Editor’s note: Jurassic Park is like some classic sneakers.
It took the world by storm when it dropped 30-plus years ago, and there have been new versions released since then, but the original has stood the test of time.
To celebrate the release of the Reebok x Jurassic Park sneaker collection, The Fresh Press asked sportswriter and dad Mike Guardabascio to talk about what the franchise means to him.
My wife and I don’t mark our children’s heights on the door jamb. Like all elder millennials, we measure their growth rings by talking about which one of our beloved Intellectual Property franchises they’re now old enough to watch.
“He’s five, she’s three, we can probably do Star Wars, right?”
“He’s six, she’s four, I think Ghostbusters is okay.”
By far the movie we were most excited to share with them was Jurassic Park and its sequels. Jurassic Park is both of our favorite movie, and I am a lifelong dinosaur nut. Michael Crichton’s JP novel was the first grownup book I read as a kid, and I’ve spent a few summers picking around in Montana and North Dakota as a volunteer on digs with paleontologists. My kids are growing up in a house that has a fossil case, with handmade casts from bones and teeth that I helped to dig out of the ground in 100-degree Badlands heat.
I’m not sure what it is about dinosaurs that’s so fascinating to people, but I do know that they’re just as fascinating to kids now as they were when I was growing up, or when my parents were. That meant we didn’t have to talk our kids into watching Jurassic Park–they were geeked.
There’s a funny sensation when you watch a movie or show that you love with your kids, and they’re loving it too. It’s like the fabric of time folding over on your family — you’re a kid again sitting next to your own kids, freaking out over T. Rex smashing a Jeep to pieces. As your kids are watching Tim and Lex eating in the buffet room, they’re wishing they could get that same red Jurassic Park lunch box that you wished you could get back in 1993.
The difference is the dinosaurs, and the very different fears they inspire in children and adults. My kids were watching the movie shrieking and hiding from the velociraptors and T. Rexes, while I was sitting there stressed about how an environmental catastrophe wiped those god-like Rexes off the face of the Earth.
Dinosaurs had a reign of 165 million years — people have been around for 200,000 years, about 0.12% as long. It took an asteroid the size of Manhattan to wipe out the dinosaurs, while ironically, our global obsession with fossil fuels formed from organisms who lived alongside the dinosaurs poses the greatest threat to the world my kids will grow up in.
The movies, the love of dinos, the love of that lunch box are a common link, though. My kids are growing up in a very different world than I did, but there’s still the same magic for them in eating popcorn and watching these giant monsters eat people –s till magic in thinking about the fact that these monsters actually existed, some of them on the same land that our house is parked on.
Also, one other commonality: kids have just as hard of a time sitting through a full movie at eight years old in 2021 as they did in the 1990s. Here are the best questions my son asked while watching each of the Jurassic Park movies.
Jurassic Park: It would actually be kind of cool to be eaten by a dinosaur, right?The Lost World: Isn’t San Diego where Legoland is? Jurassic Park 3: If a Spinosaurus ate a plane, would it poop metal out?Jurassic World: If Disneyland opened a Jurassic Park could we go?Fallen Kingdom: Could we buy a dinosaur for $10 million?
The $10 million ankylosaur is still a little out of our price range, unfortunately. But we did buy them the red lunchboxes.
Mike Guardabascio is an award-winning sportswriter and journalist in Long Beach, CA. He is active on Twitter @Guardabascio and is a co-host of the Jenkins & Jonez podcast.
Reebok x Jurassic Park sneaker collection
The past year has been a big one for Reebok when it comes to pop culture collabs.
Alongside the brand’s deep archive of retro basketball storytelling thanks to signature models from legends like Allen Iverson, Shawn Kemp and Shaquille O’Neal, Reebok has been pushing the nostalgia buttons pretty hard and throwing back to some of our other childhood favorites.
We’ve seen NERF, Candy Land, the Minions, Hot Ones and even Peppa Pig make an appearance on some classic Reebok models lately, and there’s another funky release in the pipeline.
This time around the brand takes us to the Lost World with the Reebok x Jurassic Park collection, releasing in Men’s and Kids’ sizing on 7/30.
You’ll be able to choose from three different silhouettes in adult sizes – the Classic Leather, the Instapump Fury OG and the Club C Legacy.
The Classic Leather is inspired by Jeff Goldblum’s iconic line, “Life finds a way” and features Jurassic Park prints on one half of each shoe and embossed black leather on the other half.
The Instapump Fury OG mimics the design of the brightly colored Jeeps that guests rode around the park in during the films, while the Club C Legacy was inspired by the “Mr. DNA” character which was used to explain to Jurassic Park visitors how dinosaurs were recreated.
Get something fierce for your feet when the Reebok x Jurassic Park collection drops in Men’s and Kids’ sizing on 7/30 at finishline.com and in stores.
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