent queerness to the dinosaurs as well.
• 51:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not to the dinosaurs, but to the franchise overall and and I'm want to hear more, I want you to expand on this.
• 51:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well,
• 51:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's stated very, very specifically in the first film, all of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are female, which was the idea that they wouldn't be able to breed because they are all female, which I don't know, Dr. Wu, maybe make them all male in that circumstance.
• 52:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you want to make sure, just, you know, exactly.
• 52:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the uterus is from the equation and you might have a better shot, but within that, you have the narrative of life finds a way that the dinosaurs are breeding in spite of that.
• 52:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the first film, part of the dinosaur's genetic code has come from frogs.
• 52:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some frogs are able to change their sex in situations of low representation of one gender.
• 52:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as a result, you have the dinosaurs quite literally breeding.
• 52:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in that case, the dinosaurs are transcending their damn gen.
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are literally transgender dinosaurs.
• 52:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: In, and this is just a interjection, maybe Asharken add more to this, this happening and it's a huge mistake for human beings to apply gender normative roles to species of animals and biological entities all over the planet.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: because they don't pick up the kids in the same way.
• 52:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they can change and spontaneously reproduce on their whole kinds of things.
• 53:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is very, it's a story that's not very much told in modern science about the wide diversity of sexual reproduction and sexual presentation in species as sure you could probably say a lot more about this.
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: something that's really interesting is that there has been a tremendous amount of research on what we might call non-western, normative behavior in animals, which is funny because animals do not belong to any particular human culture and are completely uninterested in what we think is appropriate.
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there is a very long and funny history of Victorian and sort of early 20th century biologists going out and seeing, for example, the noble big horn sheep males having passionate love affairs and going, I can't believe that these noble creatures would commit such perversions, I better leave this out of my published account so that people don't get the wrong idea about the manly sheep.
• 54:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: But actually, there's a tremendous amount of what we might call non-heterosexual behavior in animals of all kinds.
• 54:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a tremendous amount in particularly, you see it in sort of like fish and some amphibians where there are some animals that can in certain circumstances change their sex.
• 54:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is notable that we don't generally see this to my understanding in reptiles and birds.
• 54:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the reason that it happens, of course, in Jurassic Park is because they fill in the gaps with frog DNA, which is a weird choice because you would think you would use bird or reptile DNA.
• 54:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: But without that, the plot doesn't happen, so I think we can sort of allow it.
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it is, it does mean that there is this sort of
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: tendency to treat the dinosaurs as sort of like masculine forces because they're scary and they're big and they're toothy.
• 54:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in Roller Girl, those are still a city in Jurassic Park.
• 54:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or at the very least, you know, some of them are trans men, which is, or still are still male, but is a different, a different way of thinking about it than like, Ah, yes, the T-Rex who shows up.
• 55:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that, that
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: at least one of those T-Rexes that shows up in the first Russian Park film is a female.
• 55:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I believe in world, they always refer to the T-Rex as her.
• 55:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there is a male, I think there is at least one male, like, a valid female, to Ransora that shows up, which is the one in the lost world, because they have successfully bred, but like, Transmale T-Rex, we love that for a T-Rex.
• 55:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's right there, right?
• 55:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: But they never go there, because they're cowards.
• 55:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 55:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that cowardliness is really summarized in the fact that in Jurassic World Dominion Blue has got a little baby Velociraptor with her.
• 55:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But by that point, all of her siblings have died off screen between this first and second world film.
• 55:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Blue is the last remaining Velociraptor.
• 56:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it becomes a sexual reproduction from blue
• 56:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: implication of gender switching in the velociraptors.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it almost, you know, not to get two Christian values with it.
• 56:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It becomes basically a macular conception from blue.
• 56:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think we've got a dinosaur Jesus in this franchise.
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just no one wants to acknowledge the implications there of.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, drink of this white.
• 56:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is my cold or possibly warm blood.
• 56:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, blue, blue does not die for our sins, but blue does perpetually like do things that are not in blue self-interest.
• 56:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, I'm just thinking about trying to crucify and philosophize because they're arms are so little.
• 56:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very tricky.
• 56:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it is, it is, I think, interesting to note just that we don't have this in birds, and it doesn't seem to happen in crocodiles, so probably wouldn't happen dinosaurs, but there are a number of different reptiles that can reproduce, actually.
• 56:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a number of different lizards, some of which there are entire species of lizards that exist entirely as clones from
• 57:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: females giving birth, like cloning themselves and giving birth to daughters, and these very interestingly seems to happen in places where there's a bunch of different somewhat related species, but they can't quite interbreed normally, but the normally, normative, right?
• 57:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: They can't quite interbreed in the traditional manner, but the females of those sort of like unions between these two species then produce their own species that they clone themselves sort of in perpetuity,
• 57:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: seem to do this.
• 57:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it is, you know, it's something where they could, if they wanted to sort of do something even interesting with the idea of like a sexual reproduction.
• 57:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think that's giving, giving this particular franchise a little bit more credit than I think is warranted in the attention to detail else that we see elsewhere.
• 57:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think that does sort of bleed into the characters themselves where I would say zero triggers in Jurassic World Fall in Kingdom and De Wanda Wise's character.
• 58:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think she's called Han Solo in Dominion.
• 58:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, zero is in Fall in Kingdom, but those characters are lesbians.
• 58:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like they are, they are so clearly undeniably lesbians.
• 58:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: but at the same time, the film will make no acknowledgement thereof and fallen kingdom also has what seems to have clearly been written as a romance subplot between Rodriguez and Justice Smith's character.
• 58:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I can only assume those characters refused to perform that because it was so unrealistic.
• 58:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like it just it's it's so clearly shoehorned in, but it doesn't happen because there's just absolutely no way it would work.
• 58:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It literally doesn't play.
• 58:38
  [UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
• 58:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we have B.D.
• 58:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wong, and the doctor's character, who's coded pretty gay, I wouldn't.
• 58:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's partly just B.D.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wong, but just the one that's just B.D.
• 58:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wong, you like, yeah, B.D.
• 58:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wong, okay.
• 58:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 58:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then he's the scientist who, you know, does all these things.
• 58:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I will say to you, there is to the extent that the gender change in the Jurassic films is played up.
• 59:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is played up as a symbol of monstrousness and the untamed ability of nature.
• 59:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the untimability of nature, like it's simultaneously like the untimability of nature and also the unnaturalness of of sort of genetic experimentation that, oh, like true dinosaurs would not do this unnatural things such as changing their gender.
• 59:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, on a biological level, as far as we understand arkasaurus, which is the broader group of dinosaurs, birds, crocodiles, and possibly turtles, it's a little unclear.
• 59:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: That may be true, but it wouldn't be unnatural for it to happen in the animal.
• 59:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: We know this because it happens in a lot of animals.
• 59:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and peating that against the human characters and their traditional family values definitely feels pointed.
• 59:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Especially when you have Owen and Claire forming this traditional family unit around Mazee, who is a clone who gets rape-alputined in terms of her cloning, but she is a clone definitely.
• 1:00:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why films?
• 1:00:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:00:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, well, let's switch tracks again.
• 1:00:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: We kind of slid into conversation, but that was fascinating.
• 1:00:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:00:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And obviously, I think points to the reason why we wanted to have this conversation, because this film franchise does a lot of interesting things.
• 1:00:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Some often buy accidents.
• 1:00:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: More often by accident than not.
• 1:00:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And sort of what I've brought to the table is a little bit of data analysis.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not a data scientist and nor am I a coder.
• 1:00:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: but I've been bashing around harvesting data and trying to format that into some sort of, synthesize it in some sort of visual way so that we can kind of visually see the story of the franchise and of multiple franchises, ultimately.
• 1:00:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I have sort of built up a process.
• 1:00:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how scientifically sound it is, but it seems to be working sort of on an anecdotal level.
• 1:01:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've analyzed what I got here seven different franchises.
• 1:01:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: the original plan to the apes from 1968 on the Jurassic Park World, the Star Wars franchise Marvel phase one Harry Potter, John Wick, and Mission Impossible.
• 1:01:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm still working on a lot of this data.
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But something that came up when we were covering planet of the apes, the most recent movie
• 1:01:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I did a podcast, or my fellow hosts Lisha, and we were talking about the original film franchise of the five films from 68 to 73, and something that I noticed in that franchise was that quite consistently year-on-year their production budgets went down significantly,
• 1:01:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: all the while the studio was expecting quality returns to have the films well received and to be able to make money on it.
• 1:02:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I thought, oh, this is interesting.
• 1:02:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is kind of a normative behavior
• 1:02:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: realize that they got something on their hands and then they want to then create an efficiency around reproducing and recreating the original zaz of it.
• 1:02:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And ideally, you would want your audience satisfaction scores to maintain or increase while your budgetary inputs decrease.
• 1:02:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so that you get a very efficient use of your dollars per audience score satisfaction.
• 1:02:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the planet of the apes is a beautiful curve of audience scores and budgets sort of mapping each other very closely as budgets decrease quality scores, also decrease, but never so much so that the underlying economics of it are compromised.
• 1:03:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: and is kind of a normal insuitification process as I would characterize it.
• 1:03:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Looking at the Jurassic franchise, however, was fascinating.
• 1:03:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, oh, isn't this interesting?
• 1:03:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where we have an insuitification paradox as audience satisfaction scores fluctuates.
• 1:03:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: The budgets for the franchise increased significantly.
• 1:03:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: The delta between a couple of the movies is pretty eye-popping.
• 1:04:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I hate to go rogue on a year, but these budget numbers that you've gotten for fallen kingdom and dominion are adjusted for $20, $25.
• 1:04:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're also wrong.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They publicly gave certain budget numbers, but because these films were shot in the UK, you can access a 25% production rebate essentially for shooting in the UK, which is why so many actors from Andor have tiny bit parts in the world's years.
• 1:04:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as part of doing that, your tax records have to be public.
• 1:04:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: and these films, according to their public tax records, cost about 450 million each.
• 1:04:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: adjusted US dollars?
• 1:04:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so the numbers are given in pounds, but adjusted to US dollars from those years.
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'll have to go talk to my agents that collected this data for me to see if these were adjusted online read, often writes about it for Forbes.
• 1:05:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: She, like me, enjoys finding out what, and it's, it can be tricky to get the shell company names, but once you lay them down, yeah.
• 1:05:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that I'm trying to do in its an excellent point and it's one of the things that I'm, I'm still trying to wrestle with with this analysis.
• 1:05:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: which is, I can't look at merchandise, I can't look at licensing, and I can't look at theme park tie-ins, because that data is just not available.
• 1:05:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So a movie could be horribly overbudget relative to its audience satisfaction scores.
• 1:05:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we don't see behind that what kind of licensing the yields are going on or theme park, activation, tie-in, any of that other kind of stuff.
• 1:05:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the box office versus production number can look wildly divergent, but yet from a mega corporation standpoint, the film could be
• 1:05:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: highly utilitarian in tax write-offs or other franchise spin-offs, video games, animated series, merchandise, licensing.
• 1:06:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I remember a number of years ago at a point my daughter was interested in frozen as many young girls are at one stage in their lives.
• 1:06:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And
• 1:06:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: seeing like packaged mozzarella string cheese with frozen slapped all over the labels.
• 1:06:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, your god, right?
• 1:06:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like how far the margins on Pixar licensing for children's like lunchbox fruit in Australia is enormous.
• 1:06:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, you sell a bag of mini-manderins with baby eight on them.
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there you go.
• 1:06:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So my relative to the numbers that I'm putting up on this sort of web interface thing that I've sort of put together granted there there's got to be some adjustment.
• 1:06:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think what's interesting is when we look specifically at the Jurassic franchise,
• 1:07:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: is that budgets increase dramatically, even the maybe the low numbers that I'm reporting here around two to two hundred million U.S. adjusted when we look at the audience satisfaction scores and what I'm doing with that is I am taking
• 1:07:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Rotten tomato critics, Rotten Tomato audience, Metacritic critic, Metacritic users, IMDB, and Letterbox.
• 1:07:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm mushing them all together.
• 1:07:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm keeping them individual, but I'm also kind of then mushing them all together to get an overall combined score so that I can actually work with the numbers.
• 1:07:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I've got breakdowns for, you know, users versus critics, and I've got all the raw data as well, so you can sort of see the scatter of points on the vertical axis of any given film to be able to look at it.
• 1:07:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what we see with drastic properties is that they tank.
• 1:08:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: At a certain point during the world, rebirth is doing a credible job of bringing them back up.
• 1:08:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: But for the middle two world films, fallen kingdom and dominion, those are on a combined score are 50 and 43, and for reference, Jurassic Park, the original 1993 movie, has a combined score of 82.
• 1:08:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Very, very high.
• 1:08:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is a 50% cliff fall off drop up, but at the same time,
• 1:08:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: that the budget, even if it's off by $200 million, I've got a $200 million reported for Dominion here, and that is above 137 million on the 93 films.
• 1:08:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they're throwing more money and getting less return on an adjusted dollar per audience satisfaction score.
• 1:09:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so that's what I call an institution paradox, where is I would expect that the
• 1:09:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: franchise owners to find a happy medium of money to spend that continues to return on their investment regardless of whether the audiences are going up or down.
• 1:09:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in this case, we get these really wide divergences, which is interesting because why how obviously there's a whole
• 1:09:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: but for a franchise to make a quote-unquote rational decision to double the triple the budget when their franchise is clearly tanking.
• 1:09:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, sure you had a question.
• 1:09:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: or just a thought.
• 1:09:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, something I think is really interesting is that, you know, in the sort of traditional institution model that you see with the plan of the apes films, you can sort of, as you say, track it to the lowering of budgets.
• 1:09:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: But by and large, in the apes films, at least, people tend to stay pretty and interesting engaged in those films, because they have a lot of ideas.
• 1:10:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're, they're, they're good entertainment value.
• 1:10:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're good entertainment value.
• 1:10:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even if the apes look increasingly quite like Halloween masks, dialogues go to the plotings good, you know, you're maybe feeling like you're not quite getting value for money in the spectacle department, but there is stuff there to recommend.
• 1:10:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: What I think is interesting about the sort of institution paradox when you look at something like the Jurassic World Films is that
• 1:10:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The studio is clearly spending a lot of money on them, but it's not quite up on screen somehow.
• 1:10:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: It seems like, you know, forget the fact that the films are not terribly well-written and the acting is kind of so-so in the social messaging is upsetting the more you think about it.
• 1:10:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you would think, okay, well, at least they've got the dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs look pretty bad too.
• 1:10:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so there's a weird disjunked between
• 1:10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: the apparent amount that the studios are spending to create these films and like what you can actually see when you're in the theater watching them or watching them on streaming or whatever that is I think even if it's sort of hard to put your finger on it it's noticeable.
• 1:11:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're clearly very expensive and I also look very cheap in a way that sort of grinds at the corner of the mind.
• 1:11:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Tansy, I think you had some thoughts about this relative to Star Wars.
• 1:11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I might have an answer on why this is happening.
• 1:11:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fabulous.
• 1:11:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: So let's take that quick second break.
• 1:11:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then when we come back, we'll pick it up with you, Tansy.
• 1:11:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we can talk about the Star Wars Jurassic Park Nexus here.
• 1:11:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, we'll be right back.
• 1:11:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're back when I was doing my working on this sort of rudimentary data analytics of the seven franchises that I've done my initial look at planer the apes is sort of a nice classic model MCU and Harry Potter are quite healthy franchises relative to a dollar spent and an audience satisfaction and John Wick and mission impossible they're a little bit unshittified but not terribly so
• 1:12:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the two that have the worst insuitification scores I'm trying to create a metric around the insuitification are Jurassic Park at a minus 7.5 and Star Wars at a minus 8.2.
• 1:12:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Tansie, you've got a theory as to what might be going on here.
• 1:12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so we are actually talking about film history here.
• 1:12:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So planet of the Apes is an interesting example to use because it comes from essentially a different film industry.
• 1:12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So back in the day, you made a film.
• 1:12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a hit.
• 1:12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: and you went great.
• 1:12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've got these guys contracted for sequels possibly, maybe or they're just contracted to the studio and we got all these sets.
• 1:12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: We got a bunch of costumes.
• 1:12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's roll.
• 1:12:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's do the new one.
• 1:12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've cut your budget by 20 percent because you've already got all of these things that we spent money on.
• 1:12:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Give us a sequel.
• 1:13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll get it out in about 12 months and people like the first one.
• 1:13:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they'll come to the next one.
• 1:13:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: the film that really broke that mold was empire.
• 1:13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So empire comes out, it has a much higher budget than the first Star Wars film.
• 1:13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's also an incredible film, like you can't deny empire in any way, but it changes the way that studios make sequels.
• 1:13:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because from then on, every time they go to make a sequel and the director says, I want to high a budget,
• 1:13:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: empires they're calling card for why they should get it.
• 1:13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's why these days it is really standard to set up a franchise with a, let's be honest, not particularly small hundred million dollars and then spend a hundred and fifty mil on the sequel.
• 1:13:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's that idea of betting smaller to start with and then increasing your bets as opposed to back in the day where you would bet big and then reap the reward of that and for a long time television still operated in that mold where you were like we spent a million dollars on the set we're going to do six seasons so by the end of the sixth season that set has cost us nothing.
• 1:14:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: That used to be how TV works.
• 1:14:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now TV is much more in a film mode.
• 1:14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's very little return on investment.
• 1:14:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's very little returnable sets in a lot of TV these days.
• 1:14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the way that we make things is part of why we're getting this paradoxical institution, as David has called it, where there is an expectation that more money will be spent on each sequel.
• 1:14:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And your returns and your audience satisfaction are going to increase because we spent more money on it.
• 1:14:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Look, we've given you we started a new hope at around I believe 50 just under 60 million adjusted for inflation.
• 1:14:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: adjusted for twenty twenty five of just yeah all my numbers are just a twenty twenty twenty five dollars where empire strikes back comes in around a hundred and twenty and yet its satisfaction score is almost as high it's almost a parallel to a new hope
• 1:14:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we start to go down and yet the budgets continue to go up and up and and then in some way, and it start wars, they kind of dance around each other and sort of end out at the same, but the idea that you would throw more money is inherently contradictory towards what happened with.
• 1:15:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: planet of the apes, like you said, where they could just recycle everything and continue dumb things down.
• 1:15:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: On the television front, I will say that we are starting to see a return of the serialized television, the pits, slow horses, things like this where they're turning, only murders, hacks, they're turning things around faster, they may not be using the same budget or same sets and props.
• 1:15:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: but they are figuring out how to create that efficiency for dollar spent so that that initial investment is paying really good dividends over time.
• 1:15:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where is something like a game of thrones or house of the dragon or rings of power?
• 1:16:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Very expensive, very upfront.
• 1:16:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've got location shooting, you've got a CG stuff and then you're turning that thing around every three to two to three years.
• 1:16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think a really interesting example that you've pegged here is ballerina, which was a John Wick spin-off, and it was initially planned to be a smaller budget John Wick spin-off.
• 1:16:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't by the time it was finished due to significant reshoots done by Chad Stahlsky, but yeah, the initial plan was, I think, that it wouldn't be about $40 million, which coming off John Wick.
• 1:16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: for, I think, for a 100 million in their budget for the first time.
• 1:16:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when they were, you know, putting it out and kind of me a copiering to the amount of work that needed to be done on ballerina, one of the things that Chad's to help keep pointed to was that they just didn't have enough money to deliver what would be a John Wick spin off.
• 1:16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: that when they first made ballerina, it looked like a chip cash in, essentially.
• 1:17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that back in the day, sequels were cheap cashins, and now they're expensive cashins.
• 1:17:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: correct.
• 1:17:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because you want to build the franchise bow wave, the impact, the cultural impact, and your struggling against other franchises.
• 1:17:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And John Wick, I don't think we're going to see a theme park activation for that one.
• 1:17:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I would love to.
• 1:17:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whereas Jurassic World, no problem, you know, you want to walk around amongst dinosaurs and Petta, the Veggie Sores leg, go for it.
• 1:17:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: We
• 1:17:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: a Keanu Reeves animatronic firing a semi-automatic weapon at your head.
• 1:17:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
• 1:17:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd take good money for that.
• 1:17:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: No man, you're selling me on it.
• 1:17:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: there's a whole untapped adult market here that I think we could, you know, Disney call this.
• 1:17:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think, I mean, this is something that it's sort of like been circling around a little bit, which is there is, I think a distinction, it's a narrow distinction, but I would draw it between the Jurassic Park, the three Jurassic Park films specifically, the two Jurassic Park
• 1:18:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: which are very much in the mode of, okay, you have your dinosaur island, what are other kinds of scrapes?
• 1:18:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can we get up to one dinosaur island?
• 1:18:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if there were two T-rexes?
• 1:18:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if there was a big spinosaurus?
• 1:18:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if the raptors were not just like, you know, sort of smart in a sort of vicious animalistic way, but kind of smart in a more, you know, we've been playing up the idea that these animals are smart.
• 1:18:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if we actually treat them like people?
• 1:18:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, it is a bit like more of the same, but it's finding variations within the sort of like the set as it were.
• 1:18:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like you have the Donas or Island, we're going to do Donas or stuff on Donas or Island.
• 1:18:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what's really interesting about the Jurassic World films is that they are casting about desperately
• 1:18:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: for new stuff to do, but that is not too new and that I think in some ways draws attention to the fact that they don't really have a sense of what they want to do that's different.
• 1:19:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that there's something
• 1:19:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: very interesting about this, this sense of like stuff that is nakedly a cash in is fine and stuff that is better than a house to be is great, but stuff that is simultaneously nakedly a cash in but wants to faint at being better than a house to be but isn't is a very strange and uncanny chimera of a beast and those are very strange uncanny chimera's
• 1:19:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: of films and so to bring it back very briefly to the idea of like oh do people even like dinosaurs anymore it's like I don't know man do you guys like dinosaurs anymore like nobody's making you make these things honestly they could have made Jurassic world and then take in a break for a couple of years or a period of years you know that you see Jurassic well made 1.5 billion dollars so of course they couldn't have taken a break because it made 1.5 billion
• 1:20:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it made $1.5 million because Jurassic Park Dan made a Jurassic Park film in like a decade.
• 1:20:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no.
• 1:20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look, you might think that.
• 1:20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that might be a very logical decision to make.
• 1:20:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you see, I'm a big brain studio executive.
• 1:20:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I know what I'm talking about.
• 1:20:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I need to make sure that there is another of these movies within three years that no one's really calling for.
• 1:20:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we really double down on Owen and Claire as our protagonist.
• 1:20:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even though I don't think this movie knows what it's protagonist is.
• 1:20:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we've got to have those guys because they're such popular characters who such great on-screen chemistry.
• 1:20:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Everybody's walking around holding their hand out sort of in this, uh, you know, I've seen how to trade your dragon and don't at wrong.
• 1:20:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think there is a real palpable creative exhaustion there.
• 1:20:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it is really sad, honestly, because I think that there are tremendous amount of really interesting variations on the theme that you can do if you're willing to sit down and really think about how to play it.
• 1:21:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even taking the central idea of the Jurassic World films keep running up to sort of tapping and then running away from giggling.
• 1:21:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was like, what if it was truly a world where dinosaurs were for real back?
• 1:21:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you could you could commit to that.
• 1:21:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: You could if you wanted to try and tell the story of like the park where it works and you know, there's stuff that happens, but it's not a full dinosaur apocalypse by the end.
• 1:21:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: you could do all sorts of different, you know, bring in all sorts of different dinosaurs and and approach the sort of way that you film those sequences differently, which is something I will give Garth Edwards some credit for is that I think he gets the most
• 1:21:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: material out of, oh, you know, we're doing a Mosesore, so let's do some like ocean horror, like we're doing a Tyrannosaurus.
• 1:21:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's treat it instead of being a ravting monster like a big curious predator.
• 1:21:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to do the, you know, and like yeah, obviously the titanosaurus scene is just
• 1:22:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: the Brock you so as again.
• 1:22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this time you get to touch them.
• 1:22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: This time you get to touch them.
• 1:22:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know what, I've given, I've given this franchise a decent amount of shit in this conversation for not doing interesting stuff with the dinosaur designs.
• 1:22:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: But those Titanosaurus look pretty good.
• 1:22:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: They gave them elephant-like picno feathers in between the scales, which I think is a great, like, I saw that and I was like, that's a great design note.
• 1:22:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even the, what they do with the Ketsuko Atlas of like having this sort of like, um, you know, thing happened on the cliff side, that's cool.
• 1:22:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Haven't seen haven't seen a terrorist or sequence like that in Jurassic Park film before.
• 1:22:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that you can find interesting things to do if you're willing to sit down and think about this these as theme park rides, because that is effectively what they want these films to be.
• 1:22:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the, the, the world films
• 1:22:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: don't want them to be theme park rides, but do want you to know that you're getting the ride, don't worry.
• 1:22:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, the ride's bigger and better than ever.
• 1:23:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it looks worse, but like, we spent more money on it.
• 1:23:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's just, it's a very strange, there's a very strange listlessness and sort of like creative exhaustion and creative insecurity that I think is very hard to shake
• 1:23:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: So back when Tansy and I were talking about and or on the going rogue topic, one of the things that we touched on was this sort of, I don't know, weird idea that I have that there's a Star Wars curse and it came about at the emergence of the Star Wars Christmas special and one of the things that I just listened back to that episode so this little bit more fresh from my mind that, you know, Tansy that you reacted or commented on
• 1:23:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: was that Lucas, like the kind of money they were throwing at Lucas and what he was doing, whatever, he had a point of view.
• 1:24:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he was allowed to make this Samurai flavored Western shoot him up, anti, a little bit of an anti hero story, a little bit of battle of Britain, pilot story, you know, just this sort of soup of creativity that he had.
• 1:24:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he had a point in the future, Dixon.
• 1:24:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:24:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Correct.
• 1:24:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he had a point of view and he had a creative vision.
• 1:24:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was messy.
• 1:24:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: It took a bunch of other people to create, you know, clean it up for him.
• 1:24:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: But he took a swing.
• 1:24:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: He had a vision and he took a swing.
• 1:24:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now we have this pattern where everyone who has given the keys to a franchise subsequently post empire I would add in is that you are now expected to create a movie that hits that sort of 77
• 1:24:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: level of virality and excitement, but then yet stays within some sort of budget framework and more importantly, stays in this really family, friendly, four-quadrant movie that we can sell on a conservative family basis so nobody gets us in trouble.
• 1:25:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: So creativity, artistic license, doing something new and interesting,
• 1:25:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: you as a director, almost have to smuggle in anything like that and try to work, you know, like they used to work the sensors on TV, you got to work your, you know, the producers, I have to work the studio executives and I'm so mad the franchise got canceled because that was such a beautiful look at inside of the madness of what goes on with these big franchise properties and how you
• 1:25:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Might be, oh, who's the actor who played the director in the franchise?
• 1:25:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Uh, Daniel Burles.
• 1:25:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Daniel Bruhl, who is this creative genius, and yet he's turned into this guy who's just cranking the handle on the sausage factory.
• 1:26:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think like, there is a really interesting counterpoint in all of that, which is Ryan Johnson, who managed to make a movie that a lot of people hated, but you can't deny that he made a movie that felt like he is movie.
• 1:26:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And part of how he did it was that he wrapped every day on time.
• 1:26:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The few times that they didn't know over, they, you know, those were days where they absolutely needed the extra hours, but 10 hour days on budget, on schedule, and he made that movie.
• 1:26:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, that's part of how he got away with it.
• 1:26:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, he was a, he was in class.
• 1:26:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 1:26:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 1:26:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was, he, he looked like he was conforming to the rules.
• 1:26:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:26:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:26:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Interesting on my data for the last Jedi,
• 1:26:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: of all of the movies, it has the most divergence between the audience and British school.
• 1:26:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, critic score, and it is the widest spread where something like Empire and a new hope are very compact, both last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker show this big distance between individual scoreings.
• 1:27:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would say that last Jedi is interesting because I think it more than any other Star Wars film was impacted by the expectations that people had going into it.
• 1:27:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
• 1:27:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that the fact that the studio was feeding us the same rule every time a film came out and then Ryan was like, hey, you heard a ghoulash?
• 1:27:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: was shock at something different and shock is not always a positive emotion.
• 1:27:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when we see the Jurassic franchise, they are individually.
• 1:27:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're just, they're pouring that slop down the delivery tube.
• 1:27:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they're hyper-vigilin and going, hey, remember the veggie, remember the Velociraptors, remember the Velociraptor clicking its claw, like, go, let's go back to the original visitor center.
• 1:28:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The one that gets me in Dominion is where Laura Durn has to take off her sunglasses the way that she did in Jurassic Park.
• 1:28:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, people take their sunglasses off in different ways.
• 1:28:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you can grow as a person.
• 1:28:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can take, you can just push me if you have back like,
• 1:28:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: the moment that the flares were grabbed in rebirth.
• 1:28:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was like, oh, you know, here we go, right?
• 1:28:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, hey, over here.
• 1:28:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And rebirth, I think, is beautiful in the Steven Spielberg's notes for the movie.
• 1:28:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're primarily get my shit out of this movie.
• 1:28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were a lot more references to the original Jurassic Park that got cut because he was like, I'm sick of this.
• 1:28:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: as well, he should be.
• 1:28:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that there is the reference reality in these films, chokes out the ability to do anything interesting.
• 1:28:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that you can't do something that feels like a Spielberg home.
• 1:29:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, I think that the Tyrannosaurus sequence in rebirth is the most successful and most Spielberg feeling sequence in that film without feeling like it is specifically a, you know, biting Spielberg's direct notes.
• 1:29:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we get to see a Tyrannosaurus swim.
• 1:29:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: We get to see a Tyrannosaurus, you know, knock a glass off the edge of the table, like a catwood, right?
• 1:29:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it was an interesting behavior, even if we areless of the scientific
• 1:29:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, regardless, it was something new and different.
• 1:29:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it is incumbent upon me to note that it is a sequence from the original novel that they have been trying to get really to these movies for a long time.
• 1:29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I understand it was too much water to be able to do in the first film.
• 1:29:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Essentially the degree of CG and the animatronics and water was just
• 1:29:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: They had a hardness on doing it with a shark.
• 1:29:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let alone name.
• 1:29:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, the antibiotic tyrannosaurus or the antibiotic tyrannosaurus was a real bitch to deal with in the rain, even because the rain would soak up like soak into the foam.
• 1:30:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it totally makes sense that it was just never possible.
• 1:30:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I do sort of wonder if some of the pitch for rebirth was
• 1:30:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: We can do the raf scene.
• 1:30:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's finally time to redo the raf scene now.
• 1:30:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the funny thing is of course they did do the raf scene already.
• 1:30:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: They did it with the spinosaur in Jurassic Park 3 like that was them sort of being like, oh, yeah, we should probably do the, we should probably do the big fair pod in the water thing that that's, so there's there's a degree to which these films are not only picking over the film, the the first Jurassic Park films bones.
• 1:30:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are also picking over the bones of not even the two Jurassic Park novels because there's a bunch of material in the lost world that got Jettison or never made it into the film adaptation.
• 1:30:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: But specifically going back to Jurassic Park and saying, oh, you know, we never did the Terrasource sequence.
• 1:30:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: So let's do that.
• 1:30:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, let's do a twice because they do the big tear source in the dome sequence in Jurassic Park 3.
• 1:31:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then they come back around and do it again in Jurassic World.
• 1:31:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: The sort of raptor, there's a bunch of like raptor material from the book.
• 1:31:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's like a cute baby raptor that is sort of like around in the book and then meets a very messy end because it's a quite novel.
• 1:31:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, right, but, uh, you know, it's like, oh, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, there's a cute baby raptor and like there's there's a raptor who's adorable in in these films now.
• 1:31:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, we, we've got it, right?
• 1:31:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got some of that original book material, Dolores, it's just been mining and mining and mining and mining and mining and you know, I think at some point either drop it.
• 1:31:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: or say, fuck it and make the HBO mini series remake that you just actually go back and like redo Jurassic Park, which I think you could I could see some utility to doing.
• 1:31:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not generally pro remake, but I think that at a time when colossal biosciences is putting out a number of press releases about, you know,
• 1:32:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're, we're de-extincting things.
• 1:32:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're, you know, doing these all kinds of weird technological things where we're fucking up perfectly good Wolves by pretending that they're dire Wolves, that you could make an argument for now is actually a great time to return to the original Jurassic Park and sort of, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know,
• 1:32:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: reinvent dinosaurs again for the new century, reinvent the way that that story is told in reference to the things that are happening.
• 1:32:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that's never going to happen when the point is to maintain the old Jurassic Park IP and not do anything new or potentially upsetting.
• 1:32:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think the Harry Potter HBO series is a really good comparison point there where that series is going to be exhaustively faithful to the books, but it will also be exhaustively faithful to the films.
• 1:32:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that there will be anything in there that will feel aesthetically different.
• 1:32:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it will entirely rip the styles.
• 1:32:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think they'll even do the sort of director switch.
• 1:33:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, enabled changes that were made book to book and film to film where suddenly it got a lot darker when Quarron came on.
• 1:33:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: They'll do that in the third season, I think, and that is what would happen if there was a Jurassic adaptation.
• 1:33:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: You would get away with dirtbag Hammond these days, but there is a third of no, which I think I think there is something that they haven't plumbed yet from the original Jurassic Park, which is sitting there, it's waiting to happen.
• 1:33:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are these early tests of the raptor puppets done by Stan Winston Studios and they're in a warehouse full of cardboard boxes to just mock up the kitchen.
• 1:33:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're shot on Granny VHS, they're terrifying.
• 1:33:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a perfect Granny VHS found footage movie set in Jurassic Park before the events of the first film that they could make and they never will, but it's always an option.
• 1:33:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: This makes me think of the topic of solo and who are the original directors from our film, Lord and Chris Miller?
• 1:34:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Lord and Miller, who did set out to do something creative and new and innovative within the world.
• 1:34:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they went all that out there.
• 1:34:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a whole bunch about the reasons that played into that.
• 1:34:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure.
• 1:34:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure that Chris Miller and Phil Lord version of the story is we wanted to change things and they wouldn't let us.
• 1:34:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think anyone else's version of the story is different, but it is definitely a factor in there that they sort of went back to the well of well Star Wars was made of all these different genres.
• 1:34:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what if we got some of those genres and went to the genres instead of just making a Star Wars movie?
• 1:34:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they started turning in their rushes and one of the notes along with why the hell did they take you three days
• 1:34:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of those notes was, will these doesn't look like Star Wars?
• 1:34:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, this is the importance, again, of getting your shit done on time in a way that... Yeah, Ryan got away with it.
• 1:34:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'm like, gear the Edwards in Rogue One who didn't get away with it.
• 1:35:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I've got away with it here with Jurassic with the, I think, I think they were in a tight ship on this.
• 1:35:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think they run a tight ship around him.
• 1:35:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that they they controlled the ship to the point where he was almost Maggie Simpson with a little stereo ill being like, I'm driving.
• 1:35:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: But because it didn't feel very scared.
• 1:35:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Edwards at the same time.
• 1:35:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was like, wait, Garrett, this is.
• 1:35:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: It didn't feel like it.
• 1:35:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and they retrospect I could see it, but unlike Rogue One or the creator, there wasn't just these long, languid, beautiful, strange wandering shots where he would just grab the camera and run off down the road.
• 1:35:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think honestly part of that is John Matheson, the cinematographer who is very well established.
• 1:35:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did gladiator, he did a lot of early rid of this guy.
• 1:35:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a, you know, a titan of the industry, detective Pikachu, best looking film with that decade.
• 1:36:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you don't really want to take a camera from his department and just go shoot stuff as well working with film.
• 1:36:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's a process where it was sort of creatively limited in a good way.
• 1:36:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 1:36:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was going to say, too, that they did try to do something interesting, both in Fallen Kingdom and the Lost World, the Lost World, that was the Jeff Goldblum adventure story, right, with the bus, that was really dark.
• 1:36:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: and had a very horror tone to it, low key kind of horror tone to it.
• 1:36:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then at least in Fallon Kingdom, we got a haunted house mansion, sort of Scooby-Doo mystery going on there.
• 1:36:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I will say that I think Fallon was rushed with, with the replete with Russian bad guys, right?
• 1:36:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: as every haunted house should have.
• 1:36:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, full and kingdom is a completely insane movie.
• 1:36:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's completely insane.
• 1:36:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like when you start at like sort of a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest sort of a McKay, but Mrs. Miller and you end up in a mansion at the back half of the movie, it's a bizarre.
• 1:37:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think you can tell that they own as a horror director.
• 1:37:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like there is a real horror movie vibe to it.
• 1:37:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's a real, I think engaging nastiness to the, to fall in kingdom that I think stands in for sort of dull, reheated off very well, you know, it's just sort of like, you know, I, if we're going to do, hey, there's a personal.
• 1:37:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: predatory dinosaur, and it hates, and it's like, fuck you specifically.
• 1:37:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It hates you specifically.
• 1:37:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's going to hunt you through the sort of gothic manner where it really sort of takes some of the sort of ideas of what the velociractors are and really sort of plays it up, and I think a really engaging way is that film good?
• 1:37:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I don't think so, but it's the best of them in a walk.
• 1:37:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It definitely is doing stuff.
• 1:37:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the film that comes to closest to doing stuff differently, and it's the most engaging as a result, even if, as Tansy pointed out, the actual character writing is completely bizarre and misplayed because, you know, I think, as you speculate, I think the actors pulled a little bit of a like, George, you can write this shit, but you can't say it with some of the creative decisions,
• 1:38:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that it is, it is the one of those films that I could see myself continuing to like go back and revisit.
• 1:38:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you could not get me to rewatch Dominion with a gun to my head.
• 1:38:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even though that's the one that has the feathers in it.
• 1:38:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are two things that I love about the Indo-Rapta.
• 1:38:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them being that you know at some point in the design meeting, someone brought up Kinsugi, the Japanese art of repairing things with gold, because it's got those gold eyeliner streaks.
• 1:38:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other thing I love is that clearly no one from Southeast Asia or Australia was asked about the name.
• 1:38:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: because indoor raptor just sounds like it's a raptor from Indonesia or possibly a raptor produced by Indo-Me, who make me growng.
• 1:39:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like it's a name that does not work at all in this region.
• 1:39:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have not watched this film with my partner who is Indonesian yet, but I do kind of want you just to watch your face when they get to the first line.
• 1:39:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, when they do the big like this, I'm pretty sure there's like a crack of thunder and then Toby Jones who's played the auction here is just the indoor raptor.
• 1:39:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Great use of Toby Jones and that movie too, like truly, truly putting him in the kind of role he was born to play.
• 1:39:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yeah.
• 1:39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's again, like just bizarre cast for the supporting cast in those films.
• 1:39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like Robert N's, who plays Lonnie in Andor is the guy getting absolutely destroyed by the Mosesor in the Olympic sequence of that.
• 1:39:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Varada Sethu has like a two-line role in Dominion.
• 1:39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's, yeah, there's just a really bizarre supporting cast around the end, of course, James Cromwell.
• 1:39:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: We all love to see James Cromwell in anything.
• 1:39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once he gets his hands on stuck from the Starbucks counter.
• 1:40:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, we should begin to wrap it up a little bit.
• 1:40:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asher, any final thoughts that you want to pick up on?
• 1:40:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that it is no, it is, I think the question of accuracy is in some ways barking up the wrong trade with the Jurassic films.
• 1:40:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I personally would love to see more accurate dinosaurs in as much as that means anything when we're working with animals that are our understanding of is perpetually changing.
• 1:40:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is that perpetual change and that restlessness and that sense of mystery and an unpredictability that I want to see in films about dinosaurs, something that shows me
• 1:40:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Don's sort of doing something I haven't seen before.
• 1:40:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Something that shows me dinosaurs in a way that I haven't seen them before.
• 1:40:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was the lightning strike that was the original Jurassic Park film for people who previously thought about dinosaurs as reruns of King Kong or people in suits.
• 1:41:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: we know that to some degree, you can change how people think about these things that were real animals.
• 1:41:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's fine to make monsterized versions of them as far as it goes.
• 1:41:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's going to be a lot of, oh, running and screaming as, uh, as Ben, the, the bite just missed my heel as I stepped.
• 1:41:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's all to the good and fun.
• 1:41:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think that that's our fast food.
• 1:41:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's our, our, our burger and fries.
• 1:41:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, as a film that I enjoy really enjoyed recently, the menu, you know, there's such a thing as a really well-made burger, and there's such a thing as some slot that you eat because it's kind of hot, but the second that the temperature ticks down below a certain level gets to geold and you cannot get it down your throat.
• 1:41:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that we deserve a better class of Donas were filmed the way that we deserve excellent to decent burgers, and they have not been serving even really possible fast food
• 1:41:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think we also deserve excellent rom-coms on that level, like there's a degree of craft in a lot of Hollywood filmmaking that's just vanished over time, partly due to inflating budgets and you know, different demands of the market.
• 1:42:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, there should be a market for good dinosaur run and hide movies and for good movies about pretty people being mean to each other.
• 1:42:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
• 1:42:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like there is there's markets for all of this.
• 1:42:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we can even combine them.
• 1:42:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that we could do a dinosaur romcom, I think that it's not the movies that they thought they were making with these ones.
• 1:42:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: For a moment during Jurassic World, I thought that this was a screwball comedy.
• 1:42:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I thought they were actually going to basis Claire and Owens relationship as a screwball comedy.
• 1:42:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's there and you can detect it, but then it just goes away.
• 1:42:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It just gets fizzled away in all of the other madness that goes on.
• 1:42:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think, as well, like, this is something that I find fascinating about Travaro is that almost all, if not all of his films have had female protagonists, but almost if not all of them have been more interested in the man around them.
• 1:43:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you have something like safety not guaranteed, which is a movie that I would argue only works because of all three classes performance.
• 1:43:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think anyone else in that film and it flops.
• 1:43:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the film is an interested in her.
• 1:43:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's interested in the man around her and the same is true of Jurassic, the same is absolutely true of book of Henry.
• 1:43:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I haven't seen deep cover yet but I have a sneaking suspicion about it.
• 1:43:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, is this why those films are not interested in their dinosaurs because the dinosaurs are all female?
• 1:43:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, quite possibly.
• 1:43:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's dinosaur misogyny.
• 1:43:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a real and worrying phenomenon.
• 1:43:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like, you know, we have, there's the bizarre thing that everyone's realizing where the problem of Poland season is largely due to tree sexism.
• 1:43:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it sounds so insane to go from that sentence, but once you get down to the signs, it's like, oh, yeah, I have to have main lines of tech for three months of a year because of tree sexism.
• 1:43:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'd be just to sort of unpack that for anyone who's like, what on earth is she talking about?
• 1:43:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are, you know, in a lot of urban planting because you don't necessarily want trees to be spreading.
• 1:44:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're like, oh, well, we'll just plant a bunch of male trees.
• 1:44:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you get a vast amount of male trees that are releasing pollen to fertilize the female trees that are not there.
• 1:44:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so you end up
• 1:44:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: with just going through absolute hell for large swaths of the season just because there was a there was an aesthetic decision this is very Jurassic Park right like there was an aesthetic decision that was made for reasons of human convenience or sort of perceived human convenience but the organisms human control of the environment yes.
• 1:44:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The organisms proceed according to their own directives, which do not include me personally being able to breathe for like large swaths of the season in Austin.
• 1:44:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Did I either view watch the most recent season of Alien Earth?
• 1:44:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, I haven't yet, but I've got a friend who gates pestering me to.
• 1:44:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I haven't seen it yet either.
• 1:44:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well, we just wrapped up full-time coverage of that.
• 1:44:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And
• 1:45:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love Noah Hawley, who is the writer and showrunner and directed a couple of the episodes.
• 1:45:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: At this point, I'll pretty much watch whatever he puts in front of me because he is a television showrunner who is willing to play with the form and change the to challenge our expectations about what it is that we are receiving from him and what he's encoded and what we're decoding.
• 1:45:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: He understands that there's a relationship going on there and so he plays with the deliveries of stuff.
• 1:45:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: but one of the things that I really enjoyed about the season was this idea of the unknown unknowns or being on the boundary of the known unknowns.
• 1:45:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the aliens and it without spoiling anything about that season, it's known as part of the marketing material that there are other creatures that get brought back to.
• 1:45:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: earth and there's this whole thing of, you know, can we contain these creatures, can we understand them and they keep doing things that are not expected because they exist partially in the unknown unknown realm of things.
• 1:46:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: even though from a known unknown, we're like, oh, that looks like this, or it's this, but sort of presents is that.
• 1:46:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we have some ideas about its natural history and evolution, but yet their alien creatures from another world, and we're bringing them back to Earth, and we think that we can manage for them.
• 1:46:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: We think that we can contain them and study them,
• 1:46:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: something that the Jurassic franchise does interestingly is when humanity tries to think, when humanity thinks it can try to control nature, right?
• 1:46:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Disco's back to the Dr. Grant, you know, in the very beginning movie, or maybe that was, I'm sorry, Jeff Goldblum, more accurately, that there is no way for us to predict or to understand the outcomes when we start to compress and contain these organisms.
• 1:46:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: on that note, you have human misunderstanding as well of the conditions that we create.
• 1:47:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think of Ford, Dr. David Mack, who spent his entire working life trying to make sure that people understand that the wolf studies that he did were on wolves in captivity and they are not applicable to broader nature.
• 1:47:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, as a result, we've got unbelievably smooth-brained male influences telling us that you've got to be a sepma male, and it's like, Buddy, we're also families.
• 1:47:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the wild, they exist as families.
• 1:47:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is not a power structure here, but what we have observed was so much of our own creation that we create mythologies about real nature that comes from the things that we have already influence.
• 1:47:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I sure that even goes back to a conversation that you and I had with Saul about I believe he's an anthropologist, Holmberg, and his fundamental mistake when he encountered a group of people somewhere in South America.
• 1:48:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: I can't remember all the details, but
• 1:48:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so Humberg was studying a group of people in South America that he believed because they seemed to be hunter-gatherers, they seemed to live in very rough conditions in Bolivia.
• 1:48:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: He thought that these people were essentially very primitive.
• 1:48:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: that they were a sign of the sort of fundamental state of man that man had sort of transcended by developing agriculture and stuff like that, and that he could use them as a model for what primitive people's did, essentially.
• 1:48:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what he missed when he was studying this group of people was that they weren't stone age relics.
• 1:48:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: They weren't people who were living in
• 1:48:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, what they were was they were Indigenous, but they were by and large refugees from mass land clearance for cattle and sort of rubber as well or rubber and rubber and the sort of the rubber plantations that were quite brutal and where people's traditional agricultural villages had been
• 1:49:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: raided and subsumed into this larger, really ugly, extractive framework.
• 1:49:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so they were living rough, not because they were primitive, but they were living rough because they were refugees.
• 1:49:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: They've been driven into these really marginal environments, which are very difficult to make a living.
• 1:49:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now along comes this anthropologist, who looks at them and writes a bunch of notes about how these people are sort of congenital savages who don't
• 1:49:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: have the who who have not yet evolved the sort of a wonderful aspect of the society.
• 1:49:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The benefits of society like grabbing smaller people and forcing them to onto a rubber plantation to make you money.
• 1:49:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that and it's one of those things where it's like if you ask the wrong questions, if you come into a situation with the wrong set of assumptions, you can it's not that this anthropologist wasn't seeing what he was seeing.
• 1:50:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was correctly describing the material culture, but he wasn't asking the question about why the material culture was what it was.
• 1:50:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't correctly diagnosing the history and the sort of culture that he was seeing because he was blinded by his own assumptions.
• 1:50:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: and I think that that is a sort of a to bring it back around to Jurassic Park, something that I think is sort of present in the novel and in the original film to a degree, is that the novel in the film are about what happens when you are interacting with organisms,
• 1:50:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: in ways that you don't really understand them.
• 1:50:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you don't understand it because you're, frankly, a very shady fly-by-night operation for all the amount of capitalization that had to have gone into Jurassic Park.
• 1:50:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: How dare you be spurts the good name of engine?
• 1:50:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like, I think engine besmirches the good name of engine pretty immediately, right?
• 1:51:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the scene where Hammond rolls up to a hatching and handles a baby Velociraptor, an animal that, at that point, the park knows to be quite intelligent and to have a lot going on mentally.
• 1:51:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: does the sort of viciousness of the raptors in Jurassic Park come down to the fact that ingen is working with animals that are quite intelligent.
• 1:51:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's not treating, is not giving them the enrichment that they need, is not allowing them to form the sort of
• 1:51:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: sort of social dynamics that might appear in a healthy environment in part because you've created these animals and they have no culture, they have no, they are actually like contextless and yet they think and yet they have an ability and an agency of moving through the world and in the original Jurassic Park book and film,
• 1:52:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: they are barbaric as a result of that.
• 1:52:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: They are not true velociraptors.
• 1:52:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's a really incredible scene at the end of Jurassic Park before the island gets fire bombed in the novel where
• 1:52:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a sort of a running little plot about how the raptor numbers don't quite make sense.
• 1:52:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the raptors that are hunting them throughout most of it are the raptors that are have been in captivity, but some of the raptors have gotten away.
• 1:52:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so Grant ends up going underneath the power plant and finds a raptor society that is, you know, there's still dangerous animals, but there are adults that are playing with with hatchlings.
• 1:52:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is a functioning raptor path of a kind that we have not seen in the rest of the
• 1:52:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: which is noticeably, not something that really shows up in any of those films except for Jurassic Park 3.
• 1:52:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And otherwise, there's a sense of these being things that animals that we don't really understand.
• 1:52:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that whole idea is gone after Jurassic Park 3 that the dinosaurs are fundamentally perhaps unknowable, or misunderstood.
• 1:53:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't mean that.
• 1:53:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're killing me.
• 1:53:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they're fundamentally killing machines and they're completely predictable and maybe the T-rex will turn up in a pinch to help you because that happened at the end of Jurassic Park and also she's the big IP and we love her, you know, we love our queen, but um, there's a real bite.
• 1:53:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: as you, if you will, to Jurassic Park, both certainly in the novel, into some degree, less so in the film, basically built around the idea that like, if you bring back dinosaurs, you will not understand what you've brought back because we don't know so much about these animals.
• 1:53:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think,
• 1:53:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: There are many places where the franchise falls off.
• 1:53:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's like Tanzia has identified several.
• 1:53:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think we all could pick them.
• 1:53:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: But to me, as somebody who likes dinosaurs and will always, I think, like dinosaurs, I think that the secret sauce that makes Jurassic Park really cook is that it treats the dinosaurs as inherently difficult to understand and surprising.
• 1:54:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And not something that you know quite what we're gonna get.
• 1:54:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: where I think the franchise died, essentially, or just became something that was ultimately repetitive was.
• 1:54:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a dinosaur.
• 1:54:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know what it is.
• 1:54:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know that you know that they know it because they keep hammering that plot point over and over and over that everybody knows what dinosaurs are and now they're bored of them, which is not something that Jurassic Park in any of its early incarnations ever made that mistake.
• 1:54:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think there's some parallels between Ingen and Universal Studios, but maybe that's a different podcast.
• 1:54:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tandy, you wanna give us final thoughts?
• 1:54:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I feel like just building on that, the kind of the misunderstanding of animals, I think, could probably actually best be summarized in one of the scenes from Dominion.
• 1:54:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's a kind of blink in your misset, like narratively, superfluous scene of Chris Pratt writing a horse to lasso, some rogue dinosaur.
• 1:55:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I had the thought of rewatching it and I never wanted to be someone who, you know, cinemas and stings.
• 1:55:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I had the thought watching it and I was like, how did you get a horse to go, like, horses or skitish animals?
• 1:55:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you show a horse like,
• 1:55:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: You show a horse of blue balloon and it might kill you.
• 1:55:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They cannot feed that easily controlled and then within that scene.
• 1:55:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chris Pratt is trying to get the horse to speed up and he whips it.
• 1:55:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, well, I don't trust this man as someone who cares about the well-being of animals.
• 1:55:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: If he's taken a horse, that close to dinosaurs and then he's also willing to whip it.
• 1:55:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I don't want to be lefty vegetarian, but not a fan of the horse as in basically any context.
• 1:55:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's your hero introduction for that film.
• 1:55:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's look at Owen Grady, isn't he a cool man's man and like multiple red flags are already showing up.
• 1:55:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then it's like, oh no, he's looking after the... Against the character as presented, too.
• 1:56:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:56:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is the scene in Fallen Kingdom as well where they're getting a blood sample out of the T-Rex, which goes against all the laws of Flopotomy.
• 1:56:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just sort of, there's something where I know they need to get more
• 1:56:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, paleontologists and more scientists with, you know, background in history to actually and animal behavior, they need more vets involved in the writing process of these films, because vets can tell you how unpredictable animals are to be around and how kind of cherry-react a lot of their medical treatment needs to be.
• 1:56:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that you could get a decent
• 1:56:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the thought that this occurs is that the best Jurassic Park movie is not that exists out is not yeah it's not yeah best Jurassic Park movie yeah because it's it's that approach that Jordan pill took of wanting the audience to think they're watching.
• 1:56:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: of closing counters of a third kind, and then there's slowly dawning realization that you're watching jaws.
• 1:57:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, it's, yeah, absolutely perfect movie, but no, yes, what Jurassic Park work, and it's not doing it within the framework of all this as a Jurassic Park movie, so it's able to actually do interesting things with it.
• 1:57:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think as well, the human behavior in note is something that you've so rarely see, but the reaction of, oh, well, we got to film this and get it on Oprah.
• 1:57:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what about 80 percent of people would do upon seeing a U.S. or, but it is so rarely depicted in any kind of fiction.
• 1:57:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I also I love Angel, the character in that that he's response is like, you're looking for UFO.
• 1:57:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, they're actually called U.A.
• 1:57:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: P's.
• 1:57:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are and they're just like,
• 1:57:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Also just a heat death plug a buddy of mine perfect segue because I think we're going to wrap it up So I was going to ask what's next on on heat death.
• 1:57:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: So plug away.
• 1:57:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this one this one has already been written the Good friend of mine Kelly wrote a really incredible analysis of note through the lens of talking about it as a film about animal behavior and The sort of fundamental unknowability of
• 1:58:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: as it were alien minds, which I think if anyone has listened to this discussion and is interested by that, that is something that they should absolutely go and read.
• 1:58:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: What else might they encounter on the heat death website?
• 1:58:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what they will currently encounter is we have a number of really good guest pieces.
• 1:58:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got some pieces about the like hunting landscapes through history.
• 1:58:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got a really incredible piece about costuming and star wars, which you should absolutely everyone should go and read.
• 1:58:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I actually have a couple of pieces that I am in the process of working on, including the big decline in fall piece that blends together solo and or and rogue one.
• 1:58:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for those who don't know, decline in fall is our sort of historical, our look at Star Wars through the lens of both in university history and the decline in fall of American Empire.
• 1:59:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: This piece has been a bear and it's been very difficult, but I think it's going to be incredible when it's done, but
• 1:59:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a lot.
• 1:59:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like there's a lot of jumping around in time in real universe time even if the sort of chronology of solo to end or to row one is pretty straightforward.
• 1:59:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asher, where can people find you besides your website?
• 1:59:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can find me most easily on BlueSky, where I am at OSHURLBIN, ASHER, ELB-E-I-N, dot BlueSky.
• 1:59:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is usually where I hang out too much online.
• 1:59:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you have seen me on Instagram or Facebook, know you haven't.
• 1:59:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there or heat death or my website, OSHURLBIN.com is where I collect stories, although it hasn't been updated in a while.
• 1:59:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can also find my writing and my brother's writing and the writing of many incredible guest writers including Tansi who I hope will come back again at some point.
• 1:59:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm waving but you can't see it on heat death, which is heat-death.go.io and come subscribe and if you grab a paid subscription for $2 to $5 all of that money goes to pay our guests on our web hosting so it's a entirely supported by listeners and readers like you.
• 2:00:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: and folks can find you on a number of other reputable locations.
• 2:00:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 2:00:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 2:00:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Also, I'm a journalist.
• 2:00:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I write for the New York Times National Geographic Scientific American a number of places.
• 2:00:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you Google OSHA, Elbine, my work will come up.
• 2:00:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fabulous.
• 2:00:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Tanzi, what's happening with going rogue?
• 2:00:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've got another season coming, which is exciting.
• 2:00:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've done a lot of stand-alone in the past year or so.
• 2:00:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Excited.
• 2:00:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we have got a full season really diving far too deep into one particular film.
• 2:00:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: he's the tragic figure of an episode in there.
• 2:00:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I don't, I don't know whether this will be before or after that episode goes up, that depends entirely on me getting my shit together, but I won't say what film it is just for safety, but you can probe bubbly guests.
• 2:01:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: what film Colin Travore was involved with and then suddenly not involved with, but that's been a bit of a beast.
• 2:01:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the current episodes are sitting at about 20,000 words each.
• 2:01:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They will hopefully be much shorter by the time it goes out.
• 2:01:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot to talk about there.
• 2:01:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just heard a million fingers doing a million internet searches, trying to look at it.
• 2:01:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Alan Chowaro's filmography.
• 2:01:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Real heads will know immediately what film it is just based off of that.
• 2:01:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so that is what's next on the horizon for us.
• 2:01:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's been a long time coming, but it is actually coming now, hopefully by the end of the year.
• 2:01:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you as well are an independent producer.
• 2:01:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So folks want to support you.
• 2:01:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have a Patreon, which is very well priced relative to the quality that you produce.
• 2:02:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: You are one of the higher quality podcasts I've heard on the internet these days.
• 2:02:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
• 2:02:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're very low quantity.
• 2:02:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: We make it up for it.
• 2:02:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think we've only done like four episodes this year.
• 2:02:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's been a weird one.
• 2:02:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, we will.
• 2:02:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They've been very good episodes.
• 2:02:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will more than double the number of episodes we've done this year.
• 2:02:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: If we managed to get this one in the can in time, so.
• 2:02:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And folks can all find you also where the skies are blue.
• 2:02:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I'm on blue sky.
• 2:02:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm Tanzi G there, but don't quote beyond that.
• 2:02:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm bad at remembering what any of my handles are.
• 2:02:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's quite alright.
• 2:02:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, the show is the main thing.
• 2:02:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I also write things, but the main thing is going rogue.
• 2:02:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Excellent.
• 2:02:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asher, Kanzi, really great to have a conversation with both of you.
• 2:02:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love heat death, I love going rogue, and so for me it's a real treat to get to hang out with both of you and talk about something in a report to do me again.
• 2:03:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Asher, thank you.
• 2:03:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for suggesting the topic.
• 2:03:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thank you so much for having us.
• 2:03:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was an absolute blast.
• 2:03:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, thank you.
• 2:03:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for having us.
• 2:03:33
  [UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
• 2:03:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: The Laura Hound podcast is produced and published by the Laura Hounds.
• 2:03:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can send questions and comments to LauraHounds at thewarhounds.com.
• 2:03:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Get ad free access to all the Laura Hound's podcasts on Patreon or Supercasts and connect with us on Blue Sky and Join us on our Discord server.
• 2:03:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Links for everything are in the link tree in the show notes of this episode.
• 2:03:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Any opinions stated are ours personally and do not reflect the opinion of or belong to any employers or other entities.
• 2:04:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for listening!