Jurassic Park fans enjoyed a blast from the past last week hen an obscure behind-the-scenes photo surfaced on Reddit. The picture showed Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello posing with the tyrannosaurus rex’s prop foot, away from all the rest of the set and the chaotic scenes where it was featured. The two child stars wore genuine smiles, and commenters wondered if they had as much fun making the film as the audience has had watching it over the years. The picture drives home the scale of the set and the amount of dedicated work going on there, from the perspective of two kids who were caught up in it all.
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As you can see below, the T-rex foot seems to have been staged on a painter’s drop cloth when Richards and Mazzello decied to ake a photo with it. Both of them could hide behind the dinosaur’s ankle comfortably, and it was rendered in such extreme detail that it the viewer can hardly appreciate in its brief time on screen. Commenters shared other photos of this prop, and others like it, as well as trivia about the filming process and the artists who made it all happen.
Many remarked that they had never seen this particular photo, though none could dig up a specific source for it. However, Jurassic Park had a staggering amount of behind-the-scenes content, especially for its time, before DVD extras made these profitable additions. That makes sense, since Jurassic Park was a groundbreaking production in so many ways.
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Jurassic Park was on the cutting edge of CGI in its time, and those animated effects hold up incredibly well by today’s standards thanks to their strategic use. However, there were a lot of animatronics on the set, which were engineered by the created by the same team that had made the monsters for Aliens just a few years earlier. These machines were covered in latex skins, and filming around them was one of the biggest challenges of the shoot, as they were not easy to reposition, and could not be exposed to harsh elements for long.
The artists all answered to paleontologist Jack Horner, who was hired to ensure the dinosaurs were depicted as accurately as possible using current information. Even then, the dinosaurs looked more lizard-like than bird-like, but this at least was explained in the movie’s dialogue. According to the 1993 book The Making of Jurassic Park, director Steven Spielberg frequently emphasized that he wanted to depict the dinosaurs as real-life animals more than “monsters.”
The results speak for themselves more than three decades later. At the time of this writing, Jurassic Park is streaming on Starz, and on various PVOD platforms for rental or purchase. The next installment in the franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth, hits theaters on July 2nd.
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Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images
