The Lost World at 20: Growing Up and the Sad Case of the Velociraptor Pencil Tin

It was a great pencil case. Rectangular, about 6 inches long, and made of metal, so technically a pencil tin, if you’re a pencil case purist and really care about such details. I loved it. How could I not? It had a Velociraptor on it and proudly bore the mark of Jurassic Park, making it 100% official and therefore even more awesome. I bought it for the new school year and had proudly stuffed all my pens, pencils, erasers and sharpeners into it ready to show all my classmates because they, like me, would surely believe it to be a very cool pencil case (okay, pencil tin!) too.

Predictably, they didn’t. This was 1997, and me and my classmates were 13, at the start of the long, hard road through puberty. A pencil case that proudly displayed an earnest love for a dinosaur film wasn’t the ‘done’ thing at that age. Too childish, too silly for a group of kids ready to proclaim themselves adults and watch Baz Lurhmann’s violent take on Romeo and Juliet on VHS (God, I miss the 90s!) in class. The danger, the excitement, the sheer coolness of it all! A dinosaur pencil tin, on the other hand…? I was mocked and while I was too stubborn (and too in love with Jurassic Park) to get rid of it, I didn’t show it off either, carefully removing it from my bag at the start of class and concealing it under books during it. Poor pencil tin; it never got its chance to shine.

I recount this story not to encourage sympathy (though, come on: awwwwwww, poor me, right?) but to underline just how important Jurassic Park was to me as a kid. I’ve written before about the sheer delirium I experienced when watching the first film and the papier mache disaster that was my attempt to record my own sequel back in 1993. So when an actual sequel was announced, I was, to put it mildly, rather excited. Shortly after the first film came out, a TV show announced that Tim and Lex (my childhood heroes!) would be making appearances. What would happen!? Would they be the focus? Would they go back to the island? Would Tim get stuck in that damn tree again? I needed to know. Jurassic Park was important. Like: ruin-the-scant-cred-I-had-with-a-Raptor-pencil-tin important.

Naturally, when The Lost World: Jurassic Park (a title whose curious order baffled me then and still does now) finally hit cinemas, I was first in line to see it. These were exciting times. As if the release of a new Jurassic Park film wasn’t enough, The Lost World was one of the first films I saw at the cinema without parental escort. I took my seat with a friend and waited for what I was convinced was going to be the greatest feat of cinematic excellence since, well, the first Jurassic Park film.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

But it never arrived. It wasn’t that it was a bad film, but The Lost World simply didn’t bowl me over in the same way the first film did. It still doesn’t now. There are only two Spielberg films I find difficult to defend: 1941 is one of them, and The Lost World is the other. I can find interest in recognised duds like Always, whose aching melancholy is under-rated, and Hook, which for all its flaws is thematically fascinating, but 1941 (save for the excellent dance hall sequence) is a mess and The Lost World is too familiar. A series of dazzling sequences aside (the trailer cliffhanger and raptors in the long grass, in particular), it’s not much more than a comment on boring sequels by a man who seems pretty bored himself. The cut from screaming mother to yawning Ian Malcolm that introduces our hero mathematician sums it up neatly.

Back in 1997, my critiques were less rounded and more focused on the lack of wonder. I didn’t dislike the film, and actually rigorously defended it. I told the friend who I saw it with that I didn’t get why people were so sniffy towards it; after all, it’s got dinosaurs in it. What more do these people want? But there was something that just didn’t slip into place. Maybe it was that I disliked the Site B concept (Jurassic World 2: I still want my ‘dinosaur film in a deserted, overgrown dinosaur theme park’, please), maybe it was that I felt a bit conned by the tagline. Technically something hadn’t survived; it’s just that the dinosaurs we see in The Lost World are on a different island. They’re different dinosaurs, so apart from shoddy sequel logic, nothing has really survived. Whatever it was, The Lost World didn’t click, and I think now, in hindsight, I know why.

It was the pencil case. Or, to be more precise, what the pencil case represented. As a thirteen year old geek who still enjoyed cartoons and thought dinosaurs were the coolest thing ever, I was a fish-out-of-water. The four years that had elapsed between the release of Jurassic Park and The Lost World had taken me from nine to thirteen: a giant leap at that age. The former’s a kid who’s allowed to enjoy the escapist nonsense of dinosaur theme parks; the latter’s a teenager who’s not. Like my pencil case, my disappointment with The Lost World reflected a switch in who my friends I were. We were older and more susceptible to the demands of peer pressure. Not even the combination of dinosaurs and Steven Spielberg (especially not the darker post-Schindler’s List Spielberg) could turn back the clock.

It’s something we all go through and quite Spielbergian in its way: that moment in your life when you put childish things away and start thinking that spreadsheets and coffee and all those other oh-so-adult things sound cool. Then, of course, you become an adult and spreadsheets and coffee and all those other oh-so-adult things are very very not cool. At that point, the fantasies of your childhood seem necessary again, and watching a dinosaur film, even a flawed one like The Lost World, is a trip back to a lost world of its own: one where papier mache islands and dino pencil tins are the greatest things ever. You were just too busy pretending to be grown up to realise it first time round.

As for the pencil tin, it’s now lost beneath the sands of time, scratched and dented as all pencil tins were. Still fucking awesome though. It had a Velociraptor on it!