After all of these years, it has finally been found!
Fans of Jurassic Park, I humbly present to you, the animated Pitch Trailers for the canceled Jurassic Park Animated Show!
More info coming soon! pic.twitter.com/UGT5lOvvd5
— Jurassic Library (@JurassicLibrary) October 31, 2026
(If the embed above doesn’t load, the post with the trailer is at https://x.com/JurassicLibrary/status/2116597310410883504.)
Life, as a certain leather-jacketed chaos mathematician kept telling everyone, finds a way. So, it turns out, does a VHS tape. The pitch trailer for Escape from Jurassic Park, the animated series Universal developed in the wake of Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster and then quietly buried, surfaced on Halloween. It was shared on X by the Jurassic Library account alongside internal Kenner material, including a letter dated 18 June 1993 tying the show to the second wave of Jurassic Park action figures. Fans who have since weighed in say the tape had been doing the rounds privately among a handful of collectors for years before it finally broke out of its paddock.
What Universal Cartoon Studios had in mind was rather grander than a half-hour toy advert. Veteran animator Will Meugniot oversaw development, with the dinosaur artist William Stout among the designers, and the aim was a prime-time series for a grown-up audience that blended traditional animation with CGI and a graphic-novel look. The story would have picked up where the film left off, with John Hammond back on Isla Nublar trying to open the park properly while corporate rival Biosyn plotted mischief of its own. Reports of the pitch describe heroes called the Dino Trackers, with Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm among them, facing poachers called the Dino Raiders, names that suggest the naming committee met over breakfast cereal. One proposed episode, “Brachiosaurs on Broadway”, had twenty Brachiosaurus loose in Central Park and poachers turning up on motorbikes. That sounds less like an episode than a West End musical that someone talked Andrew Lloyd Webber out of at the last minute.
It never got further because Spielberg never said yes. Stout has said that the director, worn out by the avalanche of merchandise the film had spawned, didn’t even watch the trailer. Stout kept a copy and once ranked it his tenth favourite dinosaur film, a generous honour for something almost nobody could see. He declined to release it without Universal’s blessing. Meugniot briefly hosted it on his own website in the late 2000s before it vanished again, which is how lost media usually behaves: it gets found, then mislaid again, like a pair of reading glasses.
Going by the coverage, the footage shows detailed character and dinosaur animation and a reworked logo in which a living dinosaur replaces the familiar skeleton. The franchise did eventually reach television animation with Netflix’s Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory, both aimed squarely at younger viewers. The 1993 version, adult and prime-time, belongs to that pleasing category of things that were probably never going to happen but look marvellous in hindsight. Thirty-three years late, it’s the most convincing piece of de-extinction the franchise has pulled off in a while.
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