Monsters bring in monstrous money

By Arif Suryobuwono

JAKARTA (JP): The Jakarta Fair is offering visitors the opportunity to experience its own version of Jurassic Park through a US$2 million Dinosaur Park.

There, at nine a.m. over the weekend, visitors lined up to experience the heyday of the "terrible lizards" or dinosaurs, as coined by Richard Owen in 1842.

Inside, voices mixed with the roars of dinosaur robots and the taped voice of Prof. Wang, explaining the park's attractions. Unfortunately, the recording of the professor's voice was not easy to understand.

Twenty computers gave touch-screen information about the beasts and a five-minute time limit to put a puzzle in order.

No visitors, who were primarily families and teenagers, seemed to show interest in the "preliminary yard" of the park, in which some replicas of dinosaur skulls were on display with explanatory pictures about the extinct creatures hanging on the walls.

The first savages on sight were a family of maiasaurs -- dinosaurs with wide, beak-like jaws.

"This couple of maiasaurs looking at their newly hatched offspring imitate the fossils of the real ones which were found in this condition exactly," said managing director Richard Tan of the Singapore-based company, Success Resources Pte Ltd., which helped organize the show.

The maiasaurs were partially in motion, with their heads and necks moving from side to side at regular intervals. When asked why their entire bodies don't move, Tan told The Jakarta Post that all parts of the robots can be activated.

"But we don't do that. Otherwise, the robots would walk off the pedestal and tumble down," Tan said. He added that sometimes he asks two Japanese technicians from the company which built the robots, Kokoro Co. Ltd., to change the monsters' movements.

Condoms

According to Tan, the prehistoric animals' muscles and skin are made of latex, the material used to manufacture condoms.

"Oh!" said a visitor who overheard what Tan said, "no wonder the monsters are so real and natural in appearance!"

The next monster was a stegosaurus. It stared fiercely at visitors and, at times, opened its mouth and roared. The roar sounded like that of an elephant or a bear, mixed with the hum of a running motorcycle.

"Uuh, frightening! If such an animal had really existed, it must have eaten many people," Reza, a sixth-grade elementary schoolboy commented about the vegetarian monster.

When asked whether live dinosaurs actually sounded like that, Tan only smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

The monsters were always surrounded by a crowd of visitors, many of which posed in front of the animals to have their photographs taken.

Depictions of rocks and hills combined with common house plants were employed to imitate the environment in which the extinct giant reptiles roamed.

Next to a bridge was a one-meter-long monitor lizard lying so motionless that it could have been mistaken for dead if its eyes had not blinked at times.

Down the bridge, a waterless aquarium displayed a fish-like reptile eating a mollusk and a turtle-like dinosaurs swimming in place.

Simulation

Other dinosaurs on display included a rhino-like chasmosaurus and the infamous tyrannosaurus rex, commonly known as a T-rex, in a cage with blue, white and green electric shocks.

The last dinosaurs on display were two pachycephalosaurs with protruding foreheads in a simulated fight in which they seemed to strike their heads against one another.

The computer-controlled beasts, according to Tan, were rented from their Japanese manufacturer for US$500,000 per month per country.

"In similar shows in Malaysia and Thailand we have incurred losses due to bad timing," he said. One show was held during the Ramadhan fasting month in Malaysia. During another, school children had exams in Thailand at that time, he added.

At the Jakarta Fair, Tan hopes to attract more school children because the fair coincides with school holidays. So far, an average of 20,000 people have visited the show every day, he added.

If this trend continues, with tickets costing Rp 6,000 ($2.80) for adults and Rp 4,000 ($1.85) for children under six, the organizer can expect to earn around Rp 100 million ($46,300) a day or Rp 3 billion ($1.4 million) during the one-month fair.

Well, monsters are not always frightening. They bring in monstrous money, too.