All I Ever Needed To Know I Learned Watching Dinosaurs

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Dinosaurs (TV series)

[edit] Overview
The show is set, initially, in 60,000,003 BC with the years, months and days counting toward zero (in one episode, Robbie asks his father if he ever questions what they are counting down to). The show centers on the Sinclair family (a reference to Sinclair Oil Corporation which uses a dinosaur as its logo): the father (Earl Sinclair, a reference to Earl Holding, Sinclair Oil's principal owner), the mother (Fran Sinclair), the son (Robbie Sinclair), the daughter (Charlene Sinclair), the baby (Baby Sinclair), and the grandmother (Ethyl Phillips, a reference to Phillips Petroleum and ethyl gasoline). (Curiously, they all appear to belong to wildly different species: Earl, Fran and Robbie look like carnivorous dinosaurs, and Charlene resembles an herbivore.) Earl's job is to push over trees for the Wesayso Corporation (alluding to the fact that petroleum comes from compresed trees and other organic matter, keeping with the petroleum theme of the show) with his friend and coworker Roy Hess (Hess Corporation is another regional petroleum chain). Another reference to petroleum companies is Earl's boss, named B.P. Richfield.

One of the most popular characters on the show is the mischievous Baby, occasionally referred to as "Junior" until the second season where he was officially named "Baby Sinclair". Baby Sinclair's mannerisms were loosely based on writer and producer Bob Young's youngest child Ethan.[citation needed]

His favorite pastime is to hit Earl repeatedly over the head with a frying pan while shouting, "Not the mama!" Frequently, when Earl is hurt, Baby will throw his arms up enthusiastically and exclaim, "Again!" A music video was produced for a song based on another of Baby's catchphrases, "I'm the Baby, Gotta Love Me".


[edit] Characters
Main article: List of Dinosaurs characters
The series centers around the Sinclair family: Earl, Fran, Robbie, Charlene and Baby. Other supporting characters are Ethyl Phillips, Roy Hess, B.P. Richfield, Monica Devertebrae and Spike. Humans have appeared in several episodes as cavemen, and the dinosaur characters often expressed the belief that humans could never develop intelligence. A recurring joke is that the dinosaurs do not know how to tell male and female humans apart and usually switch them in conversation or as shown in one episode ("The Mating Dance") in which zoo keepers unknowingly pair two obviously male humans together and cannot figure out why they will not produce offspring. There are also other reoccurring, major characters, typically from the WeSaySo Corporation where Earl works.


[edit] Intended audience

Robbie and Charlene in the episode "Refrigerator Day".The world of Dinosaurs is a satirical parody of our own society. The dinosaurs are "intelligent" enough to talk, trade, build things, have traditions, go to war, and so forth. Despite the cartoonish violence that often occur in the series, the plotlines and many jokes are aimed under the radar at adults. Sometimes these jokes are in the form of references to events or people which children are not likely to know. 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 General Douglas MacArthur's famous speech in which he stated that "Old soldiers never die. They just fade away."

It was even explicitly stated on the show that the intended audience were adults, with at least a couple of breaks of the fourth wall. In "How to Pick Up Girls," Earl asks Fran to watch a puppet show on TV. Fran dismisses it with, "Earl, that's for kids," to which Earl replies, "Yeah, you'd think that because they're puppets, so the show seems to have a children's aesthetic," and then he turns toward the camera and says, "yet the dialogue is unquestionably sharp-edged, witty, and thematically skewed to adults." And at the end of the episode "A New Leaf," Robbie makes a short public service announcement asking people to stop doing drugs to help put an end to sitcoms with preachy anti-drug messages. In his message, he describes the show as "adult-themed."


[edit] Topical issues
Topical issues featured in Dinosaurs include environmentalism, women's rights, sexual harassment, objectification of women, censorship, civil rights, body image, steroid use, drug abuse, racism, peer pressure, rights of indigenous peoples, corporate crime, government interference of parenting, and allusions to homosexuality and communism (in the guise of herbivorism).

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, which sells weaponry to both sides), 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 (politically) hawkish dinosaurs created a catchphrase for their political party: "We Are Right" (W.A.R.). Earl, originally a hawk but later disillusioned, takes to protesting the war with a sign reading "Pistachio Eaters Against the Chief Elder" (P.E.A.C.E), a backronym.

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 homosexuality, irreverence, 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." The religion brings about a set of strange and pointless rules that all dinosaurs must adhere to, possibly a parody of the Ten Commandments. Robbie and a reluctant Earl refuse to follow the rules leading to their punishment of being burned at the stake. Just as they are about to be executed, the fire mysteriously goes out. It is considered a sign, and the two are allowed to go free. The episode ends with them speculating as to whether there really is a god who created and watches over them.

In another episode, Earl switches bodies with a tree and raises the issue of conservation. This is more dramatically explored in the series finale.

The series finale of Dinosaurs concerns the irresponsible actions of the dinosaurs toward their environment, and the ensuing Ice Age which leads to 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 defoliant. 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 final scene of the series depicts a color-warped broadcast from newscaster Howard Handupme, eerily staring into the camera in a slowly freezing studio, and droning, "Goodnight...Goodbye." The credits then roll over a shot of the Sinclairs' house, slowly disappearing beneath a snow drift, while a melancholy string instrumental plays. The episode contains a clear, dark 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

I re-watched them as my friend has the first 2 season on DVD, I remember being a young kid and LOVING this show, anyone else watch