Following the huge success of the original Jurassic Park in the 1990s, the animation team at Universal began working on a spinoff TV series.

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This revelation comes from William Stout, an artist who was tasked with developing concept art and a trailer for the now defunct TV show. A blog post* from the illustrator reveals not only how the Jurassic Park animated series almost came to be, but it also offers some great concept art.

“Towards the end of all of this [Jurassic Park] merchandising I got a call from artist Will Meugniot, asking if I’d be interested in designing a Jurassic Park animated series,” Stout writes. “This was not going to be a kiddy show (although kids of all ages, including myself, could enjoy it). They wanted the show to be a mature prime time series with top writers and state-of-the-art television animation augmented with quite a bit of CG animation. Universal Cartoon Studios wanted a ‘graphic novel look’ to the series.”

Stout created a trailer for the Jurassic Park series, which he says he still holds a copy of today. Unfortunately, he’s yet to release it on YouTube, but he did publish lots of great concept art on his blog.

Each character looks close to their live-action counterpart in the original Jurassic Park. There are also a few adorable scenes including one depicting Tim using a dinosaur puppet to interact with a baby dino:

The aforementioned trailer was sent to director Steven Spielberg for approval, but unfortunately he never took a look at it.

“I heard through the grapevine that he never bothered to watch what we had done,” Stout writes. “By that time the word was out that he was burnt out on Jurassic Park merchandising and all of the film’s commercial exploitation. So, it never got made.”

Fun fact: Universal Cartoon Studios, now called Universal Animation Studios, was responsible for The Land Before Time’s animated movies and television series. Remember how great that show and those films were? Yep, we’re sure they would’ve done a great job with an animated Jurassic Park too.

The studio was also responsible for the animated Casper and Curious George.

*The blog post and concept art were released last year, but we’re just noticing them now. Will Universal be interested in the idea of an animated Jurassic Park or Jurassic World series again after the success of the latter earlier this summer? We think green lighting a project involving the former film would evoke a hell of a lot of nostalgia!