Catch a big-screen dino marathon just in time for ‘Jurassic World’

“You just went and made a new dinosaur? Probably not a good idea,” goes the trailer for the new installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World, out in theaters on June 12.

If you can’t remember exactly why tinkering with prehistoric predator DNA isn’t the best idea, you may want to revisit 1993’s Jurassic Park and 1997’s sequel, The Lost World, based on Michael Crichton’s novels. You can skip 2001’s Jurassic Park III, even though it does resurrect Sam Neill and Laura Dern as Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler. But if you want to watch all three movies, the Academy of Natural Sciences has your chance with a big-screen Jurassic Park movie marathon on May 9.

Dino fans of the early '90s who were awed by the film’s groundbreaking CGI beasts and awesome animatronics may be anxious about how the beloved franchise will enter the 21st century, now that all manner of supernatural creatures, from Gollum to Godzilla, have been wreaking havoc onscreen with all the visual realism of living things for 20 years.

Last year, we got some kind of answer, when a picture of original Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg posing next to the film’s fake triceratops went viral. Many people, apparently forgetting that dinosaurs are extinct, were furious that Spielberg had shot the triceratops for sport and posed for pictures next to the corpse.

Children who ended up at Jurassic Park because their parents wouldn’t get a babysitter could’ve gotten a pass for thinking those dinosaurs were bona fide, but the intervening years of CGI and Internet echo chambers may have seriously blurred our sense of reality.

On that note, it’s a little hard to figure out who the Academy of Natural Science’s Movie Marathon is geared towards. I don’t want to watch the T-Rex munch lawyer Donald Genarro right off the toilet next to anybody’s four-year-old. But throughout the day, puppeteer Matt Brady will be on hand for a kids’ Dinosaur Dance Party every half hour, starting at 10:30am, in a ten-foot-long Tracy the Triceratops costume.

But maybe it’s just a case of something for everyone, and no one will go home in tears with a lifelong dinosaur phobia.

The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, is holding its Jurassic Park Movie Marathon on Saturday, May 9 in the museum’s auditorium. The movies are free with regular admission, and seating is first-come, first-served. Showtimes are 10:20am for Jurassic Park, 1pm for The Lost World, and 3:25pm for Jurassic Park III.