Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Shirley Can't Be Serious Podcast.
This is episode three of our Jaws Versus Jurassic Park episode.
We're on vacation this week. We hope you're enjoying your
vacation time with your family. The crazy thing about Jaws
and Jurassic Park when we first put this out in
twenty twenty, they were the number one and number two
movies at the box office because of stupid COVID, which
we all freaking hated, but people were still going to
the drive ins and drive in theaters were showing Jaws
in Jurassic.
Speaker 2: Park because they are two iconic movies, two big Spielberg
movies from the seventies and the nineties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is the fiftieth anniversary of Jaws, so
enjoy this final episode of our Jaws Versus Jurassic Park comparison.
Speaker 2: Okay, guys, and we're going to be talking about Jaws
again with our friend Chuck Bryan at the Cinematic Flashback
Podcast where we're going to deep dive into it again.
It's a great podcast, go check it out. It's got
all kinds of good episodes and we're excited to talk
to you about Jaws again now fifty years later.
Speaker 1: All right, everybody, welcome back to episode three of Jaws
versus Jurassic Park.
Speaker 3: This is gonna be the Kapper.
Speaker 1: This is where we're gonna give our final judgment on
these two great films.
Speaker 2: I'm super excited to talk about Quin's speech and the
composer for both of these movies who is an icon?
But I am not quite as excited as I am
about what's coming up next week, which is Guns N'
Roses Appetite for Destruction versus ac DC, Back and Black.
And the first one that we tackle is Appetite for
Destruction and it's gonna get released on the thirty third
anniversary of the release of the album. How awesome is that?
So you guys, be sure and whatever app you're using
right now, be sure and subscribe or follow or do
whatever you need to do to automatically download so that
you don't miss that episode next week. And without further ado.
Speaker 4: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Surely You Can't Be
Serious podcast, discussing and debating the iconic and the forgotten
of eighties and nineties pop culture with your co hosts
James D. Graves and Jason Coliban.
Speaker 2: Welcome back everybody to these Surely you can't be serious podcasts.
We are on part three of our Jaws Versus Jurassic
Park episode. We are going to dive right in forgive
the pun there. So both of the movies start off
with a death scene. Right in Jaws, you have Chrissy
being attacked by an unseen monster underneath the water, and
that sets the impetus for the whole first portion Act
one of the movie, if you will, same thing happens
in Jurassic Park. We start off with a death scene.
Despite you know, amazing scientific abilities, for some reason, they
can't get a kid that just locks in place. And
so guy falls in and you have the Muldoon character
who's doing everything.
Speaker 5: He can't.
Speaker 2: Close up on his teeth closer, closer, and one of
his teeth. I kind of want to see the.
Speaker 1: Cavity get close the lling. Here's the other thing about
that scene that drives me insane. Okay, whatever they're shooting
the velasciraptor with is not working, okay, right, Okay, the
little zappers, the bug zappers pull out the shotguns. Okay, yeah,
shoot hard with the bazuka.
Speaker 2: So both of those set the story going for the
first act of the movie. So with Jaws, you get
this idea that there's a shark out there, maybe we
should shut things down, and then you begin the power
struggle to determine whether the beach gets shut down or
whether it doesn't get shut down. If we switch over
to Jurassic Park, the death is the impetus behind the
lawyer going to the park and putting together the team
of people to establish whether this park is really safe
or not. Do you have the very strange scene where
there's a kid out on an archaeological dig that gets
threatened by doctor Grant.
Speaker 3: That's not very scary, you know.
Speaker 2: There These are incredibly well done movies, but they're definitely
parts that I was just like, why did we choose
to do it this way? Why is there a kid
out there in the middle of this, and why is
he like a smart alecky, little snot nosed brat kid
of all things?
Speaker 1: Yeah, somebody's dad needs to whoop him for talking back
to doctor Grant.
Speaker 2: Is And they're all around the computer like I mean,
they're hovering. They're hovering over the computer where we established
this idea that doctor Grant doesn't like computer seeing the
machines don't get along, right, So it's that whole man
versus technology thing. And then this kid, who three feet
back from the entire crowd is able to look at
the screen and go not scary. So the impetus is
said in place so that these experts are called in
to establish whether the park is safe or not. And
of the course the lawyer, whose job it is to
come in and really scrutinize this for the investors, once
he sees the dinosaurs with everybody else, he becomes full on,
let's forget about safety. We're going to make millions and
millions of dollars, which is of course what this is
the big issue in this movie. It's all about money
versus how safe is it. We're going to make a
fortune with this place. And then, of course the lawyer,
the bloodsucking lawyer who's the only one that's agreeing with
John Hammond, is also the first one to die, and
appropriately so toiletting on top of a toilet.
Speaker 1: The toilet, yeah, thanks to Jeff Goldblum's character, who wouldn't
stay in the car.
Speaker 2: Well, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: He leads the t Rex to the toilet.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he does that's right, Yeah, yeah, that's right. Right,
So let me ask you this to the toilet, Yes,
what was your thought whenever you the scene didn't go
the way that originally it wasn't written that way. It
was Jeff Goldbloom's suggestion that he also grab atorch and
try to distract the t rex. And so you have
this great moment where doctor Grant distracts the t Rex
from the kids. He throws the flare into the park.
The dinosaur looks and makes a motion to follow the flare,
only to be distracted again by another flare. Ian Malcolm,
we're waving another flare who then brings him back, which
I mean, you see the look on doctor Grant's face,
and it's absolutely appropriate. It's like everybody he is, he
is the audience at that point, like what the f
are you doing?
Speaker 1: Supposedly to heroically get the kids, you know, but he
brings the te right back to him, goes off to
the toilet, gets the lawyer killed, and breaks his leg
in the process. Not very heroic in my opinion, but
it was better than the runaway that he was originally
gonna do.
Speaker 2: So we've talked before how Chief Brody was every man. Right,
he's supposed to be the audience. Right. So one of
the big ideas with Jaws, and I mentioned this in
our last episode, is this idea of the power struggle. Right,
it's the pissing contest, and it's almost exclusively man and
nature and man and man that's involved. Here we got
Brody versus the mayor and he's the new guy, and
here's a big idea that kind of gets lost in
the movie, but it's there is this idea of an
islander and a non islander, Like you know, the kid
at the beginning he talks about, you know, are you
you know, from the island, and he's like, oh, I
live this other place, he says, but I was born here,
which makes him an islander. And then later on the
woman is you know, Brody's wife is like, well, one
am I an islander? And she's like, Ellen, you'll never
be an islander. You weren't born here. You'll never it
doesn't matter how long you're here. Right. So it's this
insider versus outsider thing that goes along with the power
struggle that's going on between Brody and the mayor, right, right.
And then you have, of course, you know the probably
the biggest pissing contest is between quin and.
Speaker 3: Hooper, right, yes, yes, for sure.
Speaker 2: And but before you even get there, even the mayor
and Hooper have their little power struggle as well. You know,
you'd like to prove that would and you get your
name in one of those national geographic magazines or whatever
it is.
Speaker 1: He says, right, I'm not talking to a man who's
lining up to be a hot lunch.
Speaker 2: Right right. And then you also have this kind of
weird dynamic when they're all on the boat together of
Quinton Hooper, who even though they're warring with each other,
they have a power struggle with Brody. They're not letting
Brody do anything. I mean, we'll get the freaking chief
of police on the boat and he's like subservient to
everything that they're saying. You know, they might gets yelled
at for messing with the tanks, and then Shaw he's like,
it's okay, you just ask me like a condescending little
It's this neat power dynamic, and they do a great
job both in the script writing and the acting of
without overtly saying it, establishing that power contest.
Speaker 3: Right yep.
Speaker 2: So back to my original idea. Brody, we see him
and we know from the beginning that he's a protector, right,
he's talking to the kids, don't swing on the swing
it's broken, right, and he's willing to admit that he's
wrong when he's made mistakes, specifically not closing the beaches
and letting Alex die is wrong and he's not your fault,
Yes it was. She's wrong, as we said, she's wrong. No,
she's not. And so you see this character development of
Brody going through this process, you know, and he has
to He's already kind of left his known spot and
come into this little island that he's not familiar with,
and then he really has to go into the unknown
of the water because we learned at the beginning he
hates the water. I don't know why he moved to
be the chief of police of an island town when
he hates the water.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and we don't really get a sense of
why he hates the water, do we. I don't think
that's ever really mentioned.
Speaker 2: No, huh. Hooper tells his story in a little bit.
We can talk about Quinn and his story, so we
understand why they don't. But the most we get is
you know, they call it that fear. What's it called?
Speaker 3: And he goes drowning, right, drowning not so good.
Speaker 2: So Brody goes through this entire you know, we get
to the second death and then he has to go
through this entire process where he moves from being the
guy that everybody's picking on or condescending to and who
he can't have a voice for. So he's the last
guy left. And where is he. He's in the middle
of the water on a sinking ship. He is facing
his biggest fear. We've talked about it with Indiana Jones.
We talked about it with Marty McFly. Chief Brody is
stuck in his biggest fear and what is that. He's
in the water sinking, but he has grown. We watched
Chief Brody grow up and become a man so that
he is able to save everyone else, even and he
thinks probably sacrificing his own life so that everyone else
can be said.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's good.
Speaker 1: When they were filming these types of scenes out at sea,
Spielberg really wanted to make sure you could not ever
see land, because I wanted them to be isolated. And
there was this thought process that if you could see land.
Then if they got in trouble, they just take the
boat back. You know, we'll get them tomorrow, you know.
So I wanted them to feel isolated, and I thought
it was funny. This is of course before digital removing anything.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So they would be out at sea and there would
be a sailboat that would come into like the right
edge of the frame, and they had to wait and
wait and wait for that sailboat to completely cross across
all the way from the right side to the left side,
and then had to pray that there's not another sailboat
on the right side the screen.
Speaker 2: Right. I mean, this was all because Steven Spielberg was like,
we have to shoot this on the real ocean, right right,
that's right. Had they been on a lake, had they
been in a back lot, none of this would have
been a problem. But we also if you look at
this movie, this movie has a reality that I will
go ahead and say our other movie, even though they
were filming in an actual place, it doesn't seem to
have to be like the other movie has a cartoon
quality about it. I don't know what. I don't know
how to describe it exactly, but there is a reality
that I get with Jaws that is missing in Jurassic Park.
What do you think.
Speaker 1: I agree with you that the elements of Jaws are
just as life threatening as the shark. Whereas the jungle.
You know, doctor Grant and the kids they go to
sleep in the jungle, they're sleeping with giant dino cows,
you know what I mean. So it's just not as
threatening as deep ocean.
Speaker 2: To that to Jurassic Park. Our main character, of course
is doctor Grant, and we learn from the beginning, not
only does he scare the crap out of the little
kid by basically threatening to disembowel him, he doesn't want kids, right,
they smell, yeah, and they're loud, you know it's but
he doesn't like kids. The relationship that he has with
Sadler is so so subtle. I don't know that I
even noticed that they were actually romantically involved for the
first several times I watched it. I mean, what do
they hug maybe half a second in the movie. There's
no romance.
Speaker 3: I don't think there really is.
Speaker 1: I think we're supposed to believe that there is, but
I don't see any kind of chemistry romantically between them
at all.
Speaker 3: Really, no, huh, Do they kiss? No, no, hug? Do
they hold hands?
Speaker 2: I kind of think that maybe Ian Malcolm touches her
more than doctor Grant.
Speaker 3: I think you're right.
Speaker 2: So doctor Grant doesn't like children, but then is thrown
into this situation again where he has to protect it.
And it's one of my favorite parts in the movie.
And Lex screams, he left us, he left us, and
he says, yes, but I'm not going to At that moment,
he becomes responsible for the lives of others, and so
he starts with He starts as this guy who is
interested only in dead old things and doesn't want to
be involved with kids, and ends up with a guy
who hates the dinosaurs and loves the kids. He grows
to be their protector over the course of the movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's interesting.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I did want to talk
about is I mean, you talk about this tension between
Quinn and.
Speaker 3: Hooper back to Jaws. Yeah, there was a tension between
Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and it's rather famous. You know, Shaw had
been acting for much of his life at that point,
He's in his late forties. He started acting when he
was in his early twenties, and so he's been around
a while now. Richard Dreyfus had been in a few
small things, but it hadn't been very many years before
that that he had really gotten his first major film experiences.
He had a couple, he had like two lines in
the Graduate, and then he gets he gets this part
in American Graffiti, right, yep. And that one's a decent
that's a decent supporting role for him. And then he
gets his first starring role that we talked about last episode, in.
Speaker 3: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, right.
Speaker 2: And so he is he's a young guy. I mean,
he's a young and relatively speaking, inexperienced guy. And so
Robert Shaw would have this this power dynamic put with
him that he said, you know, he was the nicest
guy in the world to me when we weren't on set,
and then once we got on set, it became this
condescending make fun of him, you know, do whatever you
can to goad him for the entire production. And I
have heard this that during this production of this movie,
you know, they're in a beach, right, and so tourists
come in and there a lot of them are young
girls in bathing suits, and the crew was pretty familiar.
But everybody said that Richard Dreyfus was the man with
regard to the young ladies who might be taking their
vacation in Martha's vineyard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, movie crews in general, when they come to your
town are pretty popular guys, and Richard Dreyfus and some
of his buddies tried to enjoy as much of the
benefits of being a movie star as they possibly could.
Speaker 2: Right, So there may have he Obviously, Richard Dreyfus probably
has a little bit of confidence as he's coming in
and Robert Shaw is trying to put that in place.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: On the flip side of that, Robert Shaw has a drinking.
Speaker 3: Problem, for sure, Absolutely he does.
Speaker 2: Now there are certain contingent of British actors who are
just known for being heavy drinkers. We talked about Oliver
Reed when we had our Gladiator episode and how he
hung with Peter O'Toole and some of those guys, and
it sounds like Robert Shaw probably would't fit in very
well with those folks, yep, for sure, and he was
willing to admit it. Apparently. I've heard a couple of
different versions of this story, and one version goes Robert
Shaw was, you know, trying to move along the boat
and had to use two hands to do something, but
he had a drink in one hand, and he says
to Richard Dreyfus, can you help me out with this?
And Richard Dreyfus says, you want me to help you
out with it? He says yeah, and the hands in
the glass and Richard Dreyfus immediately just chunks it into
the ocean. And then the other version was I've got
a drinking problem? Can anybody help me? And it's at
that point that Richard Dreyfus takes his drink and throws
it into the ocean. Either way, it's funny. It's a
funny response to the heckling that he's been getting from
this actor all the while that they're on stage.
Speaker 1: It was the funny, but the entire crew was like, uh, oh,
we might have a blow up right here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and we don't want to give Shaw
too much credit credit. I mean he was He was like,
you're such a pandemic. I bet you won't even climb
to the top of the mast on the ship, right
And he keeps offering him more and more money to
do it, and finally Spielberg is like, you're not allowed.
I am saying, as the director of this movie, you
are forbidden to climb to the top of that mask
because it looked like Gryfus was about to go do
it right, right, And it's the same power struggle that
you see going on on film.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's talk about the scene that they
discussed the Indianapolis.
Speaker 3: I thought this was brilliant.
Speaker 2: So that part was not in the book at all.
It was Howard Sackler's idea. He said, hey, you should
have him have been on the USS Indianapolis. And Spielberg
didn't know what it was. I mean, I didn't know
what it was until I saw the movie. It's not
you know now that this movie, now, being forty five
years old, it's something that everybody knows. But even back
in nineteen seventy five, it wasn't common knowledge. You didn't
know about the event unless you're related to somebody or
you were somebody that was on that ship, right.
Speaker 3: Right, right.
Speaker 1: They needed something for the character to hate sharks. Why
does he hate sharks so much? Why is he dead
set on getting this shark right, the Indianapolis gives us
the reason.
Speaker 2: Right, And so Howard Sackler had come up with the idea.
And then I mentioned before John Millius had been involved
with the script and was a good friend of Steven Spielberg.
He was one of the guys there with Spielberg and
Lucas when they came in and broke the Shark, and
he took it upon himself to develop that particular monologue,
that scene, and he wrote a ten page monologue for this,
which is too much. I mean, you got to figure
there's approximately one minute for each page. Somebody talking for
ten solid minutes is too much. And so they had
the scene, they couldn't figure out exactly how how to
whittle it down. And it was Robert Shaw who said,
can I take a stab at it? Can I take can?
Will you give it to me and let me work
on it a little bit? And he took it home
and he worked on it, or he took it back
and he worked on it overnight and came back with
roughly a five page script and Spielberg looked at it
and said, this is perfect.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And then on the day of filming, Robert Shaw said, Hey,
before I do this, I think I'm gonna have a
few drinks. And Spielberg is like, m all right, you know,
method actor, Sure, go for it, all right?
Speaker 3: And he got hammered.
Speaker 1: He got hammered, got he got hammer headed, and I
mean he was he was slashed, and he couldn't do it.
The next day he came back and said, how bad
did I embarrass myself? Spielberg said, well, I don't really
know if we can use much of that. Well, I'd
like another shot at it. Can I have another shot?
Speaker 3: And then he came back and he nailed it.
Speaker 2: He didn't just nail it, he changed the entire perception
of the movie in one take. He made everyone in
the crew, that Steven Spielberg, everyone in the cast, suddenly go,
this is a movie that might be a success. Because
up until that point they had dealt with the shark,
they had dealt with the script problems, they had dealt
with the problems of filming in the ocean, and Steven
Spielberg thought he was going to get fired every single day.
He almost went and quit the production. And then in
a moment, everyone's perception changed.
Speaker 3: Yep, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: You know, you talk about Steven Spielberg thinking every day
he is going to be fired. He used to sleep
with Celery under his pillow because it was considered good luck.
Speaker 3: But you're exactly right.
Speaker 1: That scene gave them that sort of emotional connection between
the characters where they thought, Okay, this is more than
just a silly shark movie.
Speaker 3: We got some here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it it's still watching. Every time that I
see that scene, I am entranced. I know exactly what
he's going to say. I can almost quote it for
you word for word, and I just sit there and
am totally engrossed in it. And it's at the it's
just after that moment that the shark comes back.
Speaker 1: The scars that they're showing, like the scar scene, Yeah,
it's funny, and I think one of them is an
actual scar.
Speaker 3: Richard Dreyfas shows.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so they're comparing scars and it's it is
wonderful because this is the way it is with men, right.
You know, you you fight and then you become best friends. Right,
You antagonize an antagony. It's like being on a sports team. Right,
It's you are constantly giving the other guy crap. You're
trash talking, and then something happens that brings you guys together,
and suddenly you're the best of friends. Right, yes, And
so that's what happens when they start talking about the scars,
that somebody points out a scar. What happened to you?
What happened to me? You know? And they're showing scars
of where they were attacked by eels or attacked by sharks,
and suddenly Quin and Hooper have found their common ground.
And Brody has this wonderful little moment where he lifts
up his shirt and looks at an appendix scar to
try to decide whether he should mention it, and then
decides not to mention it. And that scar, as it
turns out, is actually Roy Scheider actually had an appendectomy.
It was a real scar. Wait wait, wait, let me
guess mother. Okay, so with both of these movies, you
have this idea of man versus nature, intellect versus ignorance, right, Okay,
so you know, the the intellect for Jaws is obviously
the Whooper and Quint and a little bit of Brodie,
and then the intellect for Jurassic Park is all of
the archaeologists and doctor Ian Malcolm and then you have
what you believe to be the ignorant animals, right, the
ignorant shark or the ignorant dinosaurs. But what makes these
things truly scary is they don't seem to be that
ignorant for sure, that's right. Right, So this it turns
from intellect versus ignorance to intellect versus something almost supernatural,
because not only is this thing gigantic and powerful and deadly,
it also appears that it's smart.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: The scene where the shark goes underneath the boat, really
he's taken by surprise, right, use the audience. You're thinking, man,
this guy's in charge, and he knows exactly what's going
on until now, and now he's like whoa.
Speaker 2: Right, And that's when, Yeah, that's when. That's when Quint
and Hooper's power struggle suddenly takes a turn, right, because
with them you had Hooper's intellect versus Quint's know how
and experience and the working class kind of idea, and
he Quin has done nothing but belittle Hooper's fancy gadgets
and stuff until the point that he realizes that the
shark is smart too. And it's at that point that
he says what exactly can you do with these things
of yours?
Speaker 3: Yep, that's really cool.
Speaker 1: Hey, there is something about that right around that moment
that I want to mention. There is a scene where
Chief Brody is loading his revolver and it's sort of
set at dusk and you see a massive shooting star.
Did you notice this when you watch the movie every time?
That is not an optical effect. They just happen to
catch that shooting star at that moment, and it looks
super cool.
Speaker 2: Dumb luck to find the movie.
Speaker 3: Right, they got so many dumb luck. Yes, it's InCred.
Speaker 2: So we have the Leviathan versus man in both scenarios,
which goes to the idea of super much supernatural power
versus mankind. You've got mythic, unemotional, almost demonic and unbeatable
with intellect with but both with intellect. Shark and dinosaurs,
and I love I love Iam Malcolm's lines and all
of this. He is the guy who's trying to he's
he's mocking, but he is absolutely right in everything that
he says. Right, life will not be contained, Life finds
a way. He says what you call I call discovery,
I call the rape of the natural world. He realizes
that they are just hurtling headlong into this idea without
taking the time to think about it. You're so preoccup
you're so preoccupied with whether they could, they never stopped
to think of whether they should.
Speaker 1: He actually even says the line, boy do I hate
being right all the time. Okay, I've got a couple
of little tidbits that I want to throw at jet.
I think you're going to be amazed. I really will
be surprised if you heard this stuff. All right, Okay,
so the shark in Jaws doesn't show up until one
hour and two minutes into the film.
Speaker 3: Okay, yes, in.
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park, the full view of the adult Veloci raptor
doesn't show up until one forty three into the movie.
Almost two hours into the movie. You don't get the
full view of the raptor.
Speaker 3: Here is my tidbit.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know the scene where the local fishermen put
like a brisket on a hook and they throw it,
and they're sitting on that rickety old doc that's just
barely hanging on by three nails.
Speaker 3: Sure enough, boom, shark hits it.
Speaker 1: The chain starts to go, and they're like well, look
at that, Charlie, and the doc.
Speaker 3: Falls apart and he drags it out to see.
Speaker 1: That's a really tense scene, right, drags that guy on
the dock out to the to you know, one hundred
yards off shore, and the doc turns around, starts to
come back, and the guy's going to swim, Charlie swim.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So first is the first point that you suddenly
go this shark is not just a mindless man eater. Yep,
he's coming back. Yep, he's turned around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's gonna make Charlie pay for this decision. But
there was a young filmmaker on set that day who
was just stopping by to see how things were going,
and they're like, all right, you hey, come over here,
grab a hammer and nails and help us put together
this rickety old doc. Do you know who that filmmaker was, No, Jason,
I don't know who that is.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me.
Speaker 1: The young filmmaker on set that day that built that
crappy little doc none other than John Landis, director of
Coming to America, Trading Places America.
Speaker 3: We're from London, Animal House.
Speaker 2: That's awesome. Good, that's a great tidbit. We're going to
put that one on the trivia card.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: A couple of little tidbits also for you that I
thought were interesting. The voice on the radio on Quint's
boat when Missus Brodie tries to contact her husband is
actually Steven Spielberg's Ye. Peter Benchley has a cameo as
a news reporter on the beaches, yes, which is kind
of cool. Okay, here's another tidbit for you. Quin's boat
is called the Orca in real life, the Orca whale,
which we typically call the killer whale.
Speaker 2: Yes, is the only known.
Speaker 3: Predator of the great white shark.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: Pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Huh yeah.
Speaker 3: And then finally I thought this was interesting.
Speaker 1: Nobody else may find it interesting, but the sound editor,
the sound editor who had to find sound effects for
everything in the movie.
Speaker 3: When the shark comes out of the water and.
Speaker 1: Onto Quint's boat, Yes, the sound effect that he used
right there is a fizzy bottle of coke poured out
on the concrete.
Speaker 3: It goes random, he jumps out, and it's like.
Speaker 2: That'd be fun job to have sound editor to just go,
this is a cool sound. Let's see what I can
put this with.
Speaker 3: I would love to fully artist if.
Speaker 2: You would to need a pig poke. And so then
of course once they finished filming and we talked about
how they did the editing process, and at Vernon Field's
pool they poured milk in the water so that they
could shoot that scare scene. And I just to touch
on Vernon Fields. She was somebody who had done like
TV editing and wasn't particularly big in Hollywood, but you know,
knew her way around. She started teaching at USC and
a couple of people that happened to be in her
classes were George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Of them, who
are they? And so she had such a great mind
that really hadn't been appreciated at that point. But when
George Lucas like, need I need an editor, I'm gonna
go call Vernie. She was smart as whip. I like
Vernon yep, And so she gets involved there. She gets
involved with Steven Spielberg because she actually worked with him,
I think on Sugarland expressed as well. When she was teaching,
she actually hired This is crazy. She hired George Lucas
before he hired her, when he was still just in
at USC. She hired him and also hired a lady
named Marcia Griffin who ended up being his future wife
and is also an editor, and who you know because
you were the one that sent me the video on
how Star Wars was saved by the editing. It was
because of Marcia Griffin that Star Wars probably was the
success that it was instead of a dismal failure.
Speaker 3: It's absolutely correct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that video is really cool. If you haven't seen it,
you need to check it out. But yeah, Marshall Lucas
cut Star Wars to get rid of all the confusing
crap and streamlined it to the to the movie that
we know and love today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, on first showing, everybody hated.
Speaker 3: It this crap. I don't understand any of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so as Marsha Griffin that came in and
say it, who had been introduced to George Lucas by
Verna Fields. Verna Fields then gets called by Steven Spielberg
to edit Sugarland Express and they start to call her
the mother cutter.
Speaker 3: Nice nice, yes, right, and.
Speaker 2: Just just to talk about her amazing ability. She developed this.
She pioneered a technique called wipe by cut, where the
cut takes place as like a figure crosses between the
camera and the character, which so you're at a distant shot,
somebody walks in front of the camera, and suddenly you're
at a close up shot because you do the cut
right as the person crosses in front of the camera,
and so you were having what would normally be called
a jump cut, where you've got a staggering thing into
something that you don't even notice that it happens. Because
of this wipe by cut type of procedure that we're
in a Field's pioneered after editing those movies and Jaws,
she was nominated for the Oscar and she won. She
goes on to be a Hollywood executive. At that point,
she moves from the lady editing TV shows to the
lady who's now ordering people around at major Hollywood studios.
And then once they're done with the editing process, the
last thing left to do put in the soundtrack.
Speaker 3: Before we do that, I just want to mention one thing. Yeah,
on Jaws.
Speaker 1: They were scheduled for fifty five days of shooting right
May first to June twenty eighth, nineteen seventy four. They
actually finished in one hundred and fifty nine days. That's
three times what they were scheduled for this is late
September when they wrapped Flash Forward to nineteen nine tinety three.
Principal photography was wrapped on November twelfth, nineteen ninety two.
That's twelve days ahead of schedule and on budget. Spilberg
learned a great deal from Jaws, and he applied that
to later movies.
Speaker 2: Okay, so onto soundtrack in both of these movies, the
composer is the same. You may have heard of this guy.
His name is John Williams.
Speaker 3: The soundtrack for My Youth is John Williams music.
Speaker 2: You cannot have watched movies in the eighties and not
heard a soundtrack by John Williams. It's the greatest of
the soundtracks. Like if you put soundtrack greatest hits of
the eighties, it's all John Williams.
Speaker 3: Absolutely is Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you I don't care who you are, you've
been living in a forest in the entire time for
the past forty years.
Speaker 3: You've heard the Star Wars theme.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anybody, if I come up to you, it's like
it's like the watch on bad. If I come up
to you, I go, dud. You know exactly what I'm
going to do. Right. That's two notes, two notes that
he made into something amazing. I'll tell you the story
of John Williams.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I did so.
Speaker 2: John was born to John and so most people call
John Williams Johnny because that was his name growing up.
His dad was also a music guy who worked in
music for films. They ended up moving out to la
where he went to high school with his future wife.
They didn't actually date while they were in high school,
but Barbara Ruick met her there. She went on to
become an actress and was in several movies and films
and TV shows in the fifties and was a singer
as well. Had a musical background. And there's this really
cool here's my interesting tie in for this particular episode. Right,
So I saw this picture of Barbara Ruick dancing with
Bob Fosse and a couple of other folks, Debbie Reynolds,
somebody else on the affairs of Dobie Gillis. Bob Fosse
went on to direct a semi autobiographical picture about himself
called All That Jazz, which starred Russ Schider. Very good.
He had all ties in right, and de.
Speaker 3: Wie Reyalds is mother of Princess Leah.
Speaker 2: Very Good, Very Good.
Speaker 3: All Ties in scored by Johnny Williams.
Speaker 2: And so John Williams gets drafted. He does his military
service as a musician, does pretty well. Ends up. He
themes his first like a promotional video for the Navy
while he's in the Navy, and then he comes back
and has to decide do I want to go to
Juilliard or do I want to go arrange and compose music.
He is pianist. He plays several instruments, but he is
best at piano, and he says, Okay, I'm gonna go
to Juilliard. So he goes to Juilliard to become a
concert piano and after a while there he starts to
look at all of the other pns who are there
and he's like, I'm not as good as these guys.
This is not this is maybe not what I should do,
and that it's crazy. At that moment, he changes movie
history because he decides I'll go back and I'll start
arranging and composing, and that's what he does. He goes
back to la and he before Jaws. He composes dozens
of movies and hundreds of TV show episodes, and so
he's getting his ten thousand hours in and through that
process he decides to start conducting because he doesn't want
to leave it to lesser conductors to get the conducting
right as well. And one of the movies that he
happens to write the score for is a movie called
The Reavers starring Steve McQueen. And I listened to the
soundtrack and it's very It starts off very folky like
if you listen to the theme, it's got this kind
of folky guitar going and Southern style to it, and
then it moves into.
Speaker 5: The orchestra and you're like, there, I could see that's
John Williams.
Speaker 2: You're familiar. You get that John Williams familiarity. And so,
of course that movie came out in sixty nine, right
about the same time that Steven Spielberg is becoming a
director of TV shows, having to write scripts, waiting for
his big break, which is going to be Sugarland Express.
And what he does, because he's the son of a musician,
is he goes and buys soundtracks and listens to them
while he writes his scripts. And I identify with this.
I've done this exact same thing many many times. You
just listen. You'll to classical music, or you listen to soundtracks,
and it inspires you to make a story out of it.
And so that's what he's doing. And so he's at
the album store. He's flipping through the albums and he
sees this album for a soundtrack from the reverse, takes
it home, listening to it, writing a script, writes a
wonderful script, and thinks to himself, Man, this guy is good.
If I ever get a chance to direct a feature film,
I want this guy to be the guy that composes
the soundtrack.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 2: And so, just as it happens a few years later,
he gets the opportunity at a Sugarland Express and he says,
I want John Williams. And so John Williams, who at
this point he's in his early forties. Now, he's been
the young guy most of his life, right, he has been.
The directors have all been older than he is, and
he's been the young guy who's learning the ropes. But
then with Spielberg, I mean, Spielberg's in his early twenties.
He's a young young man, right he's And John Williams says,
he looked like he was eighteen when I went to
go talk to him, and he says, but just within
the first five minutes of talking to him, I realized
that Spielberg knew more about soundtracks of history than I did,
which is as a that's a big statement for John Williams. Yeah. Really,
And so he's like, I just I'm thinking this kid's
going to be listening to rock and roll music. But
apparently he rebelled against his parents who played classical music
by listening to soundtracks and not listening to led Zeppelin
or whatever. And so they do the Sugarland Express and
he still has that same style. He still has. You've
got this kind of folky guitar. It's very similar to
the Reavers. And then it moves into something that you
can say, yeah, I feel John Williams in this. I've
got the orchestra. I've got the same orchestration going on.
I feel it. But Jaws is different. John Williams talks
about this. He says, there's a point in his life
where he loses somebody very important to him, and it
was his wife, Barbara. When he was young man younger
than we are right now, early forties, Barbara suddenly had
a brain aneurysm died suddenly and John was left as
the father of three teenage children. But he says that
point in his life it was almost like a gift
where he realized how he needed to do things. And
I can say with certainty if you listen to his
soundtracks before Jaws and then listen to Jaws, you can
hear a difference. And he lost his wife in March
of nineteen seventy four, and he wrote the soundtrack for
Jaws in March of nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: Dang, let's talk about his meeting with Spielberg.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, So Spielberg.
Speaker 1: Is working on the movie and he meets with John
Williams and says, all right, let's hear what you got.
And John Williams goes through the piano and says, all right,
here's what I think. The sound track for Jaws is
going to be ready done. Bill WREK's like, that's good,
that's really good. I no, seriously, He's like, no, seriously,
that's it. Two notes become the most recognizable soundtrack of
all time.
Speaker 2: And it's perfect. It is perfect because it's frightening. It's frightening,
and with two notes he he is able to give
you not only here's the shark. But here's how far
the shark is away from you.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's so good how he manipulates the audience with
this theme.
Speaker 2: Right. If it's d D that's too, that's far away.
You've got a long space and poops around, but he's not.
If it's du dump dump dump dump dump dump dump
dut dump dump, you're about to get your legs bitten off, right, right,
So I listened to this and thought about it carefully.
When he was still a young man, he worked under
a composer named Bernard Hermann, who you may not know,
but that's the composer of Psycho.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that, and so I look back and
I listened to specifically the shower scene. So I listened
to the shower scene. Right, it is almost the reverse
of Jaws, And I will play both of them for
you here, and you can kind of hear out how
it's the reverse. But whereas Psycho starts with and then
it goes u uh uh, it's the reverse. It is
the reverse of Jaws, which is bu b. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: Psycho goes done done, done done instead of done done.
Speaker 2: So yeah, okay, yeah, cool, And just for the for
the musicians out there. He does a fantastic John Williams
does a fantastic thing with the other part of the
melody in this where you've got the and then you
go no, no, no, you know you've got this other part
to it. But whereas the underlying part is in e,
the higher pitched melodic part is in E flat, which
means they're right next to each other on the keyboard.
Most notes, you've got spaces between the notes for them
to sound good. When you played notes that are a
half step apart, they don't sound right together. They don't
go together, and that creates the discomfort that you feel
whenever you hear those notes that don't belong together. He's
playing notes that don't belong together, and it makes you
on edge. It puts you at the edge of your seat,
in fear of whatever it is that's going on. Brilliant.
Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about what he did for Jurassic Park.
Speaker 2: All right. So Jurassic Park you have dinosaurs eating people right, yes,
scary scenes, yes, But whereas with Jaws you have tension
and fear, John Williams does something completely different with Jurassic Park.
With Jurassic Park, you have awe and reference. It is
like you are walking into a cathedral.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It's fascination and wonder and amazement and beauty rather than
the mindless eating machine that the Shark is.
Speaker 2: Right, because Steven Spielberg didn't want this to be a
horror movie, right. He wanted to approach it from the
perception of a little kid. And little kids aren't scared
of dinosaurs, They're in awe of dinosaurs. And so that
was the idea that he conveyed to Williams, and that's
why Williams composed a score that was majestic and awe inspiring,
as opposed to having this discontinent sound of notes that
don't belong together that puts you in fear and tension.
Speaker 1: The scene in Jurassic Park when John Hammond brings doctor
Grant and doctor Sadler and they see the brachiosaur eating
from the trees and the swell of the music and
doctor Grant is about to faint and John Hammond is like,
doctor Grant, my dear doctor Sadler, welcome to Jurassic Park.
That scene I've seen a thousand times, and when that
goes with what I'm seeing on the.
Speaker 3: Screen and the emotion of the music.
Speaker 1: It's emotional.
Speaker 3: I mean I get choked up sometimes when I watch it.
It's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's incredible. So I want to go back just
real quick, because there is this moment in Jaws. You've
got all of this tension music that gives you fear
and trepidation, but there's this moment when the chase is on. Right,
did you listen? Did did you get a chance?
Speaker 4: Yep?
Speaker 2: And suddenly in the midst of all of this scary,
intense music, suddenly it turns into a swashbuckling adventure. It's
amazing because every time I see it, it just the
whole mood of the movie changes in a moment. And
Steven Spielberg said this. He said that Jaws would only
have been half as successful as it was without John Williams.
And so you look at this and you go, wow.
If if I don't hear the shark, I don't know
what's going on. The shark is invisible because, as we noted,
there were production problems which made them make decisions about this.
But even though you can't see it, you hear it, right, right,
that's right, you fear it, you have you understand how
near or far away it is. And then in just
a moment, he switches, He switches gears on you, and
suddenly you're no longer following the shark. You're following the
three adventurers on their quest to conquer the shark. And
you think to yourself, we're going to win. We're going
to win. This is this is the this is where
the sailors win, they take over, they win, and it's
this wonderful, exciting, exhilarating music, which then when it twists
again and everything goes badly, makes it that much more effect.
Speaker 1: When John Williams won the Best Score for he was
conducting the orchestra at the Academy Awards, and when they
announced his name, he had to leave the orchestra, run
up there except his award, and then hustle back to
continue directing the orchestra. Here's a couple of tidbits I
want to throw at you about Jurassic Park that I
thought were pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: One of the things that Steven Spielberg takes a sort
of creative license on is the height of the velociraptors.
Lost raptors are kind of known archaeologically to be only
about six feet tall, right, six foot turkey ish, but
he makes him ten feet tall that he just decides
they're gonna be scarier that way. Well, during filming, paleontologists
uncovered a ten foot tall specimen of raptor called the
Utah Raptors.
Speaker 3: Pretty cool. They were super excited when they discovered that
while they were filming.
Speaker 2: That's awesome. I'm going to throw in a bit between
your digbits here, okay, because it also involves a discovery
three years ago. On August nineteenth, twenty seventeen, forty two
years after the movie Jaws brought the story of the
USS Indianapolis to the world at large, a co founder
of Microsoft named Paul Allen located the wreck of the
USS Indianapolis in the Philippine Sea at a depth of
over eighteen thousand feet.
Speaker 1: That is awesome. Love that a couple of tidbits for you.
At Jurassic Park, when Dennis Nedri is first introduced, he
is watching Jaws on his computer screen.
Speaker 3: Nu uh, yes, how did I miss that? He is
watching freaking Jaws?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 2: I scrap Now I got to go look at it again.
Did we already talk about his clothes and his wardrobe change.
Speaker 3: No, let's talk about that.
Speaker 2: Okay. So Dennis Nedri Wayne Knight has several different outfits
that he wears during the course of this movie. One
of them is a Hawaiian shirt, the other one is
like a member's only jackets, a gray jacket as it
turns out, and his yellow raincoat. Yes, the yellow raincoat, right,
this is what the kids each one of the kids,
Sean Aston, Corey Feldman.
Speaker 3: And and Chunk Jeff Cohen.
Speaker 2: That is the costumes that they are wearing in the movie.
Speaker 1: Uneys, Oh that's incredible man. The yellow raincoat is what
Mikey is wearing. The Hawaiian shirt is what Chunk is
wearing when he does the truffle shuffle. And members only
jacket is what Corey Felderman is wearing over his purple
rain shirt in the Goonies.
Speaker 3: Really purple rain purple. Okay, a couple more tidbits.
Speaker 1: Okay, if you go back and watch the movie, when
the Delaphosaurus is spitting venom at Dennis Nedri, Okay, yeah,
the first shot that he spits, he goes and it
hits him kind of in the chest.
Speaker 3: He actually, if you watch closely, the actor.
Speaker 1: Wayne Knight has a big blob of it in his hand,
and he takes it and wipes it on his chest
to sort of help the help the effect a little
bit of a blooper that you can see he goes
from having a little bit on his chest to having
a whole lot because.
Speaker 3: He just took a big scoop of it and rubbed
it on himself from his hand.
Speaker 1: And then finally, one of the things that a lot
of people were kind of interested in, and it's never
really covered, it's kind of mentioned and then dropped, is
is what's wrong with the triceratops? Why is the triceratops sick?
And it's this sort of mini mystery. In the middle
of the movie, by the way, the big gigantic pile
of triceratops dung that she's digging through to check for
lilac berries made of clay and straw, and they poured
honey on it to draw flies. So it really wasn't
that smully, It wasn't really that big of a deal.
But when Lauren Duran's character is sifting through the poop
looking for lilac berries, she doesn't find any. But the
answer to the mystery is the scene that was kind
of cut out was that the triceratops would swallow stones
to help grind up for digestive purposes, and it had
thrown up the stones after they had rounded out and
were no longer of use, and that's where the lilac
barriers were, and that's what was making the triceratops sick.
All right, let's talk about the reception of these movies.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we've mentioned before that Jaws was the first blockbuster, right,
and blockbuster is a word that existed since World War Two.
It's actually where it came out. They would drop bombs
during the Blitz, which our friend John Hammond, you know,
the actor Richard Attenborough, lived through drop bombs that would
take out a whole block. They would call those blockbusters,
and so that there was a little bit of an
idea that you know, hey, a movie can you know,
have a bigger impact. That's what the blockbuster came from.
But it wasn't until nineteen seventy five that the word
became associated with movies that were major hits during the summer,
because in nineteen before nineteen seventy five, the summer was
considered a dead period for movies. People were on vacation,
they weren't going, they weren't school, they were doing other things,
and so people did not go and watch movies during
the summer until nineteen seventy five. And you mentioned to
me this movie was originally supposed to be released in December.
That's right, But because of that, because of going long
on the production, it didn't get released until midsummer June
of nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 1: But what happened, Yeah, so the release date was pushed
back to the summer of nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3: In May.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind, at this point, Steven Spielberg and
his crew are still wondering if audiences are going to
accept a giant rubber shark as the threat.
Speaker 2: They may not. They didn't know how the public at
large was going to feel about this. But they had
done some screenings and there is a point in the
movie Steven Spielberg is watching one of the original screenings
that they do for the test audiences. So there's this
scene where Alex Kittner is getting eaten by the shark
and the blood literally shoots up out of the water.
You know, they had to it was it was an
amazingly grotesque scene given that this is a little kid.
And so at this point in the pre screening, someone
jumps out of their chair and runs out of the theater,
and Steven Spielberg thinks, oh no, I went too far.
And he watches this guy and he goes out of
the theater and he sees him throw up in the
trash can. He sees him vomit into the trash can.
He's like, oh God, I've made it too bad. It's
not going to work. Oh no, what's going to happen?
And then the guy, after he gets done throwing up,
turns around and goes back in and watches the rest
of the movie, and he's like, holy cow, this might work.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, it was tested in Dallas because it was
far from the ocean.
Speaker 3: He wanted to know if a shark was scary to
people who are landlocked, and the answer was.
Speaker 2: Yep, yes it is. Bat Yes it is.
Speaker 3: People were scared to go swimming and swimming pools.
Speaker 1: After this movie came out, this was the first movie
to gross over one hundred million dollars at the box office.
That was something that nobody had ever achieved before.
Speaker 2: So another thing that had never that did not happen before.
This was a mass release, all on the same day.
So they took an entirely different tack with this movie.
When they saw their final product, when they saw how
test the audiences reacted, they thought, Wow, we may actually
have a real hit on our hands. And so they
did a marketing campaign where they had all of the
actors come and do all of these TV spots promoting
the movie, and it's it's incredible because if you watch
some of the stuff that Richard Dreyfus did, he's not
he's not complimentary. He's like, if this movie fails, it's
not Steven Spielberg's fault, it's the it's the production company's fault.
I mean, he doesn't look favorably upon it.
Speaker 1: He is actually defending the movie before the release, like
he's like, I know people are gonna hate it, and
you know, it's just not gonna and it's not Spielberg's
fault that this movie is gonna fail.
Speaker 2: Right, But they do these promotions the other not everybody
else is as critical as Richard Dreyfus is. They're doing
their promotion and then they do something unprecedented. They release
it in over four hundred theaters all on the same day. Now,
people listening to this brother are gonna be like, why
is that unprecedented? What happens all the time? Yeah, it
didn't before this time. It used to be that a
movie would come out in a few theaters and then
a few more, and it was something that was a
trickle out effect. But with Jaws, they said, we wanted
to all hit all at the same time so that
everyone is talking about it at once, and it changed.
Forgive me for saying this again, it changed the paradigm.
It was a shift, and from that moment on, every
major motion picture would have a gigantic release. I mean
a standard for today is twenty five hundred theaters on
release day.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: The marketing campaign was genius on this deal too. It
included shark related messages like, if you happen to see
a great white here's how you deal with it.
Speaker 3: This is part of the marketing, right.
Speaker 2: Awesome.
Speaker 1: There was a great white shark on the cover of
Time magazine, and it also created a boom in tourism
at Martha's Vineyard, which.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's great. At the time that they filmed this,
the population of Martha's vineyard was five thousand people. Within
just a few years it had increased to fifteen thousand people.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the reception of Jurassic Park. Okay,
So Jurassic Park was released June eleventh, nineteen ninety three.
The studio's biggest concern in competition the summer of ninety
three was The Last Action Hero, which also happens to
be the last movie that I walked out of it
because it sucks of it.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. The first movie I walked out of was
Jaws three. The last movies you walked out it was
Last Action Hero.
Speaker 1: The movie and book generated so much interest in dinosaurs
and paleontology that universities had a record increase in students.
I'm sorry, I get ahead of myself. Jurassic Park was
released on Friday, June eleventh, nineteen ninety three, and it
broke box office records its first weekend with forty seven
million dollars on the first weekend, first weekend. Yes, it
eventually went to make more than nine hundred million worldwide.
Speaker 3: Compared that to what we just discussed with Jaws.
Speaker 1: One hundred million, right, nine hundred million. David Kep, who
is the screenwriter remembers the day it open. I was
in New York and I walked to the theater that
he was watching, and the guy comes out and announces
this to the giant line ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 3: The seven o'clock show of Jurassic Park is sold out.
Speaker 1: And people go oh, and he goes Also, the ten
o'clock show is sold out, and they went oh. Also,
Saturday night seven and ten o'clock show are sold out.
And David Kep's like, I'm not an expert, but that
seems like it's doing pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's a good sign.
Speaker 1: This movie was very well received.
Speaker 3: It made tons of money. I thought this was interesting.
Speaker 1: Spielberg received two hundred and fifty million dollars from the
movie gross and profit participations, which is the largest sum
ever for a director.
Speaker 2: Can I just say something about Steven Spielberg and the
finishing up of this movie. We talked about the soundtrack
and what happens with it, but Spielberg at this time,
I mean, while while Jurassic Park is being finalized, before
it has the soundtrack finished, he's already filming Schindler's List.
It's astounding that he's doing both of these movies almost
at the same time. I mean he's finishing one as
he's in the midst of directing the other. But what
would happen is he would be directing in Poland, he
would have the weekends off. On the weekends, he would
fly to Paris. Someone from the US would take tapes
of what John Williams had been composing for Jurassic Park,
fly them over to Paris. They would sit and listen
to the tapes and watch the film. At the same time,
Steven Spielberg would give his notes. The guy would fly
back give them to John Williams. Steven Spielberg would fly
over to watch to continue directing Schindler's List, and then
he within the span of two years, he makes two
of his biggest movies of all time as they overlap.
Speaker 3: It's astounder it is, it really is.
Speaker 1: Laura Dern when she saw the dinosaur cgi on screen
for the first time, she cried, people don't appreciate it
now because it's so commonplace. But at that time, when
when you looked on the screen and you saw a
freakin dinosaur, it was like nothing you'd ever seen. Like
we were used to giant rubber.
Speaker 2: Sharks, holy how did they do that?
Speaker 3: That's right? All right, so let's get final judgment. Indeed, okay,
where are you?
Speaker 2: All right? These are two iconic movies. Yes, they change
the paradigm in different ways, nearly twenty years apart from
each other. Okay, we've talked about for two and a
half episodes. We've talked about what they did. Looking back,
I just have to say to myself, Okay, I'm just
gonna look and watch these two movies. As I look
and watch these two movies, now, it's been forty five
years since Jaws came out. It has been twenty seven
years since Jurassic Park came out. They're both old movies
at this point. And so I just looked and I said, okay,
what problems do I have? And how have these movies
aged over time? Right?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 2: I look at Jaws, and it's impressive. As the mechanical
shark comes out of the water and onto the boat,
I'm not thinking to myself, Oh, there's the mechanical shark
coming out of the water. I'm thinking, holy crap, that
guy is gonna eat one of those guys. And sure enough,
that's what happens. As I see the shark's jaws chomped
down on Quin and him screaming for mercy. I am
I am not thinking about the production of this movie.
Speaker 3: It's great scene at all, great scene.
Speaker 2: It is a movie that, despite the fact that it
is forty five years old in its technology, I am
not distracted Jurassic Park. I loved it when it came out.
When I watched it and I saw the dinosaur for
the first time, I was just like everybody else in like,
holy crap, how do they do that? That is astounding.
It changed the way that movies were made. Looking at
back at it twenty seven years later, it's still amazing.
But there are features that I kind of go that
did an age as well as I had hoped it would.
And it's not just me. I watched this with my
children and the first scene that was so amazing back
in nineteen ninety three of the Bracyosaurus when you see
it for the first time, my kids went that doesn't
appeal and I kind of went, guys, I mean, remember,
this was the first time that this had ever been done,
but it hasn't aged as well. Then I look at
the first scene with doctor Grant and the kid, and
I'm going, why is this kid here? And why is
doctor Grant so mean to him? And then I'm looking
at the scene where the car is falling through the
tree as they're trying to escape and trying to escape,
and I'm thinking, why don't they just go to the
other side of the tree. And so as amazing as
Jurassic Park is, there are problems with it from my perspective,
and I can't say that it is as timeless as
Jaws is. And so that is why I say Jaws
wins the contest between Jurassic Park and Jaws.
Speaker 3: Okay, your way off base. Here's what we're looking at here,
all right. Yes, these movies are old.
Speaker 1: Yes, when you look at them from twenty twenty, there
are things that are not as favorable. I mean, the
shark that we only see for about twenty seconds of
Jaws would have a lot more problems if we got.
Speaker 3: A good look at it. These two movies are amusement
park rides.
Speaker 1: Think of the greatest roller coaster, like I'm thinking the
Titan at six Flags over Texas. Okay, that's Jaws. Super high,
super straight drop, exciting thrill ride, still fun today. No
matter what Jurassic Park is like that same ride, except
you have ten loop to loops, So it takes something
that's awesome and it makes it even more awesome.
Speaker 3: Okay, now, do you have Jurassic Park without Jaws? Probably not.
Jaws is the granddaddy of Jurassic Park, and it owes
a lot to Jaws. I do think it steps up.
Speaker 1: Instead of having one threat, you've got two raptors and
a t Rex instead of one shark. You also have
a poison spitting de la Vosaurus running around, so you
have more things to be scared of.
Speaker 3: I do think the water element makes it more scary.
Speaker 1: But I know when I watch these two, the more
entertaining movie for me.
Speaker 3: Is Jurassic Park. Do I love them both? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Do we owe a lot to what they've contributed to
the movie culture. Absolutely, Jaws changed everything. But from my perspective,
the most entertaining of these two movies is Jurassic Park.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm gonna give a quick rebuttal argument. Okay, because
there's there's an idea that I wanted to touch on, and
I'll just as as kudos to Jurassic Park. The same
kids who are like, yeah, that doesn't look real when
when it came to the velociraptors chasing the children through
the kitchen, or the t rex like attacking people in
the land Rovers. They were burying their head in my
shoulder and saying, tell me when it's olf right. I
mean they may have been unimpressed initially, but with Jurassic Park,
from t Rex moment on, except for that car falling scene,
it is intense and frightening. But I talked in our
very first episode on this on these two movies about
how the criticism of sugar Land Express was even though
they had these fantastic car chase scenes, there wasn't any
character development in Jurassic Park. I feel like he falls
back into that same trap. I think that the character
development is minimal. It's there, it's there's something there, But
you do not, from my perspective, emotionally connect with doctor Grantler.
Maybe no, not even Ian Malcolm. You don't really have
the connection with them that you do with the characters
in Jaws. And we talked about how the movie was
about the shark and the movie was about the dinosaurs,
so they weren't as much worried about the actors. But
I just think that Jaws brings a higher caliber of actor,
and especially that scene that we talked about earlier today,
the USS Indianapolis, the drunk talk, the comparing of scars.
I can see why that moment changed everyone's perception about
this movie because it was that moment that you made
a heart to heart connection with all of the characters,
the Holy Trinity that was fighting against the demonic Shark.
You made that connection at that moment, and I just
never had that moment in Jurassic Park.
Speaker 3: No, you're exactly right.
Speaker 1: I will not argue I don't really care about the
characters in Jurassic Park. The one character that I do
care about, the biggest emotional impact for me character wise
is when the raptors are fighting the t Rex. I
want the t Rex to win. Yeah, everybody else, I'm
just like, Oh, who's going to get it next? I
don't really care, right, let's the hacker?
Speaker 3: Eh.
Speaker 2: So so you felt when you watched Jurassic Park. You
felt the same way Steven Spielberg when he read the
Book of Jaws. At the end, you wanted the shark
to win. You wanted the t Rex to win.
Speaker 3: I want the t Rex to win.
Speaker 2: So they did that. I mean at least for that
you can say they did that perfectly because the t
Rex wins and the people still survive. Right. Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 3: Well, we sure want to hear from you guys. Are
we way off base? De took Jaws, I'm taking Jurassic Park?
Where are you? Hit us up on Facebook, hit us
up on Twitter, email us. You might even get a
shout out on the next podcast.
Speaker 2: We'll see you guys next week.
Speaker 4: Yeah,