It may not be a YJ, but this Wrangler drips with all the Jurassic Park style you can imagine.
Animal names have been used in the automotive industry for decades. Some of them haven’t proven so popular. Take the Mercury Sable and AMC Marlin as examples. Others have been and continue to be hits, such as the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Corvette Stingray.
The YJ Wranglers used as tour vehicles in that movie have proven so iconic that many people have made clone tributes to them with their own Wranglers. In fact, there’s an entire association of vehicle owners dedicated to the recreation of “Jurassic Park” vehicles known as the Jurassic Park Motor Pool.
Even dinosaurs have inspired the names of vehicles. Ford has the Raptor, a beast of a truck that feeds on boost and can rip up almost any terrain its pointed at. Wrangler may not be a type of dino, but Jeep‘s association with the ancient creatures goes back much further than the birth of the Raptor, all the way to 1993, when the film “Jurassic Park” hit theaters.
What if you want to pay homage to the ’90s classic, but you have a JK Wrangler? It’s up to you. You can go as far as applying a custom khaki and red wrap complete with all of the T-Rex skeleton silhouette logos to your rig or you can go smaller and simpler. That’s what Youtuber Blacked Out Jeep Wrangler does with his 2015 JKU in this video. He doesn’t get a square headlight conversion or pay a Jeff Goldblum look-alike to tell him to speed up. He just adds a few small mods to show his JP love.
Up front, he sticks on a matte black Jeep logo that features T-Rex skeleton heads as the letter E. To give his rig some movie-correct color, he adds a red, white, yellow, and black license plate to the left of his winch. That coordinates with the laminated hangtag he places just ahead of his rearview mirror. The finishing touch is a pair of matte black Jurassic Park logos for the front doors.
Sure, this JK’s nowhere close to looking like a movie vehicle, but it also isn’t filled with an animal that spits blinding venomous goo and eats people alive, so we’re going to consider its less-than-complete authenticity a good thing.
Derek Shiekhi's father raised him on cars. As a boy, Derek accompanied his dad as he bought classics such as post-WWII GM trucks and early Ford Mustang convertibles.
After loving cars for years and getting a bachelor's degree in Business Management, Derek decided to get an associate degree in journalism. His networking put him in contact with the editor of the Austin-American Statesman newspaper, who hired him to write freelance about automotive culture and events in Austin, Texas in 2013. One particular story led to him getting a certificate for learning the foundations of road racing.
While watching TV with his parents one fateful evening, he saw a commercial that changed his life. In it, Jeep touted the Wrangler as the Texas Auto Writers Association's "SUV of Texas." Derek knew he had to join the organization if he was going to advance as an automotive writer. He joined the Texas Auto Writers Association (TAWA) in 2014 and was fortunate to meet several nice people who connected him to the representatives of several automakers and the people who could give him access to press vehicles (the first one he ever got the keys to was a Lexus LX 570). He's now a regular at TAWA's two main events: the Texas Auto Roundup in the spring and the Texas Truck Rodeo in the fall.
Over the past several years, Derek has learned how to drive off-road in various four-wheel-drive SUVs (he even camped out for two nights in a Land Rover), and driven around various tracks in hot hatches, muscle cars, and exotics. Several of his pieces, including his article about the 2015 Ford F-150 being crowned TAWA's 2014 "Truck of Texas" and his review of the Alfa Romeo 4C Spider, have won awards in TAWA's annual Excellence in Craft Competition. Last year, his JK Forum profile of Wagonmaster, a business that restores Jeep Wagoneers, won prizes in TAWA’s signature writing contest and its pickup- and SUV-focused Texas Truck Invitational.
