Hollywood used to think just about any movie could become a kids cartoon. Rambo is a sobering examination of post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of the Vietnam War; the rights holders looked at it and saw the potential for a G.I. Joe knock-off. Result: Rambo: The Force of Freedom. RoboCop is an ultraviolent social satire; somebody missed the satire entirely and made a relatively straight-forward animated series. The same basic thing happened a decade later with Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles. Highlander, everyone’s favorite tale of iimmortals decapitating other immortals, got a dreadful, barely related cartoon. The Karate Kid cartoon featured Mr. Miyagi, Daniel, and some random girl chasing down a stolen ancient artifact while the Dumb & Dumber cartoon had Harry and Lloyd enjoying road trip adventures with their pet beaver named Kitty. Some movies-turned-cartoons were really good (e.g., The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice), others were things we know we watched yet barely remember (e.g., Back to the Future, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure).
I’d like to think that if Jurassic Park had ever made the transition to animation the result would have been something we’d remember fondly. After all, Spielberg would have certainly been involved, and his early 90s Amblin Entertainment shows Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and Pinky & the Brain are classics. However, it turns out that Universal Studios really did want a Jurassic Park TV show, one that would air in prime time no less, and the person who put an end to it was Spielberg.
As uncovered by the FromDirectorStevenSpielberg Tumblr, animator William Stout told the whole story on his personal website last year:
Upon the success of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movie, all kinds of ancillary projects abounded: toys, games, novelties, apparel, etc. Towards the end of all of this merchandising I got a call from artist Will Meugniot, asking if I’d be interested in designing a Jurassic Park animated series. This was not going to be a kiddy show (although kids of all ages, including myself, could enjoy it). They wanted the show to be a mature prime time series with top writers and state-of-the-art television animation augmented with quite a bit of CG animation. Universal Cartoon Studios wanted a “graphic novel look” to the series. I came in, showed my portfolio and was hired.
Full disclosure: This is the first time I’ve ever heard of William Stout. His bio indicates he started out as a designer in the late 60s/early 70s publishing world (Playboy, Bomb!, Heavy Metal) before transitioning to film production design with 1978’s Buck Rogers, which he followed up by working on both Conan films, First Blood, The Hitcher and Invaders From Mars. He climbed the ladder fast enough to become the youngest production designer in the history of film with Return of the Living Dead. However, he’s best known for his paleontological reconstructions in the 1981 book THE DINOSAURS–A Fantastic New View of a Lost which led to work on Ray Bradbury’s Dinosaur Tales and The Little Blue Brontosaurus (aka, the basis for The Land Before Time). He had several traveling art exhibitions of his dinosaur work throughout the 80s.
So, yeah, the dude loves dinosaurs, and he was desperate to work on Jurassic Park:
A friend sent me Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park before it was published, when it was still in what the publishing biz called “galleys”. I was told to read the entire novel but not to look at the last page until I had finished the book. His requested reading condition made me curious.
As I devoured the book, I was amazed. I knew all the people upon whom the characters in the novel were based; they were friends of mine. The book took place in a theme park; I had been designing theme parks for Disney and Universal for years. And dinosaurs. I certainly knew my dinosaurs. It seemed the most absolutely perfect property for me to design as a film. That worried me, as the Hollywood axiom is the more perfect one is for a film, the less likely one’s involvement or chance of getting hired.
When I got to the last page, I knew I’d never be hired. There was an acknowledgement by Crichton of my work as an inspiration for his book. I was too perfect to ever work on the film. Nevertheless, I thought I’d give it a shot, even though I knew that trying to get a job on a film almost always guarantees the job will never happen.
I met and hit it off with Rick Carter, the film’s fine production designer. We had lunch together every other week, during which I fed him ideas to put in the movie. Nearly all of them made their way into the film.
While he didn’t get to work on the movie, he was clearly the guy they came to for concept art for an animated series:
We made a trailer to communicate the look and feel of the series, also showing how we would combine computer animation with traditional animation. All we needed was Spielberg’s approval. I heard through the grapevine that he never bothered to watch what we had done. By that time the word was out that he was burnt out on Jurassic Park merchandising and all of the film’s commercial exploitation. So, it never got made.
Stout still has the trailer, but he doesn’t have the rights to release it. However, he is apparently allowed to share all of his concept art, which he is now selling on his website. To my eyes, these look more like children’s book illustrations than anything else, really old fashioned ones at that (Dr. Sadler looks like a 60s cartoon character), but it is an interesting window into what could have been:
You can buy matted and framed 5″ x 7″ copies at Stout’s site, but it’ll cost ya ($900 is the cheapest price I saw).
And now, for no reason, here’s someone’s video review of the old Jurassic Park Super Nintendo game, which was like Legend of Zelda merged with Doom:
Source: FromDirectorStevenSpielberg, William Stout (via Collider)