Jurassic Park has always had rides and snack bars, not free-range triceratops and velociraptors. (Class of 2017, #26)

Here’s another example of a “words develop new meanings” item that makes little sense.

Jurassic Park is a 1990 novel by Michael Crichton. A Steven Spielberg movie of the same name was released in 1993. A sequel to the book, The Lost World, was published in 1995, the year when much of the Class of 2017 was born. That book became a movie in 1997. A third movie came out in 2001. A 3D version of the first movie was re-released in 2013 and a fourth movie is planned for 2015.

Jurassic Park: The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood opened in 1996 with other versions opening later in Japan, Florida and Singapore.

There have also been Jurassic Park comic books, video games and toys.

There are two obvious directions for the BML to take regarding Jurassic Park. First, Jurassic Park has always existed for the Class of 2017 (since they can’t remember a time when it didn’t exist). Second, Jurassic Park never existed (or at least is not important) for the Class of 2017 (since it came out while they were babies).

As evidence that either approach would work, we can look just one year back when the Class of 2016 list used one approach for The Santa Clause and another for Pulp Fiction even though both movies were released during the same year:

There has always been a Santa Clause. (Class of 2016, #53)
Pulp Fiction’s meal of a “Royale with Cheese” and an “Amos and Andy milkshake” has little or no resonance with them. (Class of 2016, #69)

(See more about this contradiction here.)

Instead, the BML goes in a third direction, suggesting that the Class of 2017 can recall the ride but not the premise of the movie or book, i.e., “Jurassic Park“ has a new meaning.

Ron Nief, one half of the Beloit Mindset List brain trust, is a Beloit College P.R. guy so it’s bizarre that this item seems drafted by someone with a complete misunderstanding of how marketing works. Jurassic Park is a media franchise with multiple products that increase awareness of each other. You might as well claim that “Beloit College is ‘a poorly written compendium of trivia, stereotypes and lazy generalizations,’ not an institution of higher education.”