The Jurassic Park film series has spanned 27 years and five movies, with a sixth in production—but until now, it hasn’t spawned an animated TV spin-off. This feels like an uncharacteristic act of restraint for a property that has been winking at its own merchandising blitz since midway through the first 1993 film. Sure, the Jurassic movies are essentially creature horror designed to lure in kids on the cusp of PG-13 readiness and give them expertly rendered nightmares, but they’ve also inspired elaborate toy lines; anyway, everything from the R-rated RoboCop to the publicly rejected 1998 Godzilla has taken a shot at Saturday morning glory over the years. Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous arrives on the scene so late that Saturday morning cartoons are already extinct; it has to find a habitat on Netflix instead.
Despite its retro-sounding name (nonsensical pitch: It’s Camp Candy, but with dinosaurs!), Camp Cretaceous fits the model of the modern integrated multi-platform franchise. The eight-episode first season takes place during the events of Jurassic World, elsewhere in the reconstituted dinosaur theme park. One set piece from that Colin Trevorrow blockbuster even takes place in the distant background of a scene here. Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing does not appear, but counselors Roxie (Jameela Jamil) and Dave (Glen Powell) do talk about trying to get ahold of her. They don’t realize that at this stage of the film, Claire is still a child-hating monster; that must be why she never mentioned the campers during the film.
And yes, there is an actual camp in the middle of the Jurassic World theme park. Camp Cretaceous syncs up perfectly with its live-action cousin, not just in the details of its plot but how that plot’s momentum is sped up by pure, abject stupidity, far exceeding mere man-tampers-with-nature hubris. The camp’s testing phase involves bringing six kids to the island without their own guardians, giving them plenty of downtime, and instituting minimal security even after the counselors belatedly realize that young teenagers, left to their own devices, will go poke around the dinosaur cages. Lead character Darius (Paul-Mikél Williams) isn’t looking for trouble; he’s just over the moon about the opportunity to see the real-live dinosaurs he still obsesses over, earning the “dino-nerd” moniker the other kids stick on him. Camp Cretaceous isn’t especially astute in terms of teenage sociology, but it is clever about portraying the tween-to-teen age where a lot of kids find their dinosaur obsession diminishing. For family-related reasons that are gradually explained through flashbacks, Darius holds fast to his dream of exploring Jurassic World.
Darius wins a place at Camp Cretaceous through a video game competition; the other test-case slots go to Kenji (Ryan Potter), an older and annoyingly self-assured rich kid whose dad bought him into the camp; Brooklynn (Jenna Ortega), a young vlogger whose online clout means that she is the only camper allowed to bring her phone; Yaz (Kausar Mohammed), an athlete who has accepted corporate sponsorship from the park; Sammy (Raini Rodriguez), an enthusiastic farm girl; and Ben (Sean Giambrone), a nervous type who evinces no interest in being there at all.
The first few episodes of Camp Cretaceous unfold as if the series may take an episodic approach to the kids’ ill-advised misadventures. Halfway through, though, Jurassic World’s hell has broken loose, and the series switches to more or less continuous, movie-style storytelling. The pace picks up considerably—the seventh episode has several of the show’s best junior-level dino-attack set pieces—while also making the camp material seem even more half-assed. What makes this a camp at all, rather than a private tour? What would day-to-day operations look like if fearsome dinosaurs didn’t get loose in the middle of the campers’ stay, and if the kids weren’t constantly left to fend for themselves? The counselors don’t seem to know, and neither does the show—or rather, their answers are basically, “the stuff that happens in Jurassic World, but at different times with slightly different outcomes.” The writing occasionally tries to lampshade the utter irresponsibility of the counselors without quite making it into a functioning running joke; it’s just a lazy shortcut to the kids-on-an-adventure format the show obviously wants.
As that kind of an adventure, and as a kid-friendlier reskin of a Jurassic Park movie, Camp Cretaceous is mildly diverting. There are pleasing videogame-like simulations of more complex movie-style dinosaurs, including the token cute-dino baby ankylosaurus and the carnotaurus that becomes the group’s default nemesis. (Indominus rex is busy; he can’t be everywhere at once!) The computer-animated humans are trickier, by turns choppy and stiff-looking, though the refreshingly celebrity-light vocal performances are endearing. Occasionally, the show introduces a fresh element to its diet Breakfast Club dynamics, like how Brooklynn lives in fear of losing her audience and having her online popularity diminished by “angry internet randos.” The small ways Darius confronts his personal grief are sensitively handled.
At the same time, that storyline eventually imparts a “keep going” message of resilience that doesn’t exactly square with the parent movie’s thematic backbone, where dogged persistence turns into spectacular self-destruction. Camp Cretaceous doesn’t need to grapple directly with the conflicts between science, capitalism, and man’s inability to leave well enough alone. But it is strange to see a children’s show taking those conditions as a given, and repackaging them as the adventure of a lifetime despite a majority of the kids seeming to not give that much of a shit about dinosaurs in the first place. This is a better-looking, more carefully planned Jurassic spin-off than anything that would have been cash-grabbed into production in the mid-’90s. It’s also hard to picture future adults looking back on it with a combination of puzzlement and nostalgia. There’s no warping of the movie elements into bizarre kid-friendly shapes, which is particularly odd given that the parent movie already offered Blue The Trained Raptor. Instead, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous is more of a holding pen, where kids can wait for the next proper dinosaur movie to come out.
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They don’t realize that at this stage of the film, Claire is still a child-hating monster; that must be why she never mentioned the campers during the film.I mean, she didn’t seem to hate kids. At worst she was busy with a work project and dumped her nephews on her assistant. She wasn’t like Movie!Grant, she was just career-oriented. But for some reason the movie has this weird subtext that a woman focusing on anything but being a mother is a bad thing.And, considering similar themes are in The Book of Henry, Trevarrow’s movie he did after Jurassic World, it doesn’t seem unintentional.
She basically is positioned in that Alan Grant role, though. No, she doesn’t hate kids, and I’d argue that Grant doesn’t either, so much as he doesn’t feel comfortable around them, which she certainly doesn’t either. I was being a little facetious because the movie gives her such a cheesy working-woman-to-nurturing-figure arc.
And, you know, I hadn’t thought about that Book of Henry connection, but yeah, it’s a weird one. The screenplay’s whole idea that it was performing a deliciously ironic role-reversal by having a young boy act like an adult and his mother act like a kid. It definitely suggested a sort of limitation on conceiving what a less-than-perfect mother might look like. Ugh. What an awful movie.
Grant definitely DID hate kids, he tried to get that one to piss himself in the first 5 minutes of the movie, and when Ellie calls him on it he has this whole little rant about why he doesn’t like kids (they’re noisy they’re annoying they smell …).
Yeah, I don’t think you can argue that Alan Grant didn’t hate kids. When Jurassic Park started Alan Grant definitely hated kids. I mean sure, when push came to shove(d a jeep off a cliff) he realized that he didn’t hate them enough to let them succumb to death-by-t-rex, but he for sure openly hated children.I think the most interesting part of the JP series is about the question of “what is makes a good parent?” JP1: Alan Grant does not like kids, he likes dinosaur bones. He probably thinks that because he doesn’t really like any kids he meets he’ll be a bad parent, he learns he actually could probably be a pretty good parent and you can make space for liking multiple things (dinosaur bones kids, a smoking hot Laura Dern who is one of my roots). JP2: Ian Malcom loves kids… he’s just shitty at taking care of them because he’s also an egomaniac. He learns that if he can quit being such a self absorbed prick he could be a pretty good dad because he truly loves his daughter and parenting in general. JP3: Tea Leoni and William H Macy are having marriage problems, it seems because they neglected each other in favor of raising a bright kid. But when your child gets trapped on a dino island those problems seem to fade away with the bigger problem of not being eaten by pterydactyls. They learned that you shouldn’t let your relationship deteriorate just because you have a kid, your marriage is just as much work as raising a kid, and you don’t have to forgo one for the other.JW: Just because you’re not a mom yourself doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, you can still be a loving and nurturing human being regardless of your choice to procreate (is what the message should have been, this is not what was delivered because this movie’s underlying misogyny was not subtle).JW2: I don’t know that movie was so dumb I don’t remember the point at all other than for everyone to get their paycheck.
The problem with kids is they’re so small and vulnerable and when they see a carnivorous dinosaur all they do is scream and scream.
The problem with kids is they’re so small and vulnerable and when they see a carnivorous dinosaur all they do is scream and scream.
heh heh that’s not all they do
You could say that about Ian Malcolm, too, Modusoperandi.
I mean, it’s a trope at this point that every Jurassic movie ends with a nuclear family unit being formed (or re-formed) out of the chaos (Alan/Ellie/Lex/Tim, Ian/Sarah/Kelly, the Kirbys, Owen/Claire/Zach/Gray, Owen/Claire/Maisie).World was certainly one of the least subtle about this, but I don’t think that the movie was trying to make a point about motherhood being the only valid choice – I think it was just surface-level “well, the character’s got to go through some growth, so what’s the opposite of being a surrogate mother?”
Yeah, you’re not wrong. I’m not crazy about Jurassic World, but her character did make sense, and she definitely didn’t seem to hate kids at all.
But she is a women of breeding age, she must want to spawn or she is a mutant that must be crushed!!!!This message brought to you by the Republican Party
I think that if we’re going to lay any fault upon Trevorrow, that should just be that he’s largely incompetent as a filmmaker- especially considering Book of Henry.
And yet, I really would much rather have seen his Star Wars 9 than the execrable piece of trash that we got!
Current Ep 9 is certainly baffling garbage, but Trevorrow has yet to make a good film, so I doubt it would be any good- but yeah, it would be worth a shot rather than sticking with Abram’s mess.
You know who also has never made a good movie – JJ Abrams!I read (parts of) the Trevorrow script. And while “good” isn’t a word I’d use to describe it, it at least is a million miles better than the festering turd that Abrams & co gave us.
NAAAH, I call bullshit. His career as a director has been a continual descent in quality, but Mission Impossible 3 & Super 8 started his directorial career quite well. The new Star Trek franchise is in no way what I want, but the first film is a watchable film, as is The Force Awakens. In reality, he’s only made two films that are truly bad, Into Darkness & Rise of Skywalker, both having objective issues with pacing & poor characterization. With those stats, he’s proven himself a competent director.And if you’re making a broad claim that he’s never made a good film, he’s got a considerable amount of great films under producer credits. He’s a producer on all MI films since III, at least two of the Cloverfield films are great, and Overlord is great fun. I also think The Last Jedi is largely a good film, so I don’t know how you can claim he hasn’t made a good film beyond your personal preferences.
Super 8 is a horrible piece of shit, a total tonal trainwreck that has no fucking clue what it wants to be other than, “I’m going to rip off every Spielberg movie ever!” There’s a reason why E.T. and Jaws aren’t the same fucking movie, but Abrams is a clueless hack.MI:3 isn’t that bad, certainly, but it’s deeply mediocre and, unfortunately, became sort of a soft reboot of the franchise that the far superior follow-ups still have to pay some fealty to (by continuing to include Simon Pegg’s dud of a character, for instance.)Star Trek (2009) is one half of a good movie, but the second half sucks. TFA is watchable, yes, while also being mostly awful. It’s so trite and cloying and obvious and deeply, deeply derivative.Just because most of his movies aren’t quite as mind-blowingly awful as STID and ROS doesn’t mean they’re actually good. So, at best, he’s got, what, two mediocre movies? Helluva shitty track record.
You clearly have your feelings on Abrams, good on you for that, but you’re pretending your dislike for him has any bearing on his quality as a filmmaker- I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.
Riiiiiiiiiiight. You nailed it. My dislike of Abrams movies has literally zero to do with their quality. Thanks for the insight.
No problem, my guy!
Yeah, within the limitation that every Abrams movie is a lot better at setting up an intriguing premise than delivering a satisfying conclusion, I’d think you’re dead-on about the breakdown of his films. None of them is perfect or truly great, but several are good. The Force Awakens and the 2009 Star Trek are pretty much his best-case scenarios, good films where he’s using his pastiche skills (in both cases, imitating Lucas by way of Spielberg) setting up a world with intriguing questions he doesn’t even try to answer. When he’s required to come up with some answers, like in M:I3 when he explicitly yadda yaddas away the question of what the McGuffin is and therefore what the movie’s stakes are, the answers are lacking. And that inability to deliver answers is fatal in sequels like STID or Episode IX, because you can’t keep the mystery box (mystery photon torpedo?) closed forever.That doesn’t make him a bad filmmaker. He’s got real skills, and his movies—particularly TFA, but there’s bits of it in all of them I’ve seen—have some great moments of storytelling. People who dismiss him as an imitator don’t appreciate how hard it is to effectively imitate Spielberg. A lot of people have tried, none with Abrams’s success. It just means that Abrams is a weirdly limited filmmaker. Back when he made Super 8 and M:I3, I had hopes he’d grow as a filmmaker and figure this aspect of storytelling out (maybe adapting an existing work with a known strong ending?) but it doesn’t seem that he has or ever will, because those limitations haven’t hurt his career. So it’s up to producers and studios to keep him doing the things he does well (worldbuilding, setting up mysteries at the beginning of a series) and far away from the stuff he’s unqualified to do (concluding a series). As for the producing stuff, it’s hard to tell how much credit he should get, if any, because we don’t know which movies he had real creative input on and which just had his name on them as a contractual requirement. Yeah, he was a producer on TLJ, but I don’t know that he deserves much credit for it, given how aggressively he’s thrown it under the bus since. I think we need to silo off Bad Robot’s producing accomplishments from Abrams’s writing/directing output to make much sense out of his career.
I’m opening Camp Archaean. My park features various pools of goo and other oozes and nothing that chases you down and eats you so, aside from the fatal lack of free oxygen, nothing there kills people.
*small slimy mat of cyanobacteria floats by**John William’s majestic Jurassic Park theme swells*
They DO move in slimy mats….
“They’re moving in mats. They do move in mats.”
Ah, a D&D Ooze themed Jurassic Park. Add some Gelatinous Cubes and you’ve got a movie.
I went to Boy Scout camp for several years, there was enough Ooze theme there to last me a lifetime
Quite the opposite of my Camp Arachnean, then.
Oh, look at Johnny-come-lately here. The real fun is at Inflationary Epoch Park, where everything is just a billion-degree soup of quarks.
I’ll take the Big Bang Burger Bar, the sister restaurant to Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think that it’s gross.”
For those who don’t get the Camp Candy reference:
I was pleasantly surprised, while digging through old Camp Candy episodes, to find out that Candy and Eugene Levy brought their old SCTV characters Dr. Tongue and Bruno back in an episode, complete with the old 3d gag. As well as Levy playing Bobby Bittman in another episode.
I was surprised that I recognized/knew some of the lyrics to this show, which I don’t remember ever watching.
I’m assuming we aren’t counting “Lego Jurassic World: Legend of Isla Nublar” as a kid-friendly spinoff then? (That was a lighthearted prequel miniseries that ran on Nickelodeon, for reference.)
There are so many spinoffs/sidequels/etc. under the Lego umbrella that I wind up forgetting about them (or somehow not really thinking of them as their own thing, even though there’s not some single “Lego” show that contains them all). And because the Star Wars Lego stuff I’ve seen is hilarious but also weirdly time-warped across the movies, I tend to think of it as kind of a goof, too. (Albeit a welcome one. Excited for that holiday special!)
Well, “Lego Jurassic World” is very much its own goof (though there’s nothing in it, far as I can tell from what I’ve seen/know, that really contradicts the movies), and a rather funny, endearing one at that.
Lego Jurassic World is fantastic – a lot funnier and lighter than its source material. I watched it with my kids and found myself laughing as much as they did…
Given the body count of the various Jurassic Park/World attempts, what parents are going to send their kids to this place to be potential dino meals?Who are these people?!
You obviously haven’t been reading Facebook posts about face to face schooling during a global pandemic.
Touché.
I actually really like the idea of setting a tv series with the movie as a backdrop, but yeah, the camp premise is bone headed. It seems like a needless stretch as well. Just make it as a week long school or summer field trip or something along those lines and eliminate the need write yourselves out of a weird corner. That would have given the added advantage of getting to play around some more with seeing more of the park in operation.
I believe there are LEGO Jurassic World animated episodes.
everything from the R-rated RoboCop to the publicly rejected 1998 Godzilla has taken a shot at Saturday morning glory over the years
My favorite example of this is the Highlander animated tv series. I watched it for months as a kid, trying my best to piece together its plot, which both relied heavily on a movie that I was about ten years to young to see and was fairly nonsensical in its own right. When I finally got to see Highlander as a teen I was like… “What?”The cartoon had a lot less of Clancy Brown beheading people, a lot more of some kind of Pirates of Dark Water style post-apocalyptic fantasy world.
One – what is the point of a Jurassic Park anything without the tension of people (possibly) being eaten by dinosaurs?
Two – so during that whole movie nobody thought to go rescue the children that were alone at a daycamp elsewhere on the island?
To be fair, in the Jurassic Park movies the park never opened. Hammond was just showing it off to the main characters pre-opening and basically abandoned it after things went haywire. So even if there was a camp, it never was used. It’s only the recent “Jurassic World” movies that featured an actual open attraction.
Depends on what you mean with “possibly”. We watch a lot of fake suspense where the hero (James Bond, Indiana Jones, Batman, Disaster movie guy who takes things in charge and helps his wife even though they were about to divorce because he was at work during his kid’s anniversary baseball school play) can “possibly” die but can’t possibly die. I had the same reaction. “Hah, kids cartoon. They’re safe.” Then remembered that “they’re” also safe in my movies. Big hypocrite me.Heck, even Ian Malcolm didn’t manage to die.
I mean, yeah we know Batman and Indiana Jones aren’t going to die – but the Jurassic Park films always had a lot of people die – even people that were main-ish characters.
Season finale, one of these kids should get eaten. Then I’ll tune in.
Don’t know. Probably a matter of degree of main-ish-ness (or memory?). I never felt that main-ish enough characters got eaten in JP/W. At least not the same level of main-ess as the protagonists of that cartoon. These six are all Tim and Lex. No Muldoon amongst them.Lower the bar to secondary characters. Maybe some of them get eaten. Probably off-screen. Dunno. Don’t really care. I have the same impression that the fact it’s a cartoon lowers the stakes. But I think the difference is more in the way JP visually tricked us into believing it wasn’t one.Maybe there was more suspense in the film because we were less certain of the outcome ? Were we ? Weren’t the plot armored characters obvious ? I can’t really tell because I was tricked by the novel.
very cool. I imagine that steven spielberg had the veto power over any saturday morning show to “dilute the franchise” but at this point feels comfortable in a “high quality” version for streaming services. My guess is that if a “typical” cartoon show was produced in the 90s or early 00’s that they would already have had the plot to Jurassic World 1 & 2 taking place. lol.
I just started watching this show today; it’s not the kind of show I would want to just sit down and watch but we put it on for our son, and he became invested in it quite quickly. I’d give it a B- so far. It’s clever in its own and I like the characters.