The original Jurassic Park, released in 1993, is one of the most memorable films of the past 30 years. Featuring one of the great ensemble casts of the early ’90s, Oscar-winning sound and visual effects, and a gripping plot based on Michael Crichton’s bestselling science fiction thriller, it also ranks among Steven Spielberg’s best movies — which is saying a lot for a director who has E.T., Saving Private Ryan, and Indiana Jones to his name. Jurassic Park moved audiences around the world with humor, horror, and moments of genuine wonder. Who can forget the buildup and anticipation when we first see those magnificent Jurassic Park dinosaurs for the first time? The scene when Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and the other visitors enter the park and come upon the brachiosaurus glistening in the sun and bestriding the land like primordial colossus still has the power to conjure feelings of grandeur after all these years.

Computer-generated imagery (CGI) was a fairly new technology in 1993. In the hands of Spielberg’s creative team, it was stunningly effective in creating genuinely realistic-looking dinosaurs. The authentic-looking appearance of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, made with both CGI and practical effects, was a key factor behind its equally stunning box office success, which set national and international records for ticket sales that would not be broken until the exceptional theatrical performance of Titanic in 1998. Jurassic Park led not only to CGI becoming an ordinary rather than extraordinary feature of modern movies, but also to more Jurassic Park movies — six of them, to be exact. The first was the 1997 sequel The Lost World, also directed by Spielberg, followed by Jurassic Park 3 in 2001. Audiences could have taken a clue from Spielberg’s dropping out of the series that the franchise had begun to decline, but no matter. Universal Studios continued churning out Jurassic Parks on the average of one per every U.S. presidential term. When diminishing ticket revenues for Jurassic Park 3 indicated that the humans-encountering-resuscitated-dinosaurs concept was beginning to exhaust itself, rather than pivot to other, more original and more creative film possibilities, the studio stuck with the undead dinosaurs and in 2015 gave us the first installment of a new series within the Jurassic Park universe: Jurassic World.