CFP for a special journal issue: ‘Franchising Jurassic Park’
Edited by Matthew Melia (Kingston University, UK)
I am looking for 3-4 articles for the forthcoming journal ‘Franchising Jurassic Park’. If you feel you would like to send me an abstract by the end of September / early October (end of 1st week) (m.melia@kingston.ac.uk), please feel free to do so. For full disclosure, this is to replace several withdrawals from the issue.
We currently have articles dealing with ‘the ecology of sound design’; Jurassic Park computer games; the gothic, masculinities and feminism.
Please find the original CFP below (with amended dates).
Steven Spielberg’s classic summer blockbuster Jurassic Park (1993) spawned one of the most successful and iconic franchises of modern Hollywood. As well as two trilogies: Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World (2015), Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2021)), the ‘world-building’ franchise embraces novels, video games, toys and Lego sets, comic books, theme park water rides, short films (Battle at Big Rock (2019), and an animated series for Netflix (Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous (2020)). Yet this record-breaking transmedia phenomenon, which has so far grossed over $5 billion dollars for Universal Studios, has attracted remarkably little critical attention.
This special journal issue, comprising eleven articles and an editors’ introduction, offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Jurassic Park franchise, mostly focusing on the sequels, the second trilogy and their spin-offs. We aree looking for new and established international scholars to engage with wide-ranging collection of critical, historical, theoretical, and political perspectives on franchising. This will be an important contribution to research into the dominant mode of contemporary transmedia production..
Topics may include (but are not limited to):
Digital effects, branding and merchandising, gender and masculinity, the Gothic, video games, sound design, ecology, palaeontology, world building, chaos theory and nostalgia.
The editor also has submitted a proposal to Bloomsbury for The Jurassic Park Book: New Perspectives on the Classic 1990s Blockbuster, an edited collection on the original film only and a follow up to the The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on the Classic Summer Blockbuster (2020). This publication is now nearing completion. This special issue on the Jurassic Park franchise is designed to complement the book.
Articles will be 6000 – 7000 words long, in English, and previously unpublished.
Date of submission of articles (first drafts) to the editors: March-April 2023
Publication date of special issue is now projected to be December 2023
Art TV Film 