What do “Godzilla,” “Jurassic Park,” “The Land Before Time” and “Pacific Rim” have in common?
They were all the subject of heated discussion at Saturday’s Phoenix DinoCon, held at Phoenix Center for the Arts.
Arizona’s second annual pop-culture dinosaur convention featured nearly a dozen panel discussions in the Tyrannosaurus Theater and Diplodocus Demo Room, as well as a Velociraptor Vendor Room, a Brontosaurus Bar and several trivia competitions. Presentation topics ranged from Japanese kaiju to steampunk Tea rexes and from “Power Rangers Dino Thunder” to spoilers for the upcoming “Jurassic World” film. There was also an after-party at FilmBar featuring a screening of the ’90s film “Adventures in Dinosaur City.”
The convention was founded by five family members: Julia Zolondz, Julia’s husband Bobby Tyning, Julia’s sister Patty Jimenez, Patty’s husband Carl Jimenez and their 16-year-old son Trinidad Jimenez.
“It kind of came out of going to (Phoenix) Comicon and being like, ‘You know, Comicon is awesome, but it’d be even more awesome if it was just all about dinosaurs,'” Carl Jimenez said. “It’s like, ‘There’s hardly any dinosaur stuff at Comicon this year. We should start our own thing, we’ll call it DinoCon.'”
Trinidad Jimenez, who gave a presentation on the differences between the Jurassic Park film “The Lost World” and the Michael Crichton novel it was based on, said the event’s goal was to bring together the diverse pop-culture mediums dinosaurs have a presence in: everything from films and books to tabletop and video games.
Carl Jimenez said the family is already planning for next year’s DinoCon, which should continue to increase in size. The first event, held at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa in 2013, had nearly 100 attendees; this year’s convention had close to 400. He said the long-term goal is to bring “Jurassic Park” star Jeff Goldblum to DinoCon in 2018.
The convention was targeted to dinosaur-lovers over the age of 12, although many younger children came as well. Several traded dinosaur jokes and facts during the panel discussions, which relied heavily on audience participation, while others chose to “adopt” toy dinosaurs from the DinoCon merchandise booth in the vendors’ hall.
Trinidad Jimenez said that for him and many other dinosaur-lovers, the passion for the creatures starts at a young age.
“For dinosaurs, it’s always been like that sort of fascination always starts when you’re a young child, because especially as a boy it’s like there’s these big lizards that have sharp teeth and eat other big lizards,” Trinidad Jimenez said. “That’s just something really cool as a young child to think about. And then the dinosaurs, they just look so cool, because they’re just these big reptile-bird things and they just have giant teeth.”
Many of the panelists discussed the accuracy, or lack thereof, of dinosaurs in pop culture, especially films. Hollywood has a tendency to value dramatic appearances over verified facts, they said, which can be frustrating to true dinosaur-lovers who are watching as fans or are somehow involved in the project.
Sedona-based sculptor and video-effects artist Michael Trcic, who was the key sculptor of the T. rex from “Jurassic Park” and gave a presentation at DinoCon, said that while the film was groundbreaking for its use of special effects and portrayal of semi-realistic science-fiction topics, it was difficult to preserve many of the actual facts about dinosaurs. Often times, truth was sacrificed in favor of something that was more visually exciting.
“I had it in my head that because ‘Jurassic Park’ was about cutting-edge science, the dinosaurs needed to be extremely accurate, at least for what we knew at that time about dinosaurs,” Trcic said in his presentation. “That was a constant battle for me, it was a daily battle for me.”
Barrick Gold geologist Melanie Dolberg gave a presentation about why fans love pop-culture dinosaurs and how the creatures’ portrayals in popular franchises stack up against scientific fact. She said the appeal of dinosaurs is that they are animals that actually existed at one time, as opposed to true mythical beings. Their existence in the past is proven fact, so their possible existence in the present is more plausible.
“The common thread that I see is that we all want to experience something incredible and something impossible,” Dolberg said in her presentation. “And the idea that something that amazing might still be lurking around our islands or caves, it makes us feel like the world’s holding this magical secret back from us.”
Still, Dolberg said it’s unnecessary for pop culture to stretch the facts when it comes to dinosaurs.
“The world as we see it today has all of its magic right there on display for us, we don’t actually need to make up all these things. We don’t need to think dinosaurs are any more fantastic than they are,” Dolberg said. “My big love of science comes from the fact that the ‘what if’ is really fun, but ‘what really is’ is … more beautiful than anything we’ve ever made up. So there’s no reason to pretend that dinosaurs are cooler than they are, because they’re already amazing.”
Saturday’s event culminated with the inaugural induction of ‘Jurassic Rex’ — the T. rex from the “Jurassic Park” movie series — into The Hall of Distinguished Dinosaurs. The hall will be located at a Bookmans Entertainment Exchange and a new famous pop-culture dinosaur will be inducted every year. This year, Jurassic Rex beat out Godzilla in the balloted vote by Phoenix DinoCon attendees.
Someone in costume as John Hammond from “Jurassic Park” accepted the award on behalf of Jurassic Rex.
“I’m sorry that our T. rex couldn’t accept this award but I chose not to ship her hundreds of miles out here to Phoenix,” the pseudo-Hammond joked. “This is truly a beautiful award. I cannot wait to go back to Isla Nublar with this award and set it on one of the shelves in the ruins of Jurassic Park.”
Contact the reporter at kimberly.koerth@asu.edu
