A lost piece of Jurassic Park history has finally resurfaced. A pitch trailer for Escape from Jurassic Park, an animated series developed by Universal Cartoon Studios in 1993, has been unearthed and shared publicly by Jurassic Outpost’s Chris Pugh.
The proposed series was cancelled before it could enter full production, but not before its creative team completed a surprising amount of work, including character designs, story development, and an animated presentation of what the show might look like.
Pugh announced the discovery on X, describing the footage as lost media. For years, fans knew that Universal had been developing an animated continuation of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster, but the pitch trailer itself remained out of public circulation. The discovery finally gives us a chance to see the project in motion rather than simply imagine what might have been.
And this wasn’t supposed to be another Saturday-morning cartoon designed to sell dinosaur toys. The creative team was developing an ambitious prime-time series that would pick up after the events of the original film. Its proposed combination of traditional 2D animation and early computer-generated imagery was intended to give the dinosaurs and familiar characters a distinctive look.
The trailer is particularly interesting because of the era in which it was made. In 1993, computer animation was still developing rapidly, and Jurassic Park had just demonstrated what CGI could accomplish on the big screen. Bringing that technology into a television production would have been a considerable undertaking. The footage offers a fascinating look at how the team planned to approach the challenge, including some striking pteranodon designs that feel unmistakably rooted in the early 1990s.
What Was Escape from Jurassic Park About?
The proposed series would have brought back several familiar faces, including Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, Ian Malcolm, and John Hammond. Rather than simply retelling the original movie, Escape from Jurassic Park would have continued the story after the disaster on Isla Nublar, exploring what happened to the dinosaurs and the people who wanted to control them.
One of the major storylines involved BioSyn, InGen’s corporate rival. The company planned to establish its own dinosaur attraction, called DinoWorld, in Brazil. Its efforts to obtain dinosaurs and develop a competing park would eventually lead to another outbreak, with prehistoric creatures escaping into the surrounding jungles.
The first season was planned to run for 23 episodes, giving the writers plenty of room to expand the world established in Spielberg’s film. The story also included new dinosaur discoveries and additional adventures for the returning characters. Some of the ideas would sound familiar to anyone who has followed the franchise, particularly the growing rivalry between InGen and BioSyn and the consequences of taking dinosaurs out of their natural environment.
The project was developed before The Lost World: Jurassic Park arrived in 1997, making the proposed series an especially interesting alternate direction for the franchise. Jurassic Outpost published the show’s first-season story outline in December 2016, revealing just how much of the series had already been mapped out. That earlier discovery included the planned episodes and extensive concept artwork, but the newly unearthed trailer provides something fans hadn’t been able to watch publicly.
Why Was the Jurassic Park Cartoon Cancelled?
Despite the considerable work completed during development, Escape from Jurassic Park never received the approval needed to move forward. The project was abandoned in 1994, leaving the pitch trailer and other development materials behind.
Artist William Stout, who worked on the series’ visual designs, previously discussed the production and explained that Universal wanted a mature prime-time show with a graphic-novel-inspired look. The animation would combine traditional techniques with computer-generated imagery, allowing the team to create something different from the children’s cartoons commonly associated with major movie franchises at the time.
Stout also offered an explanation for why the project never happened. According to his account, the team needed Steven Spielberg’s approval, but he heard through the grapevine that the filmmaker had become tired of the extensive merchandising and commercial exploitation surrounding Jurassic Park. Stout suggested Spielberg never watched the completed pitch trailer. That explanation comes from Stout’s recollection of what he heard, rather than a direct statement from Spielberg.
The cancellation was a disappointment for the people who had worked on the project, especially considering how much had already been developed. The story outline, artwork, and animation presentation all existed, but the series never reached the stage where viewers could see a complete episode.
The discovery also adds another chapter to the history of Jurassic Park animation. Universal eventually found success with Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, followed by Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, but those series arrived decades after the original attempt. Escape from Jurassic Park would have been a very different proposition, aimed at a prime-time audience and conceived as a direct continuation of the 1993 film.
Now that the pitch trailer has surfaced, fans can finally get a better idea of what Universal was trying to create. The footage is a fascinating time capsule from the franchise’s earliest days, and it leaves us wondering how different the Jurassic Park universe might have looked if Spielberg had given the project the green light.
