In the early 1990s, one of the most popular movies was Jurassic Park. The success of Steven Spielberg's film was fueled by an enormous marketing budget of more than $65 million, which was comparable to the entire budget for filming the movie. The creators signed a contract with more than 100 companies that produced everything under license: mugs, console games, books and comics, T-shirts with the logo — and, of course, children's toys. 

The store shelves were filled with dinosaurs of all sizes and colors. At the same time, dinosaurs themselves are quite a recognizable image that cannot be patented. Therefore, manufacturers of any toy dinosaurs competed with the “official” toys of Jurassic Park. Why buy an expensive license when you can just do what you used to do — and sales will go up on their own?

Kenner wasn't too happy with that — that's why they bought the license. How do you make sure that children choose your toys? So Kenner got clever.

Dino Damage

Kenner toys had removable parts — exposing the “insides” of the dinosaur. Firstly, children liked to remove parts and look at plastic muscles and facets, the toys seemed more alive (and the toys of competitors were just plastxic dummies, well if the paws moved).

And Dino Damage was also fun for kids to play with. It was possible to inflict wounds on dinosaurs — it added to interactivity. Children preferred Kenner toys to others that did not have such a function. The “wound” could always be closed.

Logo and number

The appearance of dinosaurs is hard to patent. Besides, children will not compare how “canonical” the toys look and know nothing about trademarks.

But Kenner came up with a trick: they began to put the letters JP on the toys and put a number. And in TV commercials they especially emphasized the fact that the “right” toys always have the letters JP.

Looking at JP mark
Only in Jurassic Park!

It immediately appeared that it was not fashionable to have other toys with dinosaurs, because they do not have the JP symbol. So the children themselves dragged their parents to the shelves with the “right” dinosaurs.

But that's not all

Where did this fashion for dinosaurs even start? As it turns out, it can be traced back to the late 1960s, when the Dinosaur Renaissance took place.

Several important discoveries of paleontologists occurred one after another. Scientists found out that dinosaurs were closer not to animals or reptiles, as we thought, but to birds—- and were probably covered with feathers. They were warm-blooded, demonstrating complex behavior (caring for offspring in pairs, hunting in groups). From large, clumsy creatures, dinosaurs suddenly became fast, smart, strong — and interesting.

In the wake of the Dinosaur Renaissance, dinosaurs became an important part of the cultural landscape, literally “coming to life” — like in the Jurassic Park movie. Steven Spielberg took this into account when he made his movie, and he did not fail.

In the success of a movie, toys based on it, a cutting-edge product or advertisement lies the ability of their creators to look at the fundamentals of cultural change, tectonic shifts. It's not for nothing that advertisers say: “If it's popular, we're too late”. Right now, something is becoming subtly interesting and important — and probably right now, someone is taking a bet on it. Maybe it's you?