Let's All Re-watch 'Weird Al' Yankovic's Jubilant 'Jurassic Park' Parody

Movie scores don’t come any better than John Williams’ Jurassic Park theme. And movie song parodies don’t come any funnier than “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Jurassic Park” spoof, which debuted in October 1993, four months after the release of Steven Spielberg’s game-changing blockbuster. The first single off his Alapalooza album — the follow-up to his Grammy-nominated record, Off the Deep End — Yankovic’s song, which borrows the tune of Jimmy Webb’s 1968 song, “MacArthur Park,” was immortalized in a most excellent Claymation video directed by Mark Osborne and Scott Nordlund and released in concert with the full album.

Part of the reason why “Jurassic Park” made such a splash when it debuted was its timeliness. Where some of Yankovic’s previous movie-specific parodies (like 1984’s Rocky III-derived “The Rye or the Kaiser” and 1985’s Star Wars tribute “Yoda”) were released well after the films had come and gone, Jurassic Park was still in roughly 800 theaters when the song dropped. In the liner notes for the 1994 box set, Al in the Box, Yankovic recalls that his “Eureka!” moment came in a rented car in Florida early in the summer of ‘93, when a radio station started playing The Kinks’ “Lola,” which served as the basis for “Yoda.” “I flashed on Jurassic Park, which had just come out…[and] I thought of various songs that I could combine that with, and when I hit on ‘MacArthur Park’ it just felt natural.”  

Maybe it felt natural to him, but Yankovic’s youthful fanbase likely had little to no frame of reference for “MacArthur Park.” They were accustomed to hearing their favorite musical parodist send up songs that were in heavy rotation on MTV — “Beat It” and “Like a Virgin” in the ’80s and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “U Can’t Touch This” in the ’90s.

Webb’s song was a cult oddity, with inscrutable lyrics like “MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark/All the sweet green icing flowing down.” Yankovic reworked the words to comment directly on the movie’s story. Thus, the chorus became “Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark/All the dinosaurs are running wild” and lines like “I recall the yellow cotton dress” became “I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitoes.” It was rare for Yankovic to be so plot-specific in his parodies, and not everyone approved: “’Jurassic Park’ doesn’t satirize the film, just provides a funny promo for it,” complained Entertainment Weekly.

Maybe the speed with which the song was written accounts for its emphasis on story over the usual Yaknovic silliness. After getting approval from all concerned parties — Webb, Spielberg and Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton — Yankovic started recording the tune in mid-July 1993. Osborne and Nordlund commenced work on the video at the same time, due to the labor-intensive stop-motion process.

“I decided that it would be easier to do a clay animated video than to find real dinosaurs,” Yankovic joked in the liner notes. The singer appears in Claymation form in the video, at times sporting the fedora worn by the movie’s paleontologist hero, Alan Grant (Sam Neill). Osborne and Nordlund also faithfully translate many of the song’s gags — such as an appearance by Barney that ends with the love-happy dino getting his head bitten off — and recreate specific sequences from Spielberg’s movie, like Martin Ferrero’s cowardly lawyer character getting chomped on while in a port-a-potty.

But the directors also build in a lot of their own visual gags, from a Velociraptor using a set of keys to open a locked door to a Yellow Submarine joke to Spielberg himself becoming dino food. (That’s the other great thing about the video — the body count is just as high, if not higher, than the movie.)

Sadly, Yankovic — who is currently in the midst of his latest world tour — didn’t record a new track for Jurassic World. (Perhaps set to the tune of “We Are the World”?) But the legacy of his “Jurassic Park” anthem left a big impression on World’s director, Colin Trevorrow. During Yahoo Movies’ visit to the Jurassic World set last year, the filmmaker expressed admiration for Yankovic’s career longevity and said that the song reminds him that it’s okay to approach the franchise with a little bit of humor. “I take it all so seriously — I have to remember not to be too self-serious sometimes.”

Watch a compilation of the best kills in the ‘Jurassic Park’ series: