As bleak, frightening and all-around life-ruining as the internet has proven itself to be, there was a time not long ago when the World Wide Web felt like a portal, not a black hole. I still recall the promise of new-millennium digital iconography, when knowledge fused with access, and posters with images of kids surfing on textbooks down the information superhighway adorned school computer rooms. Getting to “go on the computer” was an opportunity for entertainment, yes, but it was also a chance to learn in a fun, controlled environment. The internet was safe. The internet had something to teach us. It was the new frontier of learning and community — until it wasn’t.
A formative introduction to the internet’s tenuous rules for engagement happened when I was 13. (Have no fear: This is not a horror story. ) Let loose on the internet for a few hours every night after completing my homework, I flew to the “Cloverfield” message boards on IMDb, where all of my best, most sagacious friends like Clover_Believer and user152154 were waiting for me. We’d spend our days going about our regular lives and, in our evenings, put our heads together to speculate on the latest theories in the alternate reality game — ARG, for the uninitiated — that preceded the 2008 creature feature. “Cloverfield” made a splash in theaters over the previous summer, when a teaser trailer with only a January release date and no title appeared before the first “Transformers” movie, sending nerds running to their bulky desktop workspaces.
Over the next six months, my fellow detectives and I followed the bevy of clues, sprinkled across the internet like digital breadcrumbs. Together, we filled in the backstory for a monster movie that would begin in media res, offering no answers of its own. It never occurred to me that I was likely sleuthing alongside a bunch of grown adults. There was no way of knowing, and everyone was pretty level-headed — as long as you didn’t speculate that this was a live-action “Voltron” movie, which would be a one-way ticket to an inbox full of asterisk-laden replies.
In a hyper-modern environment like the internet, so eager to eat itself alive in the pursuit of newness, “The End of Oak Street” fandom is delightfully prehistoric.
In the years since, I’ve kept one eye open in case any new “Cloverfield” properties drop out of thin air. It happened in 2016 with “10 Cloverfield Lane” (good), and again in 2019 with “The Cloverfield Paradox” (atrocious). And because Hollywood can’t stop their sequel train, another entry could appear at any second.
That rare feeling of excitement emerged once again, seeing J.J. Abrams’ name and his Bad Robot production company attached to the teaser trailer for this summer’s “The End of Oak Street.” Starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, the film explores what happens to a family who wake up one day to find that their quaint suburban block has moved somewhere else entirely. Everything’s already awry when, suddenly, a dinosaur walks past their window.
Like a teenage reflex, I sprinted to the comments to see what people were saying. To my surprise, these weren’t just my fellow “Cloverfield” nerds; they were dinosaur diehards, people with a massive affinity and seemingly vast knowledge of a subject I haven’t thought much about beyond high school science class. But something else in the chatter caught my eye, too. There was a genuine thrill seeing a dinosaur appear in “The End of Oak Street.” This is a film that dinosaur fans have been waiting for — a new, big-budget studio film existing outside the tired “Jurassic” franchise. Their excitement was almost childlike, and I mean that in the best possible way. It was akin to all those hours I spent online once upon a time, dissecting clues down to their bones. Their thrill was mine, and it warmed my heart.
“I’ve been interested in dinosaurs since my father brought home a ‘Jurassic Park’ CD when I was two years old,” Raunak Choudhury, an active member of the dinosaur communities online, tells me. “I consider myself the unofficial record holder of having watched the ‘Jurassic’ franchise the most number of times.”
Dinosaur fans had been speculating about the existence of prehistoric creatures in “The End of Oak Street” for months before the world had any proper confirmation. Choudhury’s excitement prompted him to create the fan account, “Is the ‘End of Oak Street’ Trailer Out Yet?,” where he could post news about the film and form a community of fellow dinosaur enthusiasts.
Choudhury’s account was my first stop falling down the dinosaur community rabbit hole, and one of the most edifying. It seemed to be a small but central spot for dino-lovers to gather, a glimpse of the welcoming place the web used to be — or, appeared to be. In a hyper-modern environment like the internet, so eager to eat itself alive in the pursuit of newness, the “End of Oak Street” fandom is delightfully prehistoric.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.Sign up here
Just a short trip across cyberspace, a curious mind can find the dinosaur subreddit, where even the tagline, “Dinosaurs: They Rock!,” has a punny flair that wouldn’t be out of place during a school field trip to the local history museum. In the subreddit, the latest advancements in paleontology appear alongside divided reactions to dinosaur media, like Netflix’s recent Morgan Freeman-narrated docuseries, “The Dinosaurs.” One user cautioned to take everything in the series with a large grain of salt. Another lamented that they cry at the end of every dino doc, even though they know the asteroid is coming and extinction is on the horizon. Calling it “wholesome” isn’t right; that’s too patronizing. Rather, I’d say scrolling the subreddit is like auditing a university science course where the professor prioritizes discussion, and every classmate is, for once, eager to put their hand in the air.
Christopher Panella, a defense reporter at Business Insider who grew up fostering a love of dinosaurs with “Jurassic Park” and “The Land Before Time” films, believes dinosaurs appearing in mainstream media scratches a specific, youthful part of your brain. “You get to see these amazing creatures on a screen that you’ve only seen in artistic renditions and as bones in museum exhibitions. It may not all be scientifically or historically accurate, but you still feel like you’re engaging with paleontology in some way.”
(Netflix) “The Dinosaurs”
Panella got wind of “The End of Oak Street” from a post highlighting Hathaway’s slate of upcoming films, only to be caught by surprise. “I hadn’t seen anything about the movie, so I immediately looked it up,” Panella says. “Anne Hathaway being in it was what initially interested me . . . and then the reveal of the dinosaur aspect got my full attention.” For him, the film — like all dinosaur media — has the potential to do something new, outside of timeworn franchises. “The ‘Jurassic’ films have cornered the market on [dinosaurs], and I would enjoy it if more directors and writers pursued dinosaur movies and broadened the subgenre. In my opinion, there should be a big dinosaur movie out every summer!” [Watching these movies], you’re excited to see how different dinosaurs are characterized, how the movie or television show gives them personalities or traits that you can observe.”
For dino-obsessives, an original film like “The End of Oak Street” isn’t just about the chance to see dinosaurs on-screen; it’s the possibility of seeing their favorite species, or any of the multitude of creatures that have yet to be depicted in a major film. Choudhury, whose favorite genus is the classic Tyrannosaurus, says he’d love to see more obscure prehistoric species. Asked about which dinosaurs he’d hope to see in the movie, Choudhury lists off several that I have to look up, rusty from my years away from textbooks. “[The] Rajasaurus, Dreadnoughtus, Omeisaurus, Dracorex, Crichtonsaurus, Attenborosaurus and Geosternbergia [should] get more representation on the big screen,” Choudhury says. Panella, on the other hand, defends his more standard choice. “I am an absolute sucker for the Brachiosaurus,” he says. “I love seeing those long-neck goofballs in any dinosaur media. There are so many scenes across dinosaur media where people end up in contact with Brachiosauruses, and are scared because they’re, well, dinosaurs, and then discover they’re actually herbivores and non-threatening. I love the contrast of Brachiosaurus being a gentle giant. Granted, you could make the worst movie ever, and if it’s got a Brachiosaurus in it, I’m sat in the theater.”
On X, the dinosaur fandom is just as active — only with fewer guardrails. There, promising artists sketch their favorite dinos. One fan I spoke to, Carmelo Hernandez, dedicates hours to handcrafting ceramic dinosaur sculptures. Exploring these accounts, I found that many lead back to Choudhury, keen to speculate and fantasize about which species might be in “The End of Oak Street.” When Choudhury posts about which dinosaurs his followers want to see in the film, his replies are quickly inundated with scientific renderings of all kinds of giant beasts. This one hopes to see the Nasutoceratops; that one’s clamoring for the Nanotyrannus. Few, if any, miss the chance to capitalize the genus in their reply.
It’s here that I notice something fascinating: A number of the people replying to Choudhury’s posts indicate that they’re queer in their profiles. Could it be that the reason I’ve fallen so far down this particular rabbit hole already is that I’m gay? Was it my budding sexuality that kept me posting on IMDb until the dawn of a winter sun broke through the blinds of my family’s computer room? Does the reason I’m interested in “The End of Oak Street” have just as much to do with the dinosaurs as it does Anne “Ally” Hathaway?
“I am an absolute sucker for the Brachiosaurus. I love seeing those long-neck goofballs in any dinosaur media. I love the contrast of Brachiosaurus being a gentle giant. Granted, you could make the worst movie ever, and if it’s got a Brachiosaurus in it, I’m sat in the theater.”
When I point out this apparent correlation to Panella, he tells me he sees it all the time. “I think queer people such as myself love to hyper-fixate on specific interests, especially ones that we discovered in our childhood, and make them our entire personalities,” he explains. “There are countless examples of this: ‘Pokémon,’ Greek mythology, ‘X-Men.’ Dinosaurs fit in this category perfectly.”
“For me, I love dinosaurs because they’re so dramatic,” Panella says. “They’re big and colorful, and they screech and eat things. Some have feathers and claws. It’s just so extravagant and fun. Take the Dilophosaurus in ‘Jurassic Park.’ That’s the smaller dinosaur that’s got the big, colorful frills on the side of its head. It spits acid, too. You can’t see those frills and not think, ‘I want to be her.’ Now, I don’t believe there’s scientific evidence that the species did that, but that’s beside the point. I’ll also note that any gay person who is into dinosaurs will tell you they’re still trying to dress like Laura Dern’s character in the film.”
I’m sure if I looked hard enough, I could find some subsection of the dinosaur community where people are spatting over science or fighting about feathers and scales. But to my eyes, this fandom appears to be a place where anyone is welcome to fantasize, dream, draw, speculate or just plain geek out. Choudhury and Panella both say that, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s really about: sharing and building upon love they’ve had since childhood.
“There’s a primal fear and fascination baked into our DNA with such majestic beasts,” Choudhury says. “We adore watching these strange, almost alien colossi lumber and barge through the landscape, but also admire the familiar qualities we share with them. They invoke wonder in us. I feel so happy to know that the new generation of kids will also get to grow up watching such magnificent shows on their TVs, along with big-budget spectacle movies like ‘Jurassic World: Rebirth,’ ‘The End of Oak Street,’ and even ‘Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie’ on the big screens.”
“It’s such an interesting creative endeavor to try to bring something so far in the past to life on the screen,” Panella adds. “This might be too big of an overstatement, but it feels very human to use the media to try to provide a perspective on history in that way.”
If anything, after a few days spent dipping my T. rex hands into the cool primordial sludge of the dinosaur fandom, Panella’s sentiment feels like an understatement. The online dinosaur community isn’t a tiny group of nerds, or a massive case of arrested development — people still trapped in science class. The fandom is far more curious, knowledgeable and friendly than most corners of the internet are today. Their interests lie in both the now and the then, stretching eons into the past to track where we’ve come from to find out where we’re going next. Whether “The End of Oak Street” is the prehistoric windfall they’re hoping for remains to be seen. But that this movie has them talking, and welcoming tangential new members like me into their fold, is its own blessing. It’s nice to know that there are still corners of the internet bright enough to cast away the darkness that often feels suffocating. Maybe we’re not as close to extinction as I once thought.
Read more
about the latest in fandom
