Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park is the kind of film that belongs to a particular summer. Except no one summer. It’s belonged to every summer since 1993, and it somehow never gets old. If you grew up on Jurassic Park, you remain obsessed. You can still fall silent the second John Williams’s score kicks in. You still harbour a secret belief that if you sit very still, a Tyrannosaurus rex is going to stride out of the long grass at any second. It’s the kind of obsession that doesn’t go away. It just needs fuelling.
Which means that, while it sounds easy, picking the perfect Jurassic Park gift is actually really difficult. Everyone thinks of the obvious stuff. But that stuff is cheap. Or nerdy. Or winds up lurking in a drawer for years because it actually looks stupid when it’s not animated on your screen. We wanted better than that. We wanted stuff that understood the source material. Toys and gifts and accessories that feel like they were made with a real fan in mind, rather than somebody browsing in the airport newsagents.
That’s the difference between merchandise and actual collectibles. That’s the difference between buying something because it’s funny, and buying something that you’ll actually use, or display on your shelf. So we’ve filtered out the rubbish with that in mind. Everything we’ve selected for this list had to pass the same test: would we want it? We didn’t include many things we loved just because they were Jurassic Park-related. Too many descend into candyfloss nonsense that misses what made the movies great to begin with. The dinosaurs. The drama. The fact that no one is in control of nature.
So there’s a lot to cover in these selections. Things to put on your shelves alongside your Blu-rays. Things to wear that won’t make you look like a kid who broke into a gift shop. Things for chefs, for readers, for fans who just want a really specific reminder of that one adorable moment. Whether that moment reminded you of yourself at ten, or forty, is up to you. We’re not here to judge.
Jurassic Park is never cheesy. It’s a blockbuster done exactly the right way. And the gifts in this list treat it as such.