Hey Roland Episode One - The Great Jurassic Silence of 2026

Welcome to the first episode of this subscribers special with VIDEO!

In this months edition I breakdown the trailer for ‘The End of Oak Street’, impart my thoughts on The Great Jurassic Silence of 2026 and share a clip from my first book episode with Cian Gill coming on the 15th July. 

Do you write in your books, or keep them pristine? hit the send a fan mail button to tell me :)

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Presented and produced by Roland Squire

Theme music: Caleb Burnett (@calebcomposed)

Cover artwork: @thejurassicartist

Find us: @JurassicPiratesPod on Instagram 

Transcript

Welcome To Hey Roland

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello and welcome to this first ever episode of Hey Roland. I've taken that name, of course, from The Lost World. And also, when I was listening to Caleb, I think on C Jurassic Wright, when my name was mentioned, he did that impression. And so I thought, if I'm going to do a subscriber series for people listening to this uh podcast as I go through the books, I want something that also takes in my love of Jurassic. But also there's just so much of that uh out there and done really well that I just wanted this to be a beh a behind-the-scenes look at this podcast. But also it allows me to talk about wider things as well. So every month I'm going to try and compile an episode for my subscribers. And I was looking at a few things today, and you know, I've started this series, season two, didn't expect to even kind of get to this point and to have so many amazing comments about what I've done so far. So thank you, thank you, really, thank you very much for all of those comments. And uh it's been really fun doing things a little bit differently, getting outside of this, getting outside of the studio sort of element of uh doing a podcast and getting out with a little handheld mic and going and seeing people and talking to them in situ. And I'll try and do that a little bit more this season going forward.

Jurassic June And The 2026 Silence

SPEAKER_00 1:41

First up, if we talk about Jurassic Dune. It's been good and it's been nice seeing sort of the fans getting involved in it again, which always happens. And then it's also slightly sad to see that we don't have a lot of uh official Jurassic uh love coming through the socials. Now, that's interesting because there is what has now been dubbed the great Jurassic Silence of 2026, where there was some sort of legal things going on in the background, but I don't think anybody actually knows the true story behind it, and it is probably too boring to talk about. But what was interesting is that uh I thought about three, four months ago we would have had Rebirth's sequel announced. And in fact, I was gearing up for an announcement episode. I messaged James Motram to say, Are you ready to come on to the show and talk about you know the announcement when it happens? Yes, perfect, was expecting it the next week, but then silence. And that silence has seemed to go on. And I thought that it might be to do with uh disclosure day and the fact that they wanted Spielberg's new film to have its moment and not looking back to Jurassic as something that Spielberg's part of, just having Spielberg able to go out and give us his uh science fiction film, which I still haven't seen actually, by the way. And then I thought, oh, then we're getting into the end of Oak Street. Uh I'll be talking about that a little bit later on. And I thought, God, it really is getting a bit crowded now for Jurassic to really make its mark. Uh and then you think about the World Cup and the sport and everything. This summer is so packed with just stuff that will take people's interest away. So maybe we wait uh until the towards the end of the year, betwe before uh you know, before Christmas, maybe November, that's when rebirth will be announced. But who knows? By the time you're listening to this, maybe uh Rebirth 2 has already been announced, and Gareth and Scarlet and everybody has come back, and uh I'm completely and utterly wrong. We did have the uh Evolution 3 update, which included rebirths, you know, crazy uh crazy designs of the distorted rex and the mutatons, the skins for the other animals. Uh uh dear listener, you'll know from uh other interviews that actually uh the last uh console I owned was a uh uh Xbox 360. And I don't have the space or the inclination because it will sap all of my time, and my time is fairly small as it is now, without adding in uh an extra thing that I need to get my eyes around. But uh I enjoyed the story the the trailer, the release trailer that they uh made of it, and uh it added in that extra bit of lore that I think oh that'd be so good uh in the film. Because I'm not a big fan of the start of the film. I'm particularly the text. I do enjoy the lab breakout scene. It feels too quick, but then it's uh it's difficult. You can't please everybody. Rebirth was and is the best of the world films. I'm happily sit down and watch Rebirth over uh any of the others, to be honest. And that's no slight on anybody that loves those films. But anyway, we don't have a new Jurassic this year, but we do have a new dinosaur film, and one that I think will be better than 65, because I dislike 65 greatly. Primitive War, I was a little bit warmer on. I think the story could have been tighter and the film could have been a lot shorter, but it was uh fun and the models, the dinosaur models, were great. I mean, they're clearly some assets floating around from Jurassic world there somehow. But anyway, let's just I'm gonna click on the end of Oak Street trailer.

End Of Oak Street Trailer Reactions

SPEAKER_00 6:03

I've seen bits of this, I mean, if you see it pop up on Instagram and you can't get away from it. But anyway, let's let's watch this trailer together. I mean there's a table scene there that's immediately E.T. Steven Spielberg. This is JJ Abrams giving us, even though he's not the director, this is his production. Yeah, uh a a lost Amblin film, that's what this feels like. Water's not working. The cast is great. It's like the whole neighborhood's lost power.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

What the hell is that?

SPEAKER_00 6:56

I love that image of the the tail of the ankylosaur, is it? That's disappearing. We can't leave. I think that our neighborhood It follows, you know, we're gonna get a horror director coming in here to make to make this. So I think we're in for something a little bit different. How the hell is that even possible? Absolutely brutal. I'm not sure what I think about the dinosaur designs that I've seen so far. They're a little bit I don't know, a little bit freaky. I don't know, that's probably really up some people's streets. But yeah. I like the sci-fi elements of this. I feel like if you're gonna do something that's very different from Jurassic, then you need to go full-on sci-fi. And time travel.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

God's not gonna let us die here.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

You only go to church at Christmas, and now you're telling the kids God's looking out for us? What about the people who are out there getting eaten? That's interesting. Because it's because there's a horror director, I think there is always elements of faith and the idea that God has left you, I think, in a lot of horror, a lot of modern-day horror as well. And I feel like that is coming through here. I think this will be a big summer blockbuster, obviously. That's the market it's going for in that trailer. But there are hints here and there in the styling of the film. So the split focus shots, somebody very close to the camera, and also further back in the frame, both being in focus together. If you've ever seen The Innocence, that film does that so well, and it's amazingly creepy, atmospheric. And so I I'm looking forward to those moments. And that God conversation as well feels like there's gonna be those extra layers to this, to this. Even though it's set in the 80s, it's very much talking about our modern day feeling that some people feel. I'm, you know, I'm one of those that feels like things have just the training wheels are off, things are not gonna go back to the way they were. We're in a strange new world. You know, the pandemic over here, the Brexit referendum, difficult conversations. Now I'm projecting all of that onto a dinosaur film. But the idea of being shifted in time, I think that is a societal thing that's happened. And I'm hoping that having a director that uh has dealt with films like it follows, he brings that element into this sci-fi film. And it makes me feel the conversation with Adam Roberts on my episode with him. You know, the anxiety and dinosaurs are at one point uh, you know, always seen as kind of like the oldest of traditions. They are uh there in the background in the deep, deep past, uh, but also it's very forward-thinking and the technology involved, this one is time travel, and how dinosaurs come back into our world and wreak havoc. That's what it's all about. It's about up-ending our status quo and having dinosaurs as these very ancient things using advanced technology to come into our world. We don't know how that happens in this film, so that'll be interesting to find out if indeed we find out if that is the mystery box of this, of this J.J. Abrams film, is that maybe we don't understand why dinosaurs are here. We'll just have to wait and see. But I am very, very interested to see another big dinosaur film, and I can't wait to sit down and see it this summer. So I'll bring you my review later on.

Writing In Books And Why It Helps

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Now, if I talk about books a little bit, if you're watching this, then you'll see that I'm holding up my book of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and it's got lots of tabs, a lot of little sticky tabs that you can get. I never used to write in my books. I always used to get a bookmark, you know, and that was that is what it was, and keep it pristine in a certain way. For this season, I've really enjoyed actually writing in my books, getting a pen, getting a pencil, writing down my thoughts, writing down ideas at the end of each chapter, and then going back and then reading those sections again and just absorbing it a bit more. And it's been just so much fun to actually have the physicality of a book and going in and adding your bits to it. And so my question is to you, anybody listening, and if you want to click the send a fan mail link in the show notes, please do. And let me know, do you write in your books? Is that what you do? And if you do, what do you get from it? If you don't, tell me how wrong I am and why I shouldn't do it myself. But I've loved doing this, and I'm gonna keep doing it even for books that I'm not covering on this season.

A Jules Verne Chat Preview

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Now I'm gonna let you listen to a little snippet now from my interview with Kean. Kean from the Lost Valley podcast. It was an amazing evening. The whiskey and the stout was flowing, and we just love chatting about journey to the center of the earth, and I can't wait to share it with you, the full interview on the 15th of July. But I thought I'd just give you this little snippet now. I've read the Frank Wynne edition from Penguin Classics. Yeah. It's uh so really what I really love about it is that it actually returns a lot of the that romance tradition to the to the language. It's quite florid. There's some wonderful sentences that are really like quite beautiful. And yeah, the the dreams that happen during the story are quite, you know, they're they're they're they're really quite something in this in this edition. It was really, really nice to actually, it's the first time reading it actually for this podcast since a child. And I think reading something from the Victorian age sometimes can put people off. But actually, then reading something like this, I was I zipped through this so quickly. You know, it was it as you as you say, it's a it's a rollicking read. There is the second the adventure starts, it doesn't stop. Is and because it was serialized before it was in book form, each each little chapter has a start, middle, and end, you know. And it just keeps you going from chapter to chapter.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Yeah, I was just looking at um I've got a a book here called Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction by Alan A. Debos. You might have it there somewhere. I've got a yeah, yeah. He just he just notes that it. He says Vern wasn't by any means a writer of the romantic period per se, but a butcher from the 1998 introduction, that's the Oxford edition, claimed that he was influenced by late romanticism. It's it's certainly yeah, it's it's it's late in the game, but it's still he's still of an age that he would have remembered when scientists were also poets, you know? And it's something that Richard Fallon says and and Debbles says in his book as well, which is that when you go looking for precursors to Jules Verne's work, right? His his great core idea here, if you want to, if you want to get too cut to the chase here, is the dinosaur fight, right? Yeah. The idea of having his characters on an adventure in a literal adventure story, right? We're not talking about Jonathan Swift style allegory here, you know, where characters go to a a fantasy land just to like make fun of, you know, the writer's own society. We're doing something different here. We're we're we're saying, no, this is really happening. Um providing masses of evidence and science here in the way that Michael Crichton later would, with his, you know, people call them his techno thrillers. And and she was very much like an early an early techno thriller, I suppose, with his his massive info dumps. Yeah. He tends to put in his books. But uh, yeah, it's it's just he he was ahead of the game with this, and he did something that was quite different to what had been done before. But both b both those authors I cited there both mentioned that prior to the 1860s there was a huge interest in prehistoric animals and in dinosaurs, but most of the paleo fiction was in verse, it was poetry, it was political cartoons, you know, of of prominent scientists, and it was a lot of it was in the scientific writing itself. So people like Gideon Mantel, you know, famous for discovering the Aguanodon in in Sussex in in the early 19th century, he would, you know, he would he would write these dry enough scientific books, but then he would say, right, I'm now going to take my imagination on a on a spin and take the reader through, you know, imagine what the world was like when these you know anti-Daluvian creatures were were roaming England. And that like that that's what you get when you look for fictitious use of dinosaurs before Joseph Arn. So there there must be there must be more solid predecessors out there, but nothing on the scale that he did, so or with the influence that he had.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

So I really hope you enjoyed that. I certainly enjoyed actually chatting to him. Can't wait to bring that to you on the 15th.

Questions, Future Plans And Goodbye

SPEAKER_00 16:24

That's it. This is the first one of these. It feels a little bit strange, me just talking to myself in a room. I'm sure I'll get more used to doing this as we go on through the year. If you have any questions for me, you want me to cover anything, I will be reading the rebirth script that David Kepp put up on his website, and I'll be dissecting that later on in the year. But anything you want me to cover, any questions you have, even if it's just questions about how I actually make the show, why I wanted to make it, ask away. Things that you want to see, let me know. Let's make this a two way conversation as much as we can. But until next time, I'll just say thank you very, very much for joining me. And goodbye.