Episode 72 - It's a Dinosaur!

Welcome to the Juras-Sick Park-Cast podcast, the Jurassic Park podcast about Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, and also not about that, too. 

Find the episode webpage at: Episode 72 - Isla Nublar.

In this episode (stream it here!), my terrific guest Dr. Hannah McGregor joins the show to chat with me about:

the Stanley Park raccoons, tales about animals out in the wild, the book Clever Girl, podcasts, feminism in Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993), the Pop Classics Series by ECW Press, cracking open popular films for cultural analysis, her favourite dinosaur, the Canadian Museum of Nature, Tyrannosaurus lips, Man v. Nature, Bushed by Earle Virney, Man v. Moose/Skunk, Crichton's shortfalls, unpacking the inextricable themes of Jurassic Park, Spielberg's retelling of John Landis's failures while filming the Twighlight Zone (1983), Pandora's Box, patriarchal cultures, the site of conflict between control and chaos, de-colonization as a New World Order, viewing Hammond as specifically coded as a colonizer/Colonialist, drawing some connections between Hammond and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard's character in Jurassic World), putting Harry Potter into Critical Theory in podcast form: Witch, Please and the current-running Material Girls podcast, and much more!

Find her new book, Clever Girl

A smart and incisive exploration of everyone’s favorite dinosaur movie and the female dinosaurs who embody what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free.

The Jurassic Park series is one of the most famous and profitable movie franchises of all time — an entire generation of people has never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. The movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, and now it has also been re-envisioned as a classic of queer feminist storytelling.

In Clever Girl, Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent, and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believed in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free. The velociraptors were not just jump scares for children but also revelatory and predatory symbols of feminist rage. Clever girls, indeed.

Available at this link: Clever Girl! 

Plus dinosaur news about:

• A Spanish saltasauroid titanosaur reveals Europe as a melting pot of endemic and immigrant sauropods in the Late Cretaceous (Qunkasaura pintiquiestra)
• Coahuilasaurus lipani, a New Kritosaurin Hadrosaurid from the Upper Campanian Cerro Del Pueblo Formation, Northern Mexico (Coahuilasaurus lipani)

Featuring the music of Snale https://snalerock.bandcamp.com/

Intro: Chinese Cafe, and the Outro: Death of a D