The Hilariously Awesome Jurassic Park 3 Scene You'll Never Get To See
The third "Jurassic Park" isn't remembered for much these days, besides maybe making the second "Jurassic Park" look like the first "Jurassic Park." For younger readers, that's roughly the same as saying that it made "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" look like "Jurassic World."
Harsh? Possibly, but "Jurassic Park III," by most accounts, came by its uneven weirdness honestly. It was a remarkably troubled production — Speaking to About in 2001, director Joe Johnston admitted that the film "did not have a final script until after we wrapped the movie," while William H. Macy, asked about the filming process by TV Guide, stated "...what you want to say is, 'Who launched a $100 million ship without a rudder, and who's getting fired for this?' (...) I think someone should be shot, but I'm not in charge." As a result of the picture's laissez faire attitude with regard to plot, dialogue, and gestures-wildly-everything, a lot of bonkers stuff got thrown at the wall, pitched in earnest against all odds. Some made it into the final cut, some was relegated to the conceptual cutting room floor. Take, for example, a scene described by "Jurassic Park III" storyboard artist Dave Lowery this week, in which a velociraptor rides a dirt bike off of a cliff,
"A velociraptor rides a dirt bike off of a cliff:" A combination of words which automatically triggers most word processors' automatic breathalyzer function. But here we are, 20 years later, and sadder for the knowledge of what might have been.
Jurassic Park 3: Sons of Juranarchy
Storyboard artist Dave Lowery spoke with the "Stuck On Sorna" podcast this week, describing his time working on "Jurassic Park III" and some of the concepts that he sketched out, only to see them fall to the preproduction cutting room floor. One such scene saw a young man trying to make a daring escape.
"The kid is being chased by the velociraptor," Lowery recalled of the sequence, "and he gets on a dirt bike, and is racing through the jungle and ends up going through a field (...) with the velociraptors chasing after him, full tilt. He's going wide open on this dirt bike, sees a cliff coming, gets to the cliff, goes off the edge of the cliff." Employing the use of a parachute, the young buck survives his tumble. The raptor, meanwhile, suffers an empirically awesome fate.
"The raptor jumps after him," Lowery continued, "and I think the raptor lands on the saddle of the bike and takes it down to the bottom. It's so amazing it didn't make it in."
There you have it. The world very nearly saw a raptor Homer Simpsoning his way down a cliff face. Why the scene was cut, we may never know. Perhaps Universal Studios was worried that audiences would like the movie too much. Maybe some stuff had to be cut to make room for that scene where Sam Neill has a bad dream about a dinosaur saying his name. In all likelihood, it was chopped due to concerns that the MPAA would put their collective foot down on raptors seeming too rad, like they did when Colin Trevorrow pitched Blue chain smoking cigarettes in a leather jacket and a pair of wraparound sunglasses in a scene that we just made up. If nothing else, "Velociraptors on Dirt Bikes" could still make a solid Saturday morning cartoon, or the basis for that "Fast and the Furious" crossover that keeps coming up.