Me: That could probably be the next winning mockumentary
Rappe: I had one of those, do you remember in Home Alone the “Talk Man” that he has and he records all the stuff in the second movie, the New York one.
Me: That one is kind of a blur for me I have to admit.
Rappe: See there was a movie that was a disappointment as a kid. If I was in New York I’d have done way cooler things.
Me: I had no problems with that movie as a child. It wasn’t until number three came out that I started to realise the downward spiral that the franchise was taking.
Rappe: I think I had already figured it out by number two. I think it was more the, “wow he’s in New York,” and the possibilities are endless and then he goes and befriends a homeless person. I was just thinking, “Why didn’t he go to more toy stores?”
But he has this recorder thing in the movie and he uses it for all his pranks and I had one and that’s how I started my stupid thing. We used to make fake shows with it and try to do what Macaulay Culkin had done, which did not work that well. We didn’t realise that they had enhancement effects in the movie which is why when we recorded the thing it didn’t sound as good. It sounded like someone recording coconut shells or whatever and that was what we used for fake news programs and I did an interview and my sister played Laura Dern. I don’t remember who else was in the interviews but I do remember that she was Laura Dern. I remember that she just did not understand the game…
Me: What game were you playing?
Rappe: I don’t know. To this day I don’t know what game we were playing, except that I do know that if I scripted whatever it was that was the only way I got to retain control of the Talk Man, because it was so coveted in my little group and I was told by my parents, “do not let anyone else have your talk man because they will break it,” and that was the only way I could control it if I was the director or the journalist in the show and casted everybody else.
What’s sad is that it never occurred to me that we could actually recreate Jurassic Park and record it on the Talk Man and why the best we could do was a news program about Jurassic Park. We weren’t even creative enough to be characters within the Jurassic Park world. In retrospect that would’ve been way cooler, like, “dinosaurs have escaped!”
Me: I wonder who would be the T-Rex.
Rappe: Ye, I dunno. We would’ve have The Lost World script before there was a Lost World because we would’ve been, “It’s running around downtown Denver! Apparently it just came from a theme park.”
Me: Most children go through this phase, and I wonder if this is why this film was one of those big ones for you. Were you a dinosaur lover?
Rappe: I was. It was part of a whole interest in history I think. I don’t remember specifically collecting dinosaur models and toys. I didn’t even get that excited about the Jurassic Park toys for some reason. I was really disappointed in them and I didn’t have any. I don’t remember why. I remember wanting dinosaurs and being really excited for what the toys would be and then seeing them and saying, “I don’t want those.”
It was more that I liked seeing things recreated that didn’t exist anymore and I was such a huge history nerd, even as a kid, that it wasn’t dinosaurs for dinosaurs sake but that they’re this thing that we don’t know what it is and if we could bring it back to life it would solve all our questions. It’s kind of weird because I remember being more fascinated with the process of how they did it, the amber and getting the DNA and thinking that you could then get woolly mammoths and sabre tooth tigers and you could get all the animal fossils out. It wasn’t so much about dinosaurs which is kind of odd, but I remember after seeing the movie I wanted to be a Palaeontologist. It was mostly about digging up lost things than a real dinosaur thing. I was a really odd kid that way.
We had a really cool dinosaur exhibit at our museum, and I know that fed into my imagination, which was just so retro Indiana Jones funky dinosaur hall it was less like seeing what they had really been like because I really liked seeing their bones. It’s really weird in retrospect.
It was the year that Jurassic Park came out that by my old house we used to have, actually it’s still there, a big stretch of mountain called Dinosaur Ridge and as a kid that’s the most exciting thing ever. They had a special tour that week, obviously they banked on Jurassic Park and kids being excited about it, and you could go along the spots that they have marked out for digs and things. They have this one spot and it’s this huge thing of shale and its three big dinosaur imprints of them going up the mountain and they had it outlined with chalk so you could see it. It was the coolest thing as a kid. Seeing that and then going and seeing the movie a few weeks later was just the most, I remember walking along this thing by my house and thinking, “it’s just like the ones in the movie,” and really being blown away by that. It made it all come to life in a really unusual way. I think that’s why I didn’t buy a lot of toys and such, I was like, “I live where dinosaurs walked, I can go to the museum and see real bones, I don’t need toy dinosaurs,” kind of thing. It was strange.