Dinosaurs (TV series)

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Image:TV dinosaurs charlene and robbie angry.jpg

Dinosaurs was an American television sitcom on ABC, about a family of talking dinosaurs that ran for 65 episodes from April 1991 to July 1994. The show ended with the beginning of the ice age.

The show featured animatronic dinosaurs created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. The show centered around the Sinclair family: the father (Earl), the mother (Fran), the son (Robbie), the daughter (Charlene), the baby (Baby), and the grandmother (Ethyl Phillips). (Curiously, they all appear to belong to wildly different species: Earl and Robbie look like carnivorous dinosaurs, while Fran and Charlene resemble herbivores.) Earl's job was to push over trees for the Wesayso Corporation with his friend and coworker Roy Hess (who wore a hat much like Ed Norton, whom he resembled). Another reference to petroleum companies was Earl's boss, named B.P. Richfield.

The most popular characters on the show were Earl and the mischievous Baby (occasionally referred to as Junior). Baby was voiced by Kevin Clash, best known as the voice of Elmo on Sesame Street. His favorite pastime was to hit Earl repeatedly over the head with a frying pan while shouting "Not the mama!" A music video was produced for the song "I'm the Baby, Gotta Love Me".

Contents

Adult Themes

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Dinosaurs had several episodes with adult themes or references. At the end of the episode "A New Leaf," Robbie made a short public service announcement (asking to help put an end to preachy anti-drug episodes) in which he described the show as "adult-themed." In another episode, Earl made a self-referential joke while watching a puppet show, arguing that while the show had an aesthetic appeal to children, its humor was aimed at adults.

Indeed, despite the cartoonish violence that often occurred in the series, many jokes were aimed under the radar at adults. Sometimes these jokes were in the form of references to events or people children would likely not know of. For example, at the end of "When Food Goes Bad," the defeated General Chow (a refrigerator creature and source of food to the dinosaurs) states that "Old food never dies. It just goes bad," a reference to Douglas MacArthur's famous speech in which he stated, "Old soldiers never die. They just fade away."

Many of these references alluded to sexual intercourse. Several references to "Thursday night" made it clear that this was a scheduled mating night for Earl and Fran. Sexual themes were also ascribed to something called the "Mating Dance," thus allowing the show to make sex-related jokes by showing the (non-sexual to humans) dance. While not overt to children, adults would obviously understand the jokes ("If you are going to dance with a stranger, always wear protective footwear!" advises a character in a sex-ed style video).

Other themes featured in Dinosaurs include environmentalism, women's rights, sexual harassment, censorship, civil rights, drug abuse, racism, peer pressure, rights of indigenous peoples, and corporate crime. Several of the episodes have liberal themes or morals. The two-part episode "Nuts to War," in which the two-legged dinosaurs go to war with the four-legged dinosaurs over rights to pistachio trees, aired in February and March of 1992, and was almost certainly in response to the Persian Gulf War. Dialogue in the episode addresses war profiteering (by the WeSaySo Corporation of B.P. Richfield, Earl's boss), the casualties of war (limited to one two-legger, which the Sinclair family thought for a time was Robbie), the war's use as a distraction from domestic issues during an election year, government suppression of information, and the harassment of the antiwar movement.

The series finale of Dinosaurs revolved around the irresponsible actions of the dinosaurs toward their environment, which triggered the Ice Age and their demise. The episode begins with the failure of a beetle swarm to show up and check the spread of a form of creeper vine. The reason is later shown to be the destruction of the beetle's breeding ground to create a wax fruit factory. The WeSaySo corporation takes charge of the attempt to destroy the vine, which it does by spraying the planet with pesticide. The operation destroys the vine, but kills off all plant life on the planet as well. B.P. Richfield assumes that the creation of clouds will bring rain, allowing the plants to grow back, and so decides to create clouds by dropping bombs in the planet's volcanoes to cause eruptions and cloud cover. The dark clouds instead instigate global cooling, and viewers are left in no doubt as to the fate of the dinosaurs. The episode contained a clear message of environmental responsibility, and while not overt in its portrayal of the extinction of the dinosaurs, the episode was still a marked change from its normal humor and merited a parental warning in the TV listings.

The Shows Within the Show

While Dinosaurs was, of course, a TV show, several jokes in the series were at the expense of television shows in general. Earl often wants to watch TV rather than do something more practical, and several jokes accuse television of "dumbing down" the population and making it lazy. Four episodes had themes related to television. In "Family Challenge," Earl gets the family to go on a game show in order to win a new TV when both of the household's televisions are destroyed. In "Fran Live," Fran gets a call-in show when she suggests that the host of the show "Just Listening With Frank" should give advice rather than just listen. In "Network Genius," Earl starts working for ABC (the Antediluvian Broadcasting Company) and recommends several "stupid" shows for the network; when these shows drastically reduce the IQ of the population, he recommends "smart" shows to save the world. In "Georgie Must Die," Earl attempts to thwart the evil plans of an orange hippo reminiscent of Barney from Barney & Friends.

A few characters in the shows within Dinosaurs made repeat appearances. Howard Handupme was the standard news anchor for the Dinosaur News Network (DNN). Mr. Lizard, a parody of Mr. Wizard, had a scientist demonstrating several dangerous aspects of nature and science for his child assistant, who inevitably died in each episode, prompting Mr. Lizard to quip, "We're going to need another Timmy!" Captain Action Figure shows up in children's programming that Fran mistakes for a commercial. Whenever Captain Action Figure mentions a product, the screen flashes "Tell Mommy I WANT THAT!" Before the appearance of Georgie, Dinosaurs used a puppet highly reminiscent of Barney named "Blarney" in two episodes. During his appearances, members of the Sinclair family commented on his annoying characteristics and failure to teach anything to children. As the powers behind Barney & Friends have threatened legal action to subdue Anti-Barney Humor, it is possible that Dinosaurs received a legal warning, resulting in the creation of the Georgie character.

Other fictional shows that have appeared on Dinosaurs:

Tricera-Cops: appeared in two episodes as a parody of fictional dramas about unconventional police officers.
Mr. Ugh: a parody of Mr. Ed featuring a talking caveman.
Info 411: a parody of Rescue 911 featuring actual calls to Information.
Totally Ineffectual Dad: a show about a father who neglects the needs of his son, who is on fire in the episode featured.
Don't Lift That Heavy Object: a show that captures real-life dinosaurs in the act of trying to lift heavy things.
The Smoo Show: a show that appeared to be musical/variety, created in response to positive reaction to the use of a swear word on network television.
Totally Hidden Predator: a parody of Totally Hidden Video (a Candid Camera-like show from the 1990s) in which a camera captures the reactions of dinosaurs to a huge hidden monster that devours them.

Trivia

  • Gunge, a small rodent-like creature from Fraggle Rock, appeared in a dinosaur's stomach in one episode.
  • Earl exclaims "oh god!" over and over when the egg with Baby hatches, in the pilot episode, "The Mighty Megalosaurus", but later in the series, in "The Greatest Story Ever Sold", the dinosaurs say that they had no higher power or deity.
  • A running gag involved the calendars. They ran backward-i.e. "October" began with the 31st and ended with the 1st, in line with the idea that the years were counting down "B.C."
  • In the last episode, all the characters died as the ice age began. The network advertised that this could be upsetting to children (and eliminated a chance for any sequels).
  • Humans appeared in several episodes, and the dinosaur characters often expressed the belief that humans could never develop intelligence. In three episodes, humans figure prominently in the plot: "Employee of the Month," in which the Sinclairs acquire a human woman as a pet; "The Discovery," in which dinosaurs buy newly discovered land from the indigenous humans at an unfair price; and "Charlene and Her Amazing Humans," in which Charlene trains three human children to do tricks.
  • In the episode "Earl's Big Jackpot," the court's Great Seal has the phrase "Ultio Mea Est," which is Latin for "Revenge is mine." The judge, who solved all the issues of the episode with one verdict, was named D.X. Machina, for Deus Ex Machina.

Cast list

Crew

External links

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