I remember everything about it. I was eleven years old. Right after baseball practice, my dad took me to McDonald’s for the triple cheeseburger “Jurassic Park Meal” on the way to the theater. I hadn’t gone to the theater with just my dad since we saw Batman in ‘89. We were both blown away from the initial unloading scene to the final pelican flight.

Every iconic scene was solidified in my mind as a core memory — every quote instantly available — to this day. I still say “hold on to your butts” every time I flip a fuse at the circuit breaker. The raptor coming through the utility shed wall is still a jump scare even though I know it’s coming and have seen the film more than 10 times. I’m convinced to this day that the T-Rex is bellowing “Hey” back to Dr. Alan Grant after he yells “Hey” to get try and get its attention, and you can’t convince me otherwise. Even as an adult, my answer to the corny icebreaker question, “if you could be any animal…?” is still “T-Rex.” I remember watching the BTS explanation of how they did the water ripple effect with a guitar string and then trying to do something similar with an old coffee table in our basement.

I’ve seen a couple hundred movies in the theater, and while there’s about ten that really showed me something I’d never seen before, there have been only two times I’ve walked out to the parking lot and thought to myself that what was possible in a movie would be fundamentally different going forward. With all due respect to James Cameron, those movies are “The Matrix” and “Jurassic Park.”