Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. An extra
notification: whatever you do, do not buy a reindeer donut, because it is a
donut with eyes. It just is not right eating something, anything, that looks
back at you while you eat it. It may not be animated, or sentient, or whatever,
but it still got eyes and is looking at you while you eat it. Do not buy it and
do not eat it – it is not worth looking at it looking back at you while you eat
it. What is next?
The Jurassic World franchise released a new ‘masterpiece’ –
a motion comic, a first part of a sequence, which deals with the mosasaur that
was introduced back in the first JW movie. Ok, and?
Well, most important part that got overseen, most likely, is
that this motion comic is ‘woke’ – its’ main character, the news TV host, is a
part of an interracial family; essentially, it is a drawn animation version of
the family that we’ve seen in the ‘Battle at Big Rock’ live short film – but because
BBR and this mosasaur-featuring motion comics are about dinosaurs, so no one
seems to be all that concerned about the human side of the pieces… So what?
Good question – for example, people on both sides claim that
‘wokeness’ is affecting mass media, especially cinema movies. Just look at
latest failure of the CA-2019 reboot. It didn’t succeed, but not because of
wokeness, and judging as to how quickly Ms. Elizabeth Banks stopped complaining
about this, (for whatever reasons), she recognized, or was forced to recognize,
this as well. What next?
The mosasaur? Yes, it’s the big one, and JW was working
towards it since the closing scenes of JW: FK film; even the aforementioned BBR
short feature had a shot of this sea reptile swallowing a great white shark not
unlike how it swallow a sea lion, but-
On average, a modern great white shark is about 6 m long. This
is a big fish, but even so, it does not really swallow its prey whole; it tears
it into chunks with its’ cutting teeth and swallows those chunks. The mosasaur –
well, all of the mosasaur family – belonged to the group of reptiles that
includes modern snakes and lizards, the Squamata; the mosasaurs’ closest
relatives were the shared ancestors of snakes and monitor lizards (think the
Komodo dragon), and so the mosasaurs were aquatic relatives of both. (Both the
modern marine iguanas of the Galapagos Islands and the modern sea snakes of the
tropical seas are not very close relatives of the extinct mosasaurs).
How big were the mosasaurs when compared to a 6-m-long great
white shark? The North American Tylosaurus, the biggest of them all, could
reach 12 m in length, twice as big as the modern fish in question. But! It was
not a swallower like a modern crocodile, which prefer to swallow their fish
prey whole. Instead, mosasaurs essentially had a second pair of jaws inside the
first pair to better rip and tear their prey into pieces.
The JW mosasaur isn’t ‘real’ or even ‘realistic’ and might
be more than 12 m long by now? It is not about size alone, in the first JW when
we saw it for the first time feeding on a great white shark; it still tore it
into a couple of pieces, before swallowing them. After it attacked and killed
the I-Rex in the end of the first movie, the beginning of the second film showed
the bones of the I-Rex just lying around in a jumbled mess. Size-related issues
or not, the JW mosasaur is realistic,
maybe not quite on the level of BBC’s ‘Sea monsters’ (2003) mini-trilogy, but
still close enough. So where does it leave us?
It leaves us with a first part of a multiserial motion comic
that shows, or will show, how the modern world will coexist with prehistoric
animals. This is the movie that the JP/JW franchise wanted to make in place of
what we now know as the JW: FK film and it will probably be done with a much more
genuine, heartfelt effort than the JW: FK film, which is essentially two movies
stitched into one. This isn’t a trait unique to JW: FK; the SW8 film had the
same problem, fundamentally speaking, but in case of JW: FK, this was done
because it became a filler between the first JW movie and the upcoming new JW
franchise creations, such as BBR and this motion comic. Both are variations on
the same theme – humans interacting with dinosaurs and other prehistoric
animals, both even feature interracial families – how progressive! Moreover,
the truth is, if a movie is good, then wokeness will not hurt it at all, just
look at BBR, and the same goes for the other mass media mediums, such as this
motion comic. Ergo, let us just enjoy it and see what the future brings us in
this medium of mass media, because real life sucks, (see above).
…This is it for now; see you all soon!
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