Dinosaurs and Nazis: The Influence of the Jurassic Park Franchise on Popular and Conspiratorial Versions of History and Historical Culture

Abstract

The words ‘Dinosaurs’ and ‘Nazis’, when combined in stylistic form or placed in juxtaposition, have exerted both significant textual and powerful visual impact in popular culture since the 1990s, and especially since the creation of the Jurassic Park franchise. The words are also signifiers that can shape and embody the ‘ultimate dream’ or perfect marketing formula for the creative imagination of those engaged in a variety of media platforms within contemporary transmedia production. Utilizing a combination of textual and content analysis, the following discussion investigates and critically reflects upon two rather under-researched aspects of the cultural influence of Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur movie franchise. First of all, there was a curious, but nevertheless important, impact of Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park movie and its sequels on the study by academic historians of the ideology of the German Third Reich concerning science and, in particular, Nazi policy towards nature and the animal world. The language of Jurassic Park was increasingly employed to convey a picture of what Nazi scientists supposedly experimented with when it came to their interference with nature. Secondly, this historical dimension and associated research has, in turn, fed into and influenced wider mass entertainment media since the early 1990s, especially when it comes to ‘alternative’ and conspiratorial versions of popular history and ideas about ‘secret’ experiments, ‘lost’ worlds and the rebirth of extinct animal species. These relatively unexplored topics require further scrutiny and critical analysis.