The Jurassic Park Brochure
THE JURASSIC PARK BROCHURE
This is one of the original brochures from Steven Spielberg’s brilliant, Oscar winning, action adventure, Jurassic Park (1993). Strangely, this isn’t a greatly iconic graphic prop, as they only featured in the background of scenes. They can be seen in the visitor centre and the back of the tour vehicles but that’s about it. Although they weren’t very visible, they still possess the very iconic look of the film with the Jurassic Park logo, the yellow, black and green colour scheme.
These images of the brochure are from the Prop Store, an auction house for all things TV & Film. This original production prop from Jurassic Park featured in an auction from 2018. I’ve chosen to use these as I know this is the original prop, not someone else’s replica and the images capture all sides of the pamphlet in good detail. I hope the watermark isn’t too distracting though.
When folded, the booklet is 21cm x 9.5cm. It’s stylistically similar to a stereotypical adventure park brochure in layout, paper mechanics (the way it folds) and imagery. It contains little to no reference to safety which you’d think would be high priority for a park full of dinosaurs. The stock images used inside, the “general information”, and overall slightly ghastly design is actually well thought out by the designer and production team as it shows Hammond’s irresponsibility and naivety about the park he’s created.
On the other side there’s a map. This pinpoints different sites on the island, including the visitor centre, helipad, electric fencing and dinosaur enclosures. According to the film’s script, the brochure produced for guests was a cheaply made cartoony map. This explains why it is not an accurate representation of Jurassic Park’s layout and looks so cheesy and childish. This again shows Hammond’s lack of attention to detail and visitor safety.
The reverse of the pamphlet, when closed, features a “Kodak Gold Plus Film” advertisement. The production companies of Jurassic Park had a deal with Kodak and so they actually got some advertising placement in the movie. Unfortunately, as the brochures weren’t really seen, this came to nothing. Kodak did some cross-branding too though, selling tons of cameras, accessories and film with the Jurassic Park logo stamped across them over the following years, so it wasn’t all bad.
I would now like to credit the designer of the brochure and give them some credit, but as usual it’s impossible to know who actually did the work when it comes to graphic props. On IMDB, no one is credited as a graphic designer for Jurassic Park (1993). I have found two likely creators for the map illustration however; Tom Cranham and David Lowery are both credited under “illustrator” and it would definitely have been one of these two created that wonderfully cheesy and undescriptive digital drawing.
Lastly, the auction of this particular copy of the park brochure. Being an internationally successful and much-loved movie, this wasn’t going to be very cheap. But, as a background graphic prop, with the possibility of hundreds of identical copies having been printed and it being impossible to tell if it ever even made it to screen, meant I didn’t think it would be very expensive either. It was however fought over heavily by bidders and eventually sold for a crazy £3,000! I hope the graphic designer, whoever and wherever they may be, are laughing to their core at the value of a single, throw-away sheet of paper they designed and printed hundreds of, back in 1993.