It’s been three whole years since the Jurassic Park/World “saga” seemingly ended with a dumb movie about giant locusts. Well, now the franchise is back with Jurassic World Rebirth starring Scarlett Johansson. While the reviews for Rebirth haven’t been great, at least the movie features a T. rex river attack sequence, presumably to retroactively justify a 32-year-old amusement park ride.
This multi-billion dollar franchise all began with 1993’s Jurassic Park, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Jeff Goldblum’s glistening chest. The movie was obviously based on Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel, but Spielberg also took at least some inspiration from one of the earliest Saturday Night Live sketches.
In December of 1993, after Jurassic Park had easily been declared the biggest money-maker at the box office for that year, Spielberg spoke with The Washington Post and revealed that he saw the film as a spiritual follow-up to his earliest blockbuster. “To me, Jurassic Park was like the sequel I never made to Jaws,” Spielberg explained. “To me, it was the Land Shark from Saturday Night Live, and it was fun.”
Famously, “Land Shark” was SNL’s pitch for a Jaws sequel in which unsuspecting victims are killed by the formerly-aquatic beast who can now knock on apartment doors and pretend to be deliverymen.
The first sketch appeared in the fourth episode of the show, mere months after Jaws premiered. And because Lorne Michaels never met a hit premise he couldn’t run into the ground, the “Land Shark” quickly became a running gag.
Spielberg’s suggestion that Jurassic Park is a riff on “Land Shark” actually makes a lot of sense. As we’ve mentioned before, Spielberg was a huge fan of SNL when it began, and once told actor Gabriel LaBelle that he would fly from Los Angeles to New York just to watch the show in person during its first season. So there’s a very good chance that the E.T. director was actually in the studio audience when “Land Shark” debuted.
Back in ‘93, a number of critics pointed out that Spielberg’s return to the creature feature genre was distinctly reminiscent of Jaws — but obviously the animals weren’t confined to the water this time around. And, in retrospect, the movie’s velociraptors aren’t so dissimilar from the Chevy Chase-voiced Land Sharks. In SNL, we’re told that the Land Shark is the “cleverest species of them all.” In Jurassic Park, we learn that the raptors — including one “clever girl” — are “extremely intelligent” and have displayed “problem-solving” skills.
Jurassic Park even gives a scene in which our heroes face off against raptors as they attempt to enter a door, which is the central conflict of the Land Shark sketch.
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But while the raptors are able to figure out how to use door knobs, they lack the ability to impersonate plumbers and candy-gram deliverymen — although, if Hollywood keeps churning out sequels at this kind of pace, that may change one day.
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