{"id":345270,"date":"2025-06-30T13:56:59","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T18:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/30\/jurassic-lark-the-satirical-genius-of-jim-hensons-dinosaurs\/"},"modified":"2025-06-30T13:56:59","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T18:56:59","slug":"jurassic-lark-the-satirical-genius-of-jim-hensons-dinosaurs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/30\/jurassic-lark-the-satirical-genius-of-jim-hensons-dinosaurs\/","title":{"rendered":"Jurassic Lark: The satirical genius of Jim Henson\u2019s Dinosaurs"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Animatronic puppets, searing social commentary, this short-lived early \u201990s sitcom had it all.<\/p>\n

Reptilian newsreader Howard Handupme looks to camera: \u201cA meteor, three times the size of Earth, is heading towards us in a collision course that will result in the extinction of all life on this planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Left of frame, a rubbery green hand slides a sheet of paper across the desk. \u201cThis just in,\u201d Handupme reports. \u201cNo, it\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, good,\u201d says Earl Sinclair \u2013 a simple, workaday Megalosaurus \u2013 who promptly changes the channel.<\/p>\n

So opens the first episode of the irreverent sitcom Dinosaurs, in which the dysfunctional Sinclair family contends with the strictures of modern life (dinos, in this timeline, having only evolved from being wild, swamp-dwelling brutes about a million years earlier).<\/p>\n

A Jim Henson Television production, the series starred a cast of expressive \u2013 and expensive \u2013 animatronic puppets, the most memorable being Baby Sinclair (performed by Kevin Clash, who also popularised Elmo). Back in the show\u2019s original run from 1991-94, Baby\u2019s wily slapstick and weekly catchcry \u2018Not the Mama!\u2019 eclipsed the show\u2019s more subversive quirks. But in the 30 years since Dinosaurs\u2019 debut, its biting satire and sly commentary on gender, labour, politics, racism, the economy and climate change \u2013 not to mention television itself \u2013 has only grown more savage.<\/p>\n

With its four idiosyncratic seasons hitting Disney+ on 29 January, now is the perfect time to reconsider this curious analogue artefact. From its prehistoric Pangaea setting (roughly 60 million years BC through to its reflection in the Anthropocene, withering under late capitalism, the prophecy of Dinosaurs is anything but obsolete.<\/p>\n

Dinosaurs charged onto the US network ABC (plus ITV and Disney Channel in the UK, among other territories) care of co-creators Bob Young and Michael Jacobs. Their previous writing and producing credits included such all-American candy floss as The Facts of Life and Charles in Charge, but this new beast sacrificed the sweet accessibility of cookie-cutter sitcoms, favouring the playful parody and contained chaos vital to much of Jim Henson\u2019s work, particularly with the Muppets.<\/p>\n

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That said, Dinosaurs was the first major Jim Henson Company work produced without supervision from the Creature Shop\u2019s founding leader, who passed away in May 1990. Henson is said to have conceived the series<\/a>, which shares thematic DNA with his unproduced screenplay for The Natural History Project \u2013 a fantasy feature \u00e0 la<\/em> The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. Sadly it was scrapped due to its apparent similarities to The Land Before Time, at a time when Jurassic antics were just starting to peak on the pop cultural landscape.<\/p>\n

Another way in which Dinosaurs tapped the early \u201990s zeitgeist was by gutting the \u2018wholesome \u201950s father\u2019 archetype. Upstanding dads had dominated sitcoms (subgenus: comedie domesticus<\/em>, or \u2018dom coms\u2019) from Father Knows Best to The Cosby Show. Full of beer nuts and hot air, Earl (voiced by Stuart Pankin) inherited the \u2018bad dad\u2019 mantle from Alf Garnett (Till Death Us Do Part) and Archie Bunker (All in the Family), whose parenting deficits were honoured such \u2018dumb dad\u2019 renaissance texts as Married\u2026 with Children, The Simpsons and Home Improvement. Dinosaurs even skewered the trend with this facetious weeknight line-up:<\/p>\n

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\u201cThis is why TV stinks,\u201d groans Earl. \u201cOne show\u2019s a hit, they make 50 more like it,\u201d to which Baby replies, \u201cDon\u2019t have a cow, man!\u201d<\/p>\n

But Earl is more cynical than his bumbling brethren like Homer Simpson and Fred Flintstone. What\u2019s more, his wilfully shit behaviour isn\u2019t typically framed as endearing, so we don\u2019t laugh with him \u2013 the chuckles come when he gets his comeuppance. (Notably, Dinosaurs\u2019 producers chose to can the initial laugh track, which means no one implicitly condones Earl\u2019s buffoonery.)<\/p>\n

Unlike many TV patriarchs, Earl is rarely handed a free pass to fail upwards, which makes it all the more meaningful when, in the third season episode \u2018Honey, I Miss the Kids\u2019, the flaccid antihero sincerely bonds with his progeny. Meanwhile, his wife Fran (Arrested Development\u2019s Jessica Walter) returns to work full time, itching to escape the cyclical tedium of domestic drudge work.<\/p>\n

A prototypical nuclear family, the Sinclairs live in a version of suburbia that marries prehistoric aesthetics and postwar social values. Every relevant stereotype gets eviscerated, along with the idealised virtues of heteronormative parenthood (both adults express resentment toward each other and their kids), organised religion (teenage son Robbie rejects many cultural customs, like eating other animals and hurling old folk into tarpits), and soulless consumerism (when Baby demands the \u2018leg smoother\u2019 he saw on TV, he\u2019s told he can\u2019t have it because he\u2019s a boy. \u201cOh, then I want a machine gun!\u201d).<\/p>\n

Traditional gender roles receive constant ribbing, with clich\u00e9d traits inverted. Man of the house Earl is beholden to the whims of his \u2013 to borrow a Sesame Street term \u2013 big feelings, whereas Fran is mostly moderate. Though she begins an obliging housewife, one part Stepford to two parts Bedrock, she becomes disillusioned with her lot and develops the voice to say so.<\/p>\n

This is largely due the influence of her friend Monica Devertebrae (Suzie Plakson), a feminist Brontosaurus who takes her employer \u2013 the ubiquitous corporate giant WESAYSO \u2013 to court in \u2018What \u201cSexual Harris\u201d Meant\u2019. The episode aired in late 1991, just two months after Anita Hill\u2019s widely televised sexual harassment case, and it features one of Dinosaurs\u2019 most searing jokes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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The ignobility of work regularly comes under fire, particularly in regard to Earl\u2019s blue-collar job as a \u2018tree pusher\u2019 at WESAYSO Development Corporation. Managed by a tyrannical Styracosaurus called BP Richfield (sitcom stalwart Sherman Hemsley, All in the Family and The Jeffersons) who\u2019s slick by name, if not by nature.<\/p>\n

The company motto is \u201cWe\u2019ll do what\u2019s right if you leave us alone\u201d, which, in practice, means razing a redwood forest to make way for 10,000 tract houses, and building a wax fruit factory that precipitates an ice age. (Howard Handupme\u2019s news report was right: it\u2019s not a meteor that ends all life on Earth in the series\u2019 breathtakingly bleak finale.)<\/p>\n

Dinosaurs leaves few sociopolitical stones unturned, illustrating how gender performance, class, work and the environment are all inextricably linked. In some ways, it\u2019s a spiritual successor to another Henson series about ecology, Fraggle Rock, which also depicts nature\u2019s precariousness and the dangers of xenophobia. (Earl\u2019s opinions of the early hominid folk who cohabit this revisionist history echo the Fraggles\u2019 view of \u2018Silly Creatures\u2019 aka the human race.) This begs the question, was Dinosaurs intended for adults or children? Like most Jim Henson Company work, it\u2019s both, and the writers clarify this with a knowing wink.<\/p>\n

The Sinclairs\u2019 television set is their home\u2019s focal point, and some of the show\u2019s best roasts concern TV\u2019s hypnotic allure. (\u2018Network Genius\u2019 is a work of genius.) But Dinosaurs\u2019 drollest running gag involves a puppet show that delights Earl and Baby equally. When Fran dismisses the show as kid\u2019s stuff, Earl retorts, \u201cYou\u2019d think that, because they\u2019re puppets \u2013 so the show seems to have a children\u2019s aesthetic.\u201d He turns to eyeball the camera. \u201cYet the dialogue is unquestionably sharp-edged, witty, and thematically skewed to adults.\u201d The mighty Megalosaurus flexes his dexterous brow.<\/p>\n

Puppets mimic the human condition with an uncanny likeness. They\u2019re not people, clearly, but an eerie approximation. When camouflaged in the soft power of a sitcom, they have a unique capacity to point fingers at society\u2019s trickiest home truths. Slapstick and catchphrases are just a handy distraction. All these years later, Dinosaurs still goes for the throat.<\/p>\n

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