The Big Squeeze: Day Seventy-Nine: "Jurassic Park" from Alapalooza
I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitos, and before long they were cloning DNA!
The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic. The column was conceived with three primary objectives in mind. First and foremost, I want to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero.
Even more importantly, I want to promote the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition of the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but way, way, better and this column is pretty damn good, because it has illustrations and copy-editing and over 80 new illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro and over 120 new pages covering The Compleat Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 tour that gave the extended version of the book its name. Third, I want to promote the Weird A-Coloring to Al “Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book I am doing with Felipe as well as its hardcover, full-color signed and numbered limited edition version, which you can pre-order here
Author’s Commentary: I have a six year old son who is obsessed with dinosaurs and “Weird Al” Yankovic, which means the following:
I know way too much about what various dinosaurs eat
I have watched the video for “Jurassic Park” literally thousands of times on Youtube
Usually when you listen to something over and over again you get sick of it and never want to hear it ever again.
With Al, however, the opposite is true. The more I listen to his songs and the more I watch his videos, the more I like them. There is joy in repetition, to paraphrase the title of one of my favorite under the radar Prince jams.
When you hear something thousands of times, to the point that you know it by heart you come to really appreciate its craftsmanship. You also come to appreciate that Al writes songs designed to be listened to compulsively by people with obsessive, compulsive brains like me and my son.
You also come to appreciate the time and labor-intensive artistry of the song’s Claymation video. Al gave hungry young animators Scott Nordlund and Mark Osborne a key break by having them direct the video.
It made Osborne’s career. He went on to direct Kung Fu Panda and 2015’s The Little Prince in addition to working extensively in television on Spongebob Squarepants along with his brother Kent, who wrote and starred in Uncle Kent 2, which could very well be the trippiest, weirdest movie Al has ever appeared in, and I mean that as high praise.
Original article:
Well folks, we have officially reached the halfway point in the Weird Accordion to Al. I know this because a gentleman I follow on Twitter what goes by the handle @Alyankovic tweeted that I’d reached that milestone and Al Yankovic, or “Weird Al” Yankovic as he is professionally known, is one of the world’s preeminent experts on the life, career and recordings of American pop parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic. He’s right up there with Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz in that regard.
It was a real honor to have Al blast out news of this labor of love to his five million followers, and after the plug, the newest entry in the series, “You Don’t Love Me Anymore”, was read over a thousand times, which means that nearly half of Al’s five million followers are now following this column, and also that I am very bad at math.
“Jurassic Park”, the first single, parody, music video and song on Alapalooza, ushers us into the middle portion of Al’s career. In the first decade of his recording career, Al released eight albums. In the remaining twenty-four years, he’s released just six. Al has gotten less prolific but more strategic as he’s gotten older, and his nineties oeuvre doubled down on pop-culture mash-ups that combined a zeitgeist-capturing classic song with an equally zeitgeist-friendly hit movie.
Alapalooza piggy-backed on the public’s affection for, or at least, familiarity with such beloved pop-culture chestnuts as the aforementioned Jurassic Park (a smash in both literary and cinematic form), The Flintstones (subject of “Bedrock Anthem”) and Wayne’s World, which brought back Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the biggest, most iconic possible way, and inspired the album-closing “Bohemian Polka.” 1996’s Bad Hair Day gave the world “Gump” to the tune of Presidents of the United States’ “Lump” while 1999’s Running with Scissors tapped into Star Wars prequel mania for the kick-off single “The Saga Begins.”
So a lot of Al’s most high-profile singles from the Clinton era aligned themselves so closely with huge blockbusters that they almost seemed to be part of mammoth marketing campaigns. There’s the mega-production, then the ad blitz and junkets and stars on late night talk shows and morning shows and the timely “Weird Al” Yankovic parody.
I’ve written extensively about commercials and commercialism and consumerism in Al’s work. “Jurassic Park” sometimes sounds as much like a tongue-in-cheek commercial for Jurassic Park as a loving spoof. As with “Yoda”, “The Saga Begins” and the Spider-Man-themed, lesser-known “Piano Man” parody “Ode to a Superhero”, on "Jurassic Park", Al broke with tradition and parodied a classic rock staple as opposed to a recent hit.
The song in question is “MacArthur Park”, that inscrutable story song written by Jimmy Webb and given screamingly hyperbolic life by everyone from disco diva Donna Summer to moonlighting English thespian Richard Harris. Al only had to change one word to transform “MacArthur Park” into “Jurassic Park.”
More importantly, the incoherent, self-parodic melodrama of Webb’s original song, and particularly Harris’ version, perfectly matches the song’s subject. The singer of “MacArthur” seems more overcome with emotion and feeling and intensity over a doomed love affair and a dumb cake melting in the dumb rain than the singer of “Jurassic Park” does over their likely impending death-by-dinosaur.
“The chorus, “Jurassic Park is frightening after dark/All the dinosaurs are running wild” seems to write itself but what Al does is always much more difficult than it initially appears. “Jurassic Park” is yet another example of Al taking a premise that might seem a little hack on paper and making it work through a combination of solid song and joke craft and sweaty determination.
The song is sung from the perspective of a character inside the world of Jurassic Park who is understandably alarmed when things at the Jurassic Park theme park take an unfortunate turn. The science-fiction theme empowers Al to be his nerdiest, most scientific self. How many other pop songs could possibly begin, “I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitos and before long they were cloning DNA?” Other than “I Think I’m a Clone Now”, of course?
The twenty dollar SAT words continue with the singer recounting being “chased by some irate velociraptor” which is both a phrase you don’t hear in music enough, and a great mental image that really drives home the peril at the song’s core. As we have explored extensively, Al is a big fan of comic understatement, so it’s not surprising that he undersells the danger he’s in when he assures listeners of his time being pursued by giant killing machines from prehistoric times, “Believe me, this has been one lousy day.” Later, he confides, “I cannot approve of this attraction/'Cause getting disemboweled always makes me kinda mad” which also seems like a pretty chill response to being torn limb from limb by a razor-teethed killing machine.
Sure, “Jurassic Park” has lawyer jokes and Barney the dinosaur jokes but it also has references to chaos theory and some of the most realistic dinosaur noises this side of, well, Jurassic Park. I certainly thought “Jurassic Park” was a hit when it came out but it turns out that it only charted in Canada, where it reached number five on the charts.
“Jurassic Park” is probably better known for its stop-motion animated music video, which was nominated for a Grammy but lost to the Rolling Stones’ “Love is Strong”, which we all remember so vividly. I think Mick Jagger was in it or something. Anyway, very memorable and ground-breaking. Clearly deserved it.
Alapalooza’s kick-off track is not Al’s finest work but twenty four years later it has aged a whole lot better than both the movie and the song that inspired it. Joining Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur-themed cinematic blockbuster to Jimmy Webb’s oldies radio staple might have been a wedding of convenience, but the song and the video have both endured.
Heck, the only thing that would possibly get me interested in the upcoming sequel to Jurassic World would be if they hired Al to do the theme song, and what the heck, while we’re dreaming, also cast him as the new lead while they were at it. I think a bold move like that would really shake up the franchise.
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