Five Forgotten Dark Sides Of The 'Dinosaurs' Universe

The brief resurgence of cultural relevance enjoyed this week by early-'90s sitcom Dinosaurs was a brilliant distraction from the crushing realities of life's futility, but still typical of other such nostalgia-laced hits that tend to capture the internet's rapidly dwindling attention from time to time.

Spurred on by a viral video in which prehistoric patriarch Earl Sinclair raps perfectly in sync with The Notorious BIG's Hypnotize, we all gathered 'round the laptop screens, lapping up the greatness, queuing up the clip to show family and friends as we knowingly winked, "Hey, remember Dinosaurs?"

But that's the problem — I don't think we do remember Dinosaurs. I think that we remember a version of what Dinosaurs was; that, through the blurred, hopeful lenses of hindsight, it has taken shape as an anodyne, family-friendly affair that wore its influences obviously and loved openly and laughed earnestly and could've outperformed fire itself in terms of warming the whole clan to the core. But the reality is that, like so many doe-eyed Joseph Gordon-Levitts, we're in love with an idea, not actually Zooey Deschanel.

Dinosaurs was a mess. From the outset, it didn't know what it wanted to be; emboldened by the success of The Simpsons, the show's producers got the green light for a primetime sitcom, and they used that opportunity (and the consequent three years of airtime it yielded) to offer up a confused tween of a show, full of angst about the world but, due to its childlike appearance, lacking any real ability to convey its iconoclastic ambitions to any degree that could be taken remotely seriously.

For example, let's not forget, in the Dinosaurs universe…

herbivores are equated with drug addicts and homosexuals

In the second season's third episode, I Never Ate For My Father, eldest Sinclair child-o-saur Robbie discovers that maybe he doesn't want to be a carnivore, and spends some time exploring the pleasures of devouring literal forbidden fruit while his family all flip out about how far off the rails he's going.

The drugs and sex equivalencies get thrown in early — Robbie admits to his friend that he thinks he likes vegetables, in a textbook coming-out metaphor, while the conversation's sharp turn into shady drug-deal territory even veers into the date-rapey as the boys discuss how "wild" the "herbivore girls" get on chlorophyll. You can watch the scene (and the whole episode, if you're planning on writing any articles about Dinosaurs in the near future) below:

Earl, in particular — a man's man (dino's dino, whatever) whose father was a meat-eater, and whose father's father was a meat-eater and so on — struggles with his son's dietary desires, as does the rest of Robbie's family, to varying degrees, with even the stupid baby getting in on the act, tauntingly calling Robbie a "herbo" in probably the laziest parallel homophobic slur of the early 1990s.

In other words, wider Dinosaurs society not only seems pretty happy to look down on and stigmatise the legitimate biological imperatives of a solid half of its population, but does so in such a manner that seems to make no distinction between addictive tendencies and sexual leanings, which makes even less sense when you consider that season three's Steroids To Heaven actually dealt with literal drugs, as did several other episodes throughout the series, usually given to Robbie by ne'er-do-well offsider Spike.

So, if drugs exist in the Dinosaurs world, why the mixed-up metaphor here? It's kinda like how Pluto and Goofy inhabit the same universe, but only one gets treated like a dog.

pangaea is a (mostly) lawless, incredibly racist place

Herbivore discrimination issues notwithstanding, the Dinosaurs universe — in particular, the mega-continent of Pangaea, where the Sinclair family resides — seems to have really loose standards when it comes to the social groups they're willing to totally ostracise, as well as dispensing justice.

For example, in Hungry For Love, we discover that Earl's oily boss, BP Richfield (yeah, they didn't try) has been serial-eating the new boyfriends of his daughter, Wendy. He is never brought to justice, remaining in his position and power and wealth for the rest of the series. In Getting To Know You, Baby Sinclair eats an exchange student he deems too annoying to continue living, leaving Earl to create a fake child to send home. It's never spoken of again. Meanwhile, in Charlene's Flat World, Robbie and his sister, Charlene, are arrested for suggesting the world is round instead of flat. There is just no kind of obvious balance in the dinosaur criminal justice system at all.

Green Card sees all four-legged dinosaurs becoming Pangaea's economic scapegoat as the two-legged set rail against them, while in Swamp Music shady dino-executives try and screw a group of humble, down-to-earth blue-skinned mammals out of compensation for co-opting their earnest and transgressive style for corporate gain. And, perhaps most disturbingly, in Charlene And Her Amazing Humans, the Sinclairs' daughter trains a bunch of humans, or "cavelings" in show-speak, to perform like circus animals, which is just total bullshit. Lack of evolutionary overlap aside (I'm not a total pedant, believe it or not), I think we all know which species is the real morally questionable ringmaster in this scenario.

If anything, that storyline should have been about the dinosaurs having to unite to prevent the rising tide of man from completely steamrolling the joint and pissing on its bones, something at which we would later prove so adept.

they toss their old ladies into tar pits — alive

Dinosaurs didn't have to wait long for the horrifying reality of life in Pangaea to make itself apparent; in the first season's third episode, Hurling Day, we discover that the show's society is governed by the same folks who brought about the utopia depicted in Logan's Run, with the elder women of Pangaean society all enduring the same ritual on their 72nd birthday: namely, to get hurled off a cliff screaming into the La Brea Tar Pits by their son-in-law.

By the resolution of the episode, of course — because the character would stick around to make asinine asides for the next four seasons — Grandma Ethyl is spared her celebratory gunk dunk after her grandchildren rightly recoil in horror at the idea that Papa Earl was going to casually fling her to her slow, horrible, immortalising death, and then probably stand around laughing about it with his boss. But it's worth remembering that before the Sinclair children became the first dinosaurs in history to exhibit any kind of ethical development with regards to respecting their elders, this had been not just a tradition, but a super-fun, toast-worthy, celebrated one at that.

Thankfully, though, the show's viewers were spared what probably would have been one of the more gruesome ends of the early '90s, if the T-1000's demise in Terminator 2 is anything to go off.

baby sinclair is a violent, manipulative, obnoxious beast

How well you remember how easy it is to hate Baby Sinclair probably depends on how old you were when Dinosaurs originally aired; to a child, Baby probably comes across as rambunctious but ultimately harmless comic relief; as an adult, it's easy to see that Baby's unpleasant characteristics are a deliberate part of his design and he's easily the most annoying character in the entire show.

First and foremost, there's his signature move — pointing out to everyone that Earl is not his mother and then usually clobbering the shit out of him with a frying pan or something similar, in a series-long extension of a gag that worked for one episode of The Simpsons. More disturbingly — and probably somewhat explanatorily — Earl is not above exacting righteous vengeance upon Baby for his violent outbursts, even once throwing him across the room after taking several pan-shots to the head.

But Baby's awfulness towards Earl isn't just cutesy, infantile behaviour — it's a calculated move designed to drive the man insane. Across the series, it is established that Baby can communicate with the audience and even spell capably; this is not an idiot child, despite whatever such appearances he attempts to maintain by his repetitious catchphrase or stabbing himself in the tail with a fork. This is an evil, antagonistic pool of demon spawn that eats exchange students and makes his brother think he's killed him, and gets worshipped as the chosen one when he spontaneously sprouts a horn, and actually goes full Linda Blair in the series' penultimate episode, The Terrible Twos, demonstrating that he might quite legitimately be the devil.

Seriously, Baby Sinclair was the worst. Knowing his fate is the only thing that softens the worst and darkest aspect of the Dinosaurs universe...

the show ended when everybody died

You want to talk depressing series finales? Forget your Breaking Bads and Seinfelds (which, yes, were both depressing for vastly different reasons) — Dinosaurs has cornered the market on bleak-as-shit show-finishers.

Now, thanks to the knowledge and insight accrued by the hard work of the people who worked on acclaimed documentary Jurassic Park, we all know how things panned out for the real dinosaurs — at the wrong end of a shrieking fireball and the onset of climate change that dropped its pants and went to town on the planet's eye socket — so the writers of Dinosaurs decided that, instead of wrapping the show up with the family simply watching TV on the couch, having learnt some lesson about togetherness or whatever other crap could stitch together the episode's A and B plots, they were going to follow the path of historical accuracy for the first time in the show's tenure by overtly alluding to the imminent extinction of every single character they had just spent the previous four seasons attempting to humanise.

When the annual return of the Bunch Beetles — an eco-systemic event that controls the region's prevalence of pest crops — fails to materialise because series big-bad WESAYSO Corp has killed all but one of the insects with its ruthless expansion, it sets off a chain reaction that ultimately brings about a catastrophic environmental change — a new ice age — that leaves the Sinclairs with little recourse but to stare wistfully out the window as string music swells and the big freeze sets in.

If you can find a series with a bigger buzzkill of a final line than, "And, taking a look at the long-range forecast, continued snow, darkness and extreme cold … Goodnight. Goodbye," then be my guest but, personally, I don't need that kind of downerism in my life because Dinosaurs was already the total pits.