Dinosaurs (TV series)

Origins

News stories written at the time of the show's premiere highlighted Dinosaurs' connection to Jim Henson, an American puppeteer who died the year before. "Jim Henson dreamed up the show's basic concept about three years ago," said a New York Times article in April 1991. "'He wanted it to be a sitcom with a pretty standard structure, with the biggest differences being that it's a family of dinosaurs and their society has this strange toxic life style,' said [his son] Brian Henson. But until The Simpsons took off, said Alex Rockwell, a vice president of the Henson organization, 'people thought it was a crazy idea.'"

In the late 1980s, Henson worked with William Stout, a fantasy artist, illustrator and designer, on a feature film starring animatronic dinosaurs with the working title of The Natural History Project; a 1993 article in The New Yorker said that Henson continued to work on a dinosaur project (presumably the Dinosaurs concept) until the "last months of his life."

The television division of the Walt Disney Company began working on the series in 1990 for CBS before the series landed on ABC, which Disney eventually acquired.

Plot

Dinosaurs is initially set in 60,000,003 BC in Pangaea. The show centers on the Sinclair family: Earl Sinclair (the father), Fran Sinclair (née Phillips - the mother and Earl's wife), their three children (son Robbie, daughter Charlene, and Baby Sinclair) and Fran's mother, Ethyl.

Earl's job is to push over trees for the Wesayso Corporation with his friend and coworker Roy Hess where they work under the supervision of their boss Bradley P. Richfield.

Characters

The focus of the show's plot is the Sinclair family: Earl, Fran, Robbie, Charlene, Baby, and Ethyl. Character and family names throughout the series often referred to petroleum companies and/or petroleum products. For example: Sinclair, Phillips, Hess, B.P., Richfield, and Ethyl, among others.

Other characters

The following characters are not in the Unisaurs category below:

Unisaurs

Outside of the recurring characters, there are a group of dinosaur characters called Unisaurs. They are customizable dinosaur characters similar to the Whatnots from The Muppet Show and the Anything Muppets from Sesame Street. Some of the Unisaurs are Full-Bodied while the others are hand-puppets. They come in different types.

The following are the Full-Bodied Unisaurs:

The Hand-Puppet Unisaurs are usually used for television personalities, elders, officials, audience members, and other characters that can be viewed from the waist up. Here are the following Unisaurs in that category:

Topical issues

Topical issues featured in Dinosaurs include environmentalism, endangered species, women's rights, sexual harassment, LGBT rights, objectification of women, censorship, civil rights, body image, steroid use, allusions to masturbation (in the form of Robbie doing the solo mating dance), drug abuse, racism (in the form of a dispute between the two-legged dinosaurs and the four-legged dinosaurs), peer pressure, rights of indigenous peoples (in the form of the dinosaurs interacting with cavepeople), corporate crime, government interference in parenting, and pacifism.

In the episode "I Never Ate For My Father," in lieu of carnivorism, Robbie chooses to eat vegetables, and the other characters liken this to communism, and drug abuse.

In the final season, "The Greatest Story Ever Sold" (a take off of The Greatest Story Ever Told) even references religion when the Sinclair family becomes eager to learn the meaning of their existence. The Elders dictate a new system of beliefs, and the entire cast (with the exception of Robbie) abandons science to blindly following the newly popular "Potato-ism".

Another religious-themed episode was "The Last Temptation of Ethyl," in which Ethyl willingly allows a televangelist to exploit her near-death experience to extort money from followers. She backs out after having a second such experience, where instead of heaven, she experiences a "place not so nice:" an existence surrounded by nothing but multiple Earl Sinclairs.

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.

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 the Dinosaur 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.

The characters will sometimes break the fourth wall as well, especially Baby. An example of such is seen in the episode "Nature Calls" (Season 3, Episode 1) when Fran and Earl spell out words in front of Baby during an argument, who, after looking at the camera and saying "This could get ugly", proceeds to spell out "They think I can't spell" with his alphabet blocks.

Final episode

The series finale of Dinosaurs, titled "Changing Nature", depicts the irresponsible actions of the dinosaurs toward their environment, and the ensuing Ice Age which leads to their demise. In the episode, a swarm of Bunch Beetles are unable to show up and devour a form of creeper vine. Charlene discovers that WESAYSO has constructed a wax fruit factory called FruitCo on the swampland that serves as the Bunch Beetles' breeding grounds, causing the extinction of the species (save for one male named Stan). Fearing a public relations fiasco more than any environmental threat, WESAYSO quickly puts Earl in charge of an attempt to destroy the vines, which have grown out of control without the beetles to keep them in check. Earl proposes spraying the planet with defoliant, which causes the destruction of the vines, but also kills off all plant life on the planet. 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 cause global cooling, in the form of a gigantic cloud-cover simulating the effects of what the viewer would recognize as nuclear winter that scientists estimate would take "tens of thousands of years" to dissipate. B.P. Richfield dismisses this as a "4th quarter problem" and states that WESAYSO is currently making record-breaking profits from the cold weather selling blankets, heaters, and hot cocoa mix as the result of the "cold snap." Later, Earl apologizes to his family and Stan for his actions that led to the end of the world. Baby is assured that no matter what happens, they will always be a family. At DNN, Howard Handupme concludes his final broadcast.

International screening

In the United Kingdom, the show was screened on ITV in 1992 and in reruns from 1995 to 2002 on Disney Channel. In Canada the show started airing reruns in 1992 on The Family Channel and aired them until the late 1990s; the show also aired on CHRO-TV in the early-to-mid-90's. In Australia the show started airing on the Seven Network from February 1992 through to 1995. In Ireland, in the mid-1990s, it was shown on a Sunday evening on RTÉ Two (known as network 2 back then).

DVD and streaming releases

The first VHS is released on December 3, 1991. On May 2, 2006, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released Dinosaurs: The Complete First And Second Seasons as a four-disc DVD box set. The DVD set includes "exclusive bonus features including a never-before-seen look at the making of Dinosaurs". The complete third and fourth seasons, also a four-disc DVD set, were released May 1, 2007 with special features, including the episodes not aired on US TV. Both sets are currently available only in Region 1.