Warning: SPOILERS for Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Season 4.
The Jurassic World franchise's obsession with hybrid dinosaurs was finally mocked by Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous. In Camp Cretaceous season 4, Darius (Paul-Mikel Williams), Brooklynn (Jenna Ortega), Kenji (Ryan Potter), Sammy (Raini Rodriguez), Ben (Sean Giambrone), and Yasmina (Kausar Mohammed) escaped Isla Nublar only to get stranded on a dangerous island new to the Jurassic franchise. Of course, Mantah Corp's island also has its own hybrid dinosaurs, which are being bred to fight each other to entertain the evil tech conglomerate's wealthy investors.
When Jurassic World soft-rebooted the franchise in 2o15, it introduced the concept of hybrid dinosaurs. Jurassic World justified its new creation, the Indominus Rex, with a meta-commentary that audiences are now "bored" of regular dinosaurs after Steven Spielberg's original Jurassic Park trilogy. Jurassic World claimed that hybrid dinosaurs, which are more like movie monsters, were the wave of the future and what audiences demanded. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom continued the hybrid gimmick with the Indoraptor, which was even more of a horror movie creature. Netflix's Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous animated series followed suit as well with season 3's hybrid monster, the Scorpios Rex.
In Camp Cretaceous season 4, the teenage heroes learned that Mantah Corp has bred their own hybrids from Jurassic World's dino DNA samples they blackmailed Sammy to steal for them in Camp Cretaceous season 1. However, instead of making all-new creatures like Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) did for Jurassic World, Mantah Corp spliced the genes of regular dinosaurs together to breed prehistoric creatures that could survive in the environments of their island's four biomes. When Sammy and Kenji realized that Mantah Corp's Spinosaurus, which lives in the desert biome, was actually a crossbreed of Spinosaurus and Sinoteratops DNA, Kenji asked, "What's everyone's obsession with making hybrids?" This turns out to be a pointed meta-commentary on how the Jurassic World franchise has overused the hybrid gimmick.
To director Colin Trevorrow's credit, Jurassic World: Dominion promises to have no hybrid dinosaurs. By Jurassic World: Dominion's timeframe, the hybrid monster dinos are all dead and Isla Nublar has been destroyed by a volcanic eruption. All of the dinosaurs that were rescued from Nublar in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom were set loose on the world by Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). So the human race now has to deal with the reality of dinosaurs roaming in cities, towns, and in the wild, but, at least, they are all clones of real-life dinosaurs and not the horrific creations like the Indoraptor and Indomonus Rex.
The hybrid dinosaur gimmick was certainly novel but Jurassic World quickly ran it into the ground. The Indomonus Rex and Indoraptor took the attention away from what was always the central draw of the Jurassic franchise - dinosaurs were once real animals that ruled the Earth and have returned in the flesh 65 million years later - and shifted the focus to purely fictional monsters created to scare movie audiences. While hybrid dinosaurs worked in the short term, they, along with the idea of dinosaurs being weaponized by humans, veered too far from what makes Jurassic movies work, which is the pure majesty of real-life dinosaurs like the T-Rex, Brachiosaurus, and Velociraptor.
Although Camp Cretaceous season 5, which is set during Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's timeframe, could still bring hybrids like the Indoraptor back, the Jurassic World movies seem to have finally left the hybrid monster dinosaurs behind. Jurassic World: Dominion's premise of the world overrun by real-life dinosaurs is already an interesting hook and something the Jurassic franchise has built to since the beginning when the fear of what would happen if the prehistoric creatures get loose was first raised. Hybrid dinosaur monsters are always something future Jurassic projects could pull out of their back pocket but at least Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous recognizes that the franchise's obsession with hybrid dinosaurs has run its course.
Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous season 4 is streaming on Netflix.
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