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Almost three decades since its release, a keen-eyed VFX crew has discovered a witty Easter egg in The Lost World: Jurassic Park—and it’s a deep-cut reference that only die-hard Steven Spielberg fans may spot. As shown in a recent installment of Corridor Crew’s VFX Artists React, the Easter egg is a meta-joke that bridges Spielberg’s hit dinosaur sequel and his lesser-seen contribution to animation: Animaniacs.
During their deconstruction of the iconic T. rex rampage scene from the 1997 blockbuster, the Corridor Crew noticed something strange in the distance behind a Blockbuster Video store. Next to mock-up movie posters featuring Robin Williams as protagonists of Jacks and the Beanstalks, the team noticed an exceedingly peculiar-looking poster: Arnold Schwarzenegger playing King Lear. While such a casting is the stuff of parody title dreams from The Onion, it’s actually a subtle nod to a joke on Animaniacs, the Warner Bros. cartoon series that Spielberg executive produced in the ‘90s.
The original joke is found in a satirical Animaniacs musical number called “Variety Speak,” where Yakko Warner warbles about Hollywood trends in insider lingo. A number of the lyrics mock Paramount Pictures for hiring Schwarzenegger to play King Lear in a Shakespeare play—an absurd notion aimed at highlighting studio decisions’ effrontery. Spielberg and his team incorporated that very joke into The Lost World, concealing the King Lear poster as an Easter egg graphical in-joke that only very observant spectators would notice.
This kind of “super inside baseball” humor is typical of Spielberg’s overall creative style. Familiar with adding winking self-references and nods to his films, the director has long referenced his previous work through suggestive details. His 2018 Ready Player One film, for example, is full of references to Jurassic Park, E.T., and Indiana Jones. Similarly, The Adventures of Tintin contains suggestive nods to his adventure blockbusters.
Prominently, Spielberg would finally bring the loop full circle on the Animaniacs-Jurassic Park connection in the 2020 debut of the Animaniacs revival. A cartoon Spielberg welcomes the characters’ return to screen in the opening credits with parody representations of Jurassic Park staples, including voice actor Maurice LaMarche performing a Jeff Goldblum impersonation.
This brand-new Easter egg not only reveals Spielberg’s multi-layered sense of humor, but also proves that his creative fingerprints bleed outside the surface—after all these years, his fans keep finding his secret nods and subtle references tucked away in plain sight.
