“Oooh! Honey! We’ve been invited to the Special VIP Feeding Time Show!”
Do they have a coupon day?
They would almost certainly have had to figure out the sedative doses anyway already, for other vet functions. This is a 20 year old functioning zoo, remember.
And why would it be nearly irreplaceable? Unless it gets completed nuked, even dead it’s a giant pile of DNA. It’s not like they have to go digging for mosquitoes in amber again. Worst case, it takes a few years for the new batch to get big and scary and entertaining again. And in movieland, theyalways have growth acceleration for clones!
“Cool, I bet that usually costs an arm and a leg!”
I’m skeptical about the idea of 20,000 daily visitors. I found some websites claiming that Disneyland sees about 40,000 visitors daily and that’s in densely populated Southern California and you can drive there. But for an American to visit this park, you have to fly to Costa Rica and then they have to have enough ferries to move 20,000 people in and out of the park. It’s supposedly 120 miles from Costa Rica, so that’s perhaps a three or four hour ride, one way.
Well, one the problem in JP1 was that the supposedly all female dinosaurs were doing some wacky reptile gender shifting (because of frog DNA?) and were having litters off in the woods. You can’t put fail safes on something you don’t know exist.
But yes, putting a souped up shock collar on your T-Rex seems like a very sensible idea. (They should also be spayed or neutered, taken for walks every day, and given regular tickles.)
The most unrealistic part of Jurassic Park was that the Tyrannosaur was not covered in fuzzy yellow down like a baby duck, the way Tyrannosaurs were in real life.
I mean, we know for a fact that Velociraptors had feathers, so it only stands to reason that Tyrannosaurs did. And since they did, it only stands to reason that they were primitive feathers like down. And since they had primitive feathers, it only stands to reason that those feathers were yellow and fluffy. It’s just good science.
I take it the frog DNA was a catch-all for any discrepancy between JP dinos and what science eventually uncovers (though feathers were discovered before the book was even written, IIRC). I don’t know if that was actually the intent, but it’s a clever device.
The fact that 'raptors started sporting feather crests (male leastways) suggests that they were, by degrees, eliminating non-dino traits via sexual selection. One of 3’s minor redeeming points, I think.
I think I once read a fan fic that addressed this. The first batch of dinosaurs came out feathered, but either Wu’s staff thought it was a mutation caused by the cloning process & eliminated it or the marketing department wanted dinosaurs that looked like the pop culture image because that’s what audiences expect.
I’ll second that; Dr. Grant’s diatribe about how the animals weren’t “true” dinosaurs, but rather genetic freaks based on dinosaurs made at least some of the scientific inaccuracies plausible. Why no feathers? They’re genetically modified dinos. Why are the T.rex’s arms pronated like a begging dog’s? Genetically modified dinos. Why on earth would the T.rex not be able to see non-moving people, or be able to smell them at least when they’re right in front of her nose? Genetically modified dinos.
When I saw the feather-spike crests on the raptors in JP3, I thought, “ah-ha!” by the time the next JP comes out, we should be seeing at least some downy coverings on the chicks, if nothing else!"
And that’s why they have the fleet of luxury Plesiosaurs for the ferry crossing.
That’s a good point, though I’m not sure it’s insurmountable. Large jet planes can move 500 people in a go and 40 daily flights isn’t out of the question. An airport on the island would reduce the need for ferries, but there are still some impressive ferries out there in actual service - the largest (theMS Ulysses) runs a 75-mile route in the UK with 2000 passengers and 1300 cars on board.
The worldwide demand for a park like this would certainly make some of this feasible at least while initial demand is high. After all, even Disneyland has to compete with three other theme parks in/near LA (Magic Mountain, Knott’s Berry and Universal). On the worldwide scene, there are three Disneys, and hundreds of total competitors. A Jurassic Park would truly have a unique monopoly.
Or- “bad writing”.
A wizard did it.
How weird would it be if they just had the movie be about humans and conflicts with each other and the park never has any loose dinos?
The MS Ulysses can go at 22 knots, so that’s a six-hour journey from Costa Rica. And you’d need ten ferries like that for the traffic to and from the park. So for a trip that long, no one is making a day trip out there, but instead would have to stay overnight, perhaps for two or three days. So maybe the answer is that they only offer week-long vacations. That might explain the other activities on the island, as described in the quote in the OP.
That’s a pretty interesting idea, reminds me of “The Specials”, a movie about group of superheroes that is completely about their interpersonal issues, and doesn’t have a single scene of superheroics.
Yeah, exactly. So there are some ways to make 20,000 visitors possible, even if you do wind up with something that’s a logistical challenge and a huge cost multiplier for the visitors.
The main problem with Jurassic Park, be it the movie version or book version, was that literally everyone involved was incredibly shitty at doing their job.
John’s not railing against much these days, although I suspect he’s a cryo candidate and might be back some day.