How Does Dinosaurs Hold Up?

Background: Dinosaurs, a Jim Henson Productions sitcom starring a family of animatronic dinosaurs, joined ABC's much-beloved TGIF lineup in April 1991. Set in prehistoric Pangaea, which looked pretty much like Earth, give or take a few modern appliances, the show centered on the Sinclair family: Earl, the Megalosaurus father; Fran, his Allosaurus wife; Robbie, their Hypsilophodon teenage son; Charlene, the Proceratops preteen; and Baby, a nubby, unidentifiable mini-dino voiced by Kevin Clash (more famously known as "the Elmo Guy"). The show, buoyed by Baby's catchphrases, was initially a ratings and merchandise smash, but it was moved to Wednesdays for its second season, it never quite regained its TGIF following, its ratings fell off, and it was canceled in 1994.

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2011/07/20/20_dinosaurs.o.jpg/a_560x375.jpg

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/07/dinosaurs_fact_check.html

Not the Mama! Not the Mama! funny but it was never one of my fav show's or anything.

http://greatbutforgotten.blogspot.com/2011/09/dinosaurs-tv.html

Any description gives the wrong impression. A show by Jim Henson Associates and Disney, about walking and talking dinosaurs, with cute catchphrases and a view of family life. It certainly sounds like a children's show, and was marketed as such. But Dinosaurs was something much more: an often pointed satire about just about anything it could get its sights on.

The basic concept for the show came from Muppet creator Jim Henson, who wanted to do a show with puppets about dinosaurs living in a 50-style TV sitcom family. Henson died (far too young) before the concept was developed, but Michael Jacobs and Bob Young fleshed it out and sole the concept to Disney to be aired on ABC.

The Sinclair family. The show follows the adventures of the Sinclair* family: Earl (voice of Stewart Pankin), the put-upon father**, his wife Fran (Jessica Walter), son Robbie (Jason Williger), daughter Charlene (Sally Struthers), and their baby, Baby (Kevin Clash). Earl was a blue-collar traditionalist, while Robbie would often question the values. Baby was aggressively cute,*** though he would always torture his father.

Other character included Earl's boss at the Wesayso Corporation, the despotic B.P. Richfield (Sherman Hensley), Earl's best friend Roy Hess (Sam McMurray), and his mother-in-law Ethyl Phillips (Florence Stanley).

The voice actors on the show were all just fine, and the puppeteers were amazing. The characters faces were capable of a wide range of expressions, and their movement is so natural that you forget that these are people surrounded by pounds of foam rubber.

The show was similar to many other sitcoms, but always had a satirical edge, mocking fame, religion, TV shows (sometimes with direct parodies), prejudice, politics, fashion and other issues in a way that was surprisingly pointed. One of my favorites was the two-part episode "Nuts to War," where the dinosaurs go to war with each other over the years crop of pistachio nuts.

And then there was the final episode, one of the most surprising finales in TV history. It had an ecological theme, where the actions of the WeSaySo Corporation leads to the extinction of a beetle, which is the only thing that keeps a certain creeper vine in check. Fiasco leads to fiasco until Earth is blanketed in clouds, cooling down and becoming uninhabitable. The last scenes show the Sinclair family in their house as winter arrives, waiting to die. It's a chilling episode of what always had been a comedy and one of TVs most downbeat moments. Few shows had had the nerve to end by killing off the entire cast, and this is the only one where it's genuinely tragic and not a gimmick.

The show has been out on DVD, marketed as a children's show. And though it works on that level, like most Henson projects, it's aimed for a fare more grown-up audience.

What made the powers that be think that the show would do better on Wednesday compared to Friday. To me, Friday was the spot because that is when most of the other family oriented shows were on.

God bless you always!!! :) :) :)

Holly

This show would get my vote for the most underrated. Even though it's on DVD, (and was a TV hit for a while) people often don't bother to listen to the content of the show when they see that it's made with puppetry and animatronics.

A "lesser" episode of "Dinosaurs" is still great fun...but there are so many episodes where the writing is just top notch, with social commentary about the many ways we humans continue to screw up disastrously...they just have dinosaurs act it out. Therefore, some of it is SO funny, and some moments are quite sad, as it mirrors our world, and we've still learned nothing. But "Dinosaurs" absolutely holds up today, and I continue to be amazed at the fantastic satire in such episodes.

Human nature being what it is, I suspect the messages contained in the show won't cease to be relevant.

ABC's 1990s sitcom Dinosaurs feels even more relevant in 2020 (https://slate.com/culture/2020/04/dinosaurs-sitcom-where-to-start-watching-hurling-day.html)

The four-season 1991-94 comedy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHOWnLetNhM) featuring animatronic dinosaurs "combines the perfectly normal and low-stakes suburban problems we’re all used to with a jarring resignation to death. That juxtaposition resonates differently at a time when a locked-down America is baking sourdough bread while tens of thousands die," says Lili Loofbourow. "Dinosaurs started in 1991, a couple of years after The Simpsons. It wasn’t subtle in its humor or its messaging. The baby bashed its father on the head with a frying pan while the show tackled everything from the evils of television to the Gulf War to the stigma against homosexuality, the latter coded as vegetarianism and pacifism in the series. (The episode in question has Robbie, the teenage son, discovering he might like vegetables and cavorting with hippies who advocate “giving peas a chance” despite his father’s lectures on the carnivorous natural order of things.) The analogies were as leaden as the puppets were unwieldy and waggly and expressive. But because the basic setup was so conventional—stressed-out dad, smart mom stagnating in her own lost potential, bratty kids—I didn’t realize, as a child, how much the sadness I felt after watching a Dinosaurs episode wasn’t accidental but deliberately engineered. Dinosaurs is often regarded as dark because of its quietly apocalyptic ending: The series finale has the family preparing to go extinct thanks to a new ice age brought on by corporate greed. But the show exposed the ugly undercurrents of American sitcoms long before its bleak end. It did so by combining the genre’s low-stakes concerns with high-stakes questions of life and death that Dinosaurs’ characters take casually in stride."

Loved the show but I cant image it being made today it would cost a fortune.