JURASSIC Park was a game changer for a generation of kids who all grew up understanding the terror of a having to outrun and outwit a pack of velociraptors in a commercial kitchen at night.
And that’s only after you’ve survived a night-time encounter with a T-Rex in the rain, trapped in a jeep in the backwoods of an overzealous man’s island zoo theme park. No-one ever forgets the shot of the glass of water rippling from the footfalls of a nearby T-Rex.
For those with glazed eyes, the 1993 movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring actors Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, was about a palaeontologist visiting an almost complete theme park who has to protect a couple of kids after a power failure causes the park’s cloned dinosaurs to run loose.
The film had a profound impact on Sheppartonian Grace Menz, who keeps one foot in the Jurassic Park fantasy even today.
In her own words, “Jurassic Park and the subsequent Jurassic World series were a big part of my life growing up.”
Grace, a diversity case manager for the Diversity Project at Uniting, said she also always liked Jeep Wranglers, and recently convinced her husband that the pair “absolutely needed one.”
What her husband didn’t realise however, were her plans to ‘Jurassicify’ her new car.
The result is an unmistakable likeness to the Jeeps that took Grant, Ellie and Malcolm, along with kids Tim and Lex on their ill-fated tour of Jurassic Park.
Today, Grace and her husband are regularly stopped at shopping centre carparks by wide-eyed kids.
“Quite often when we’re parked at Woolworths or Coles, we get kids pointing. One time a kid had a Jurassic Park hoodie on so we let him sit on the bonnet and take some photos. Our nephews love the car, too,” she said.
And no wonder. The magic of Jurassic Park was that it played into any child’s (or adult’s) imaginations that maybe, just maybe, there were still dinosaurs lurking somewhere in some forgotten bushland. The sight of a Jurassic Park Jeep is just one further piece of evidence proving that suspicion correct.
Grace said she’ll still play the Jurassic Park soundtrack, written by famed American composer John Williams, while she drives, particularly after a stressful day at work.
“We hope people continue to wave and point when they see it. It’s a lot of fun to drive,” she said
