Sight at the Museum

Previously: 

Where the Red Fern Grew  - -  Thunderstruck  - -  Bringing Up Bobby

Ryan Bellgardt is a prolific Oklahoma filmmaker whose work ranges from horror to scifi and now family films.  His latest work, The Adventures of Jurassic Pet, falls into the "kid makes a cute monster/alien/creature friend and goes on an adventure to help/save it" genre.  Like his other movies, Bellgardt filmed in Oklahoma and it's a lot of fun to try to track down the locations that make it on screen.

It usually involves spotting a street sign or a familiar building exterior or some other kind of landmark to figure out where a scene was shot.  But there were a couple of scenes in this movie that were easy to ID since they take place in one of the best museums in the state.

The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, on the OU campus, has an impressive amount of interactive features, cultural artifacts and historical items on display as well as frequent traveling exhibits.  But the biggest draw might be the colossal amount of fossils and dinosaur skeletons.  It's one of the best places in the state to take a gander at the remains of some of the behemoths that stomped around the Sooner state all those years ago.

The amount of fossil casts and skeletons really give the place a "museumy feel" for lack of a better term.  It's the perfect kind of visual shorthand that location scouts look for when they want a setting that is instantly recognizable for what it is.  In this case, the dinosaur museum looks like a dinosaur museum so it's a perfect place to film a scene that takes place in a dinosaur museum.

The museum appears in a couple of different scenes.  Towards the beginning of the film our hero Chris is on a field trip at Sam Noble with his class.  As the field trip progresses through the museum, several of their best specimens get some screen time.  Young Chris speculates on the possibility of dinosaurs being alive and well in the present while his teacher seems to become enamored with the tour guide.

The plot of the film involves Chris finding a magic (I think) dinosaur egg which quickly hatches into a baby dinosaur who quickly grows through adolescence into adulthood in about a day.  During that process the two chase after each other and run away from a bad guy scientist all over town.  Their adventures take them back to the museum for some dino-hijinks.

Fortunately no fossils were destroyed in the melee and the fun continued to several other locations.  If you've got kids that love dinosaurs (or just like checking out Oklahoma productions) you can see it for yourself on various streaming platforms or find a copy in your local Redbox.  There's already a sequel in the works so hopefully it won't be too long before before another Oklahoma museum gets the star treatment.