If you follow this blog on a regular basis, you probably recall that I recently purchased a Samsung – 32″ Class Q50R Series LED 4K UHD[1] Smart Tizen TV to replace an older Samsung LED high-definition set that I brought from Miami when I moved here almost five years ago. I already owned a Samsung 4K Blu-ray player and several UHD Blu-ray discs, including the Best Buy exclusive Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga box set, Jaws, and the 1978 theatrical release version of Superman: The Movie.  

Since I own – according to my Collection inventory on my Blu-ray.com account – 312 movies and 50 TV seasons’ worth (238 SKUs) of “regular” high-definition Blu-ray content, I do not plan on replacing all of it on a 1:1 basis. I neither have the money or storage space to do that. 

However, I do plan on getting 4K UHD versions of some of my favorite films, as it seems rather silly to have a 4K UHD television set with a compatible Blu-ray player and not get 4K UHD versions of movies that I enjoy the most. So in the process of buying a few Christmas presents for The Caregiver and her three adult kids, I’ve bought a few UHD titles of movies I already own on DVD and Blu-ray.

The latest addition to my 4K UHD collection is Universal’s Jurassic Park: 25^th Anniversary Collection Limited Edition box set, which was released on May 22, 2018 in an eight-disc DigiBook with Slipbox packaging. It consists of:

• Jurassic Park (1993)
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
• Jurassic Park III (2001)
• Jurassic World (2015)

The fifth film in this series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, was released theatrically around the same time as this 25^th Anniversary set (with a world premiere  on May 21, 2018, then on wide release a month later), so it is – obviously – not included in the 25^th Anniversary set.

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Celebrate one of the biggest movie franchises of all time with Jurassic Park 25th Anniversary Collection! From Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park), Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park III), and Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World), dinosaurs once again roam the Earth in an amazing theme park on a remote island. The action-packed adventures find man up against prehistoric predators in the ultimate battle for survival. Featuring visually stunning imagery and groundbreaking filmmaking, these epic films are sheer movie-making magic which were 65 million years in the making. Welcome to Jurassic Park. – Promotional blurb, Jurassic Park 25^th Anniversary Edition

The Box Set

In many ways, Universal’s Jurassic Park 25^th Anniversary Limited Edition box set resembles Paramount Home Media Distribution’s Indiana Jones: The Complete Collection Blu-ray set from 2012 in its dimensions and design, even though they are from two different studios. They both share the DigiBook/slipcover packaging concept, and they store the discs in “chapter-like” fashion that present the films in release order (Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, and Jurassic World.)

Also like in Paramount’s Indiana Jones: The Complete Collection, each film’s disc-holder pages bear the appropriate poster art and selected stills from the movie.

Of course, there are differences between the two sets, the biggest ones being that the Jurassic Park 25^th Anniversary one is a multi-format collection that includes the feature films on 4K UHD, the feature films with extra features on individual “regular” HD Blu-rays, and the codes – which expire in 2021 – for digital copies of all four films redeemable on Movies Anywhere. You get eight discs in two formats in the Jurassic Park set, whilst with the Indiana Jones HD Blu-ray one you only have the four films and one bonus features disc on 1080p Blu-rays.[2]

My Take

I don’t plan on reviewing the four films of this set on this post; I haven’t sat down to properly watch any of the four feature films and devote my undivided attention. I have tested the Jurassic Park disc to see what Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film looks like on my 4K UHD TV set, so at least I can make the following observations:

• As in the other films I’ve watched on 4K UHD discs – namely a few of my Star Wars films and Saving Private Ryan – the Ultra-High Definition format’s sharper resolution and more natural-looking colors are amazing, even on a “small” 32-inch set like mine. The new format adds depth to images on a flatscreen TV, which adds a “you-are-there” look that standard TV and HDTV can’t quite achieve. The dinosaurs, especially Stan Winston’s “live action” ones, look as though they can come out of the TV set and into your home
• On a TV speaker alone – I don’t have my Samsung – 32″ Class Q50R Series LED 4K UHD^[Smart Tizen TV connected to my ONN soundbar yet – the audio is decent, though I can’t crank it up during school/work hours because the Caregiver’s daughter is attending some of her college classes remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic
• The special effects, which are of 1992 vintage, still stand the scrutiny of the 21^st Century viewer
• Jurassic Park has never looked better on a home video format

All in all, I am pleased with my purchase of the Jurassic Park 25^th Anniversary Limited Edition set. I appreciate that Universal put more thought into this set’s packaging that it did for its Back to the Future 35^th Anniversary Limited Edition Trilogy set.  The slipcover for the Jurassic Park set is sturdier and the overall design is more aesthetically pleasing.

So if you are a fan of the Michael Crichton/Steven Spielberg-created Jurassic Park franchise and are new to the 4K UHD format, you’ll definitely want to get your hands on this set. I strongly recommend this Jurassic Park 25^th Anniversary Limited Edition set, although I wish Universal had waited till Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom had been released on 4K as well.

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[1] UHD stands for Ultra-High Definition, which presents a video image that has four times as much resolution as full-on high definition, which is defined as 1080 pixels (1080p). My older Samsung HD set was a midrange set that had 720p, since I couldn’t afford a 1080 HD set back in 2013.  

[2] Paramount and Disney (which owns Lucasfilm Ltd.) will release the Indiana Jones films on 4K in 2021, so we’ll probably get a similar mix of 4K UHD discs, Blu-ray discs, and digital copy codes then, too.