Dinosauras. (Metaphors in Action).

Raymond Gozzi Jr (*)

WE ARE TOLD that dinosaurs are extinct. However, they are alive and well in our popular culture. Mainstream scientists also get a lot of mileage out of dinosaurs. And now dinosaurs have a new career as a popular metaphor.

I started noticing dinosaur metaphors back in the early and mid-1990s, particularly in the technology field. With everything changing so fast, could the dinosaurs of "old media" adapt? Or would the telephone companies, the TV networks, and the cable companies become extinct?

Dinosaur metaphors really took off in 1993 with the release of the film Jurassic Park. The movie's PR campaign impressed me -- suddenly it seemed "dinosaurs" were everywhere. And not just any dinosaurs appeared on cups at fast food restaurants, it was the big, menacing Tyrannosaurus Rexes which starred in the movie. Even schoolchildren were studying special units on T. Rex.

In reality, 70 million years ago most dinosaurs were quite peaceful. Scientists classify many as vegetarians. But these grass-chewing giants from the past got almost no play in the 1990s hype. From the modern imagery, you would think that the Upper Cretaceous period resembled a combat computer game, with giant T. Rexes battling it out until no one was left standing. Perhaps these images of dinosaurs tell us more about our media culture than about the dinosaurs.

Not only violent dinosaurs, but a violent cataclysmic end to the dinosaurs received a lot of media attention. A meteor (or an asteroid) was widely conjectured to have hit the earth, causing a "great dying." The sudden, explosive end to the dinosaurs made dramatic visuals on magazine covers. However, many scientists rejected the scenario of a sudden "great dying" caused by an asteroid. Instead, the fossil record seemed to show a gradual dying off of dinosaur species over a long period of time. But such gradualism would make for less sensational media.

It is true there was at least one peaceful dinosaur in popular culture in the 1990s -- Barney, the purple dinosaur on children's TV. In fact, Barney acted so peacefully that he put many parents to sleep. But even Barney had his media scandal in the 1990s.

A Floridian named John Bunch, Jr., pretended to be a born-again person named Luscious M. Bromley who claimed Barney was sending satanic messages to kids. The story got picked up by the press, and made the national media before it was exposed as a hoax. Like many other media-generated scandals of the 1990s, this one had no substance. But the Barney hoax rode on the coattails of media interest in dinosaurs.

I did a computer search of the Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers for the term "dinosaur." I looked at January and February through the 1990s (plus June, 1993, the month of Jurassic Park's release). Before the release of Jurassic Park in June, 1993, dinosaurs were a mildly popular item in the nation's press. For example, in January and February, 1990, the term appeared 147 times. Most of the stories dealt with real dinosaurs -- fossil finds and museum exhibits. Some stories described the "great dying" debate, "Yes, the asteroid killed them," and "No, the asteroid didn't kill them." There were some metaphorical uses. Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan was called a dinosaur, and the term came up discussing Pentagon budgets. And there were dinosaurs in the media: a 1992 TV series called "Attack of the Dinosaurs" received some attention.

But in 1993, the Jurassic Park PR campaign swung into gear. January and February 1993 saw 293 dinosaur mentions, double the 147 of two years earlier. This was partly fueled by the Barney scandal. But an article on children's toys noted:

Dinosaurs: This is always a staple item, but the anticipated June release of Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" already has the licensing agents in a full-court press. Nearly everyone is showing some kind of dino-inspired product, including plush toys, board games, action figures, and dinosaur miniatures. Even the education companies will crank out Jurassic period dinosaurs, a way to jump on the mega marketing without paying a licensing fee (The Hartford Courant, Feb. 16, 1993, D2).

June, 1993, the month of the movie's release, produced 726 mentions in the database, the highest number by far in my search. The quality of the references to dinosaurs also changed. There were more metaphorical uses, and more emphasis on the supposedly sudden, cataclysmic end of the dinosaurs. I even found the plot lines of the movie Jurassic Park used as structures for metaphorical arguments in two newspaper editorials.

A column on the editorial page of the Seattle Times, shortly after the movie came Out, headlined "Transitaurus Rex: Watch Your Wallet." The column opposed a recently adopted rail plan for the Seattle area.

Cloned from the long-fossilized ashes of the defeated 1968 and 1970 Forward Thrust rail plans, the recently adopted Regional Transit Project (RTP) bills itself as an "investment" in the region's future.... (But) the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) promise(s) a transit dinosaur more menacing to our wallets than any creature ever conceived of by Steven Spielberg (Peckarsky, 1993, B5).

An editorial from The Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1994 also used the Jurassic Park motif, to make its point about healthy American companies. The headline was "The dinosaurs can still dance."

Welcome to the Jurassic Age on Wall Street. The dinosaurs of American industry are roaring back to life, reinvigorated by new profits and products. A few years ago, conventional wisdom held that the aging industrial giants of the United States were becoming extinct. Companies that once dominated the business landscape were being killed off by foreign competitors, as well as younger domestic companies. Now some of those behemoths of business are romping again, and it's good to see them looking so fit (Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Feb. 12, 1994, A18).

Clearly, the movie Jurassic Park caught the imagination of a wide public. I would have to give the promotional campaign high marks for getting the message out. After 1993, the year of Jurassic Park, my database search numbers remained higher than they had been before 1993. January and February 2001, my most recent sample, turned up 385 mentions of dinosaurs, compared to 147 in 1990.

The dinosaur metaphor got applied to many more topics in the post Jurassic Park era. Mexico's ruling party members were labeled dinosaurs. So were "convenience malls" which were losing out to larger shopping malls. Some modernist architecture office buildings in Connecticut were labeled expensive dinosaurs. So were the St. Patrick's Day Parade, bed-centered hospitals, old rock stars, and big town cars.

Once again, the Pentagon budget process reminded some writers of dinosaurs:

Like a dinosaur plodding deeper and deeper into quicksand, the Pentagon over the past 40 years has spent more and more money and has gotten progressively less and less in return, according to a new internal Defense Department study. ... "This is not a complicated diagnosis," (study author) Spinney said. "This is simply the fossil record of a 40 year trend" (Wood, 1995, 7A).

These metaphorical uses of dinosaurs emphasized the qualities of being big, clumsy, and slow. In a competitive environment, this invited extinction. The technology sector, particularly computers and media, put dinosaur metaphors to much use all through the 1990s. "Television has become a dinosaur; it's time to let it die a painful death," ran one typical headline (Feldman, 1994).

So what do these uses of the metaphor tell us about American culture in the early 21st Century? We seem to be preoccupied with obsolescence and death, especially of institutions and technologies. We are painfully aware that bigger may not be better, but bigger may mean more vulnerable. As a scientist put it, "The large dinosaurs tended to get larger before they went extinct" (Suplee, 1990).

Our media culture is also fixated on the image of a huge, sudden cataclysm which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The contrary scientific evidence of gradual disappearances gets little attention. I assume there is a genuine difference of opinion among scientists about the disappearance of the dinosaurs. But the "great dying" caused by a sudden explosion dominates media discussions. This probably indicates the media, and many of the rest of us, are still worried about nuclear annihilation.

In any case, the metaphorical portrayal of the dinosaur in the early 21st Century is much more violent and less secure than were the real dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era. The real dinosaurs lasted something like 160 million years, according to the fossil record. They must have been doing something right.

(*.) Dr. Raymond Gozzi, Jr., is Associate Professor in the TV-Radio Department at Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY. His most recent book, The Power of Metaphor in the Age of Electronic Media, Hampton Press (1999), is available from ISGS.

REFERENCES

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. (Feb. 12, 1994). The Dinosaurs Can Still Dance. A18.

Feldman, D. (Feb. 24, 1994). Another Empire Falls: Television has Become a Dinosaur; It's Time to Let it Die a Painful Death. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. A18.

Peckarsky, D. (June 30, 1993). Transitaurus Rex: Watch Your Wallet. The Seattle Times. B5.

Suplee, C. (Dec. 3, 1990). Paleontology: Doubts About Dinosaurs' Demise. The Washington Post. A2.

The Hanford Courant. (Feb. 16, 1993). Dinosaur-Related Items Still Among Hottest Sellers. D2.

Wood, D. (Feb. 21, 1995). Pentagon Study Says its Budgets are Flaky. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland). 7A.