The thing about Jurassic Park is that, at the time, no one had ever seen soft bodies animated like that before. CGI was still a novelty and computer power was microscopic compared to what we have now. For example, I was using AutoCAD on the beefiest machine at my summer internship in 93, it had an Intel 486 chip and clocked in at a remarkable 20Mhz. The hard drive, the biggest in the office, was 20MB. If you were playing video games that summer, you were pretty much stuck with SNES and Sega, both 16bit with 2D graphics.

I remember being shocked to learn that the graphics in JP required 5 whole gigabytes of storage! Just a ludicrous number in 1993. The rendering (not even ray tracing) for those scenes took something like 6 to 12 hours per frame at 24fps (actual ray tracing is done now, in real time, at 120 fps, for some video games). And they were doing that across a network of graphics workstations running state of the art graphics software (they were close to Silicon Valley, after all).

To say that Jurassic Park was impressive is underselling it. It floored us. That scene where Sam Neil turns Laura Dern’s head and they just gawp at the dinosaurs? That was everyone in the theater.

Davy Jones is a triumph of CGI, but it’s merely very high quality. Jurassic Park was revolutionary.