A Cancelled Jurassic Park TV Series Could Have Changed The Entire Franchise

You might think that following up a hit movie with a sequel would be fairly straightforward, but when a film becomes as successful and culturally influential as "Jurassic Park," follow-ups are always going to be difficult. Indeed, the sequels to Steven Spielberg's 1993 blockbuster failed to match the superlative example set by the original, but a cancelled animated series sounds like it could have done a much better job of carrying on the movie's legacy.

In the original film, paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) visit the titular park alongside swaggering mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) as the guests of Richard Attenborough's misguided visionary John Hammond. Alongside Hammond's grandchildren, Led and Tim Murphy (Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards) the group quickly find themselves menaced by escaped dinos before escaping the island via helicopter and leaving the prehistoric creatures to run rampant in the park.

The never-realized animated series, which was developed under the working title "Escape from Jurassic Park," would have picked up after the end of the original movie and feature the same characters (though it's unlikely the actors would have lent their actual voices to the project). It was overseen by 1980s cartoon maestro Will Meugniot of "The Real Ghostbusters" and "Captain Planet" fame, who seemingly had big plans for this particular animated effort. A story treatment published by fansite Jurassic Outpost in 2016 lifted the lid on this shuttered series, which, according to the outlet, was set to use "state-of-the-art animation" and was designed to appeal to older kids and audiences who enjoyed the movie. Sadly, the show never made it to air.

According to Jurassic Outpost, "Escape from Jurassic Park" was developed by the long-since-shuttered Universal Cartoon Studios, with work on the series starting prior to the release of the first movie in 1993 and lasting until the project was abandoned in 1994. Twenty-three episodes were planned before the show was canned, with artist William Stout explaining on his blog how he was contacted to design the look of the show. "This was not going to be a kiddie show" he wrote, "(although kids of all ages, including myself, could enjoy it). They wanted the show to be a mature, primetime series with top writers and state-of-the-art television animation augmented with quite a bit of CG animation."

As Stout — who also published much of his concept art for the show — went on to explain, Universal was interested in using a "graphic-novel look" for the series, which did eventually get a trailer that combined "computer animation with traditional animation." Alas, nobody ever saw the trailer beyond Stout (who claims to have a copy) and some of the main individuals involved with the series. 

Why work stopped on "Escape from Jurassic Park" isn't entirely clear, but Stout highlighted how word had gotten around that Stephen Spielberg was "burnt out on 'Jurassic Park' merchandising and all of the film's commercial exploitation," which resulted in the animated continuation never being made. In subsequent years, any work related to the project was thought to have been lost or at least extremely hard to track down — which it was. But the guys at Jurassic Outpost managed to unearth quite a lot of information, including a story outline which plotted out the arc for Season 1.

"Escape from Jurassic Park" included many elements of "Jurassic Park" author Michael Crichton's 1995 follow-up novel "The Lost World," including BioSyn — a rival to John Hammond's InGen company — stealing eggs and establishing its own park named "DinoWorld," complete with hotels and a monorail. The series also would have seen the resurrected dinosaurs escaping and making their way to the South American mainland, much like the T. Rex in "The Lost World" or the hordes of prehistoric beasts unleashed on California in 2018's "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom." "Escape from Jurassic Park" was also set to introduce new dinosaurs, including a "fanged Lycaenops" and Ornithosuchus, and by the end of the season, Jurassic Park itself actually would have opened to the public — all of which sounds like it might have been better than the live-action movies that audiences actually did end up getting.

It's a shame that we didn't get the animated continuation of the first movie (though we did get several animated shows based on the IP, including "Jurassic World: Chaos Theory," (Season 3 of which hit Netflix in early 2025), especially since Will Meugniot and William Stout's show sounds like it would have done a far better job picking up where Spielberg should have left off in 1993.