Jurassic Park Ultimate Trilogy Blu-ray Review - Recommended - Page 2

A few quick odds and ends here:

Re the digital copies.  I probably wasn't clear enough in the review about this, but there aren't separate digital copy discs in the package.  It's a download option that will expire at the end of next year.  Personally, I don't mind this, since the other discs just take up space.

Re the packaging, I much preferred this to what happened with BTTF last year.  I had no problem getting the discs out or putting them back in.  The ones last year were a nightmare for me.  I agree it's a drag that there is no bottom and you could drop all the discs on the floor that way.  I just don't hold the package that way.   Too many problems like that in my past.  (One recent one was a little dog who decided he liked to eat DVD and Blu-ray packaging.  I have the destroyed cases as proof, and even some slightly clawed Blu-rays that thankfully still play.  And no, none of those were review copies...)

Re the OSHA violation on the poor guy standing on top of the raptor crate.  This is one of those things where if we tug on the thread of that sweater, the whole thing unravels really fast.  I mean, you're transporting a multi-million dollar creature, which is known to be super dangerous, and you don't establish any kind of automatic lock system or automatic gate system so that you can avoid exactly the accident that occurs here.  No, you have a guy standing on top of the cage, manually lifting the gate (which should be so heavy that he can't lift it) like someone letting a lion into a circus pen.  So of course, Rappy comes running out and somehow knocks the cage off its seating, thus opening up a wedge and knocking the idiot off the roof so he can be eaten.  To answer Malcolm, he didn't have insurance, but there was certainly a multi-million dollar wrongful death suit.  (Which begs the question, "What the heck were you doing on top of the cage in the first place?")

Re Paul Warren's post - I don't know any way to convince you that this is a new scan other than to say that the USHE person who answered our questions was quite specific that these are new 2011 transfers done for the Blu-ray release, with full input by Amblin Entertainment at every step.  Universal doesn't have anything to hide, to my knowledge.  But you're more than welcome to contact them or Amblin to ask for more specifics.   I'm unaware of a high def transfer of the movies done for HDTV, but I'd be curious if anyone has actually seen one.   You mention DNR "set to overkill" and say this is a "poor looking transfer".  Can you provide any specific examples of this?  And if you believe that the new transfers were not from film elements, what do you believe the source was?  An earlier video transfer, and thus this would be a transfer of a transfer?  That honestly doesn't make much sense.

The gate weave issue is just that the credits are a bit wobbly, but not in a major way.

I agree that Jurassic Park was a classic example of "unsafe working conditions".  The survivors could give a series of lectures on safety precautions, couldn't they?  My favorite new element I noticed in that opening sequence is that you can see that the bottom of the cage is unpainted wood - which tells me the whole thing was painted wood and they didn't cover the bottom.  With the new transfer, I could see it, which then generated the question of how you'd keep a creature like that in a wood box when it could just claw through...

The dinos into birds theory and the "hot blooded dinos" theory were both covered in the seminars taught by Dr. Kevin Padian when I took his course.  Both were fresh in my mind when I read the book.  I still remember a lot of things from that course, mostly how entertaining it was.

Amazing that we've gotten down to figuring out the OSHA ramifications of working conditions at Jurassic Park.

I'm sure the worker's family was deeply consoled that OSHA weighed in on his predicament AFTER he was eaten. 

I suppose there could have been a clause in the Jurassic Park employee's contract regarding "assumed risk".  Something like "Employee acknowledges that this is an 'at will' employment situation and that at any time said employee may become a dining option for any of the various creations (read: vicious dinosaurs like T-Rexes, compies and raptors) and that in such situation, employee relinquishes all right to legal recourse..."  Who knows how many employees might have been saved this fate if they bothered to read the fine print?

I believe that a single of Jurassic Park (the first movie) and a single of Back To The Future (the first movie) will be made available this year as part of the 100th Anniversary idea.