Video: How to Build a Tyrannosaurus Rex

Jurassic Park was released in 1993, and it hasn’t aged a goddamn day. Since the recent release of Jurassic World we’ve all gone dino-crazy once again, and yet it seems that all anybody really wants to talk about is just how brilliant the special effects from the first movie are.

Watching the first film again now, it’s difficult to believe there isn’t some kind of sorcery at work. Surely someone on the production team made a deal with the Devil to keep the movie looking fresher than Dorian Gray for the rest of its days.

But what we all seem to be forgetting, in this age of CGI and motion capture, is that a hell of a lot of the dinosaurs you see in Jurassic Park are real. As in they ain’t cooked up in a computer; they’re giant freaking robots dressed up as dinosaurs.

Just take a look at the above video, which shows some of how that pant-wettingly terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex was created. The reason it holds up so well on film is that they literally built a dinosaur. And not only that; those sneaky Velociraptors (which still haunt our collective nightmares, tbh) were guys in rubber suits. Yep.

Of course, the fact that the giant T. Rex was a robot did cause a few problems on the set. Apparently, the fake rain would soak through its ‘skin’ and cause it to malfunction. In other words, it would move and twitch of its own accord, meaning that people wandering through the Jurassic Park set would sometimes hear random bloodcurdling screams from the T. Rex room. Colour me outta there…