Dinosaurs

thumb|300px| Early Sinclair family concept sketch
Dinosaurs is a half-hour sitcom which aired on ABC. The series, conceived just before Jim Henson's death, focuses on a family of dinosaurs, the Sinclairs, and used ground-breaking full body, animatronic puppets.
The show was a joint venture that merged the talents and resources of Michael Jacobs Productions, The Jim Henson Company, and Disney's Touchstone Entertainment. Dinosaurs made use of a system known as animatronics to express and alter the dinosaurs' facial movements, a process developed by Brian Henson and his team at the London Creature Shop.
The show parodied human life and the American sitcom. Dinosaurs is set in the year 60,000,003 BC. Just a million years earlier, the dinosaurs behaved like animals, eating their offspring and living in swamps. But now they had evolved, raising families, living in houses, working, and paying taxes.
Earl Sinclair, a megalosaurus, works for the WESAYSO Development Corporation, under the direction of triceratops B.P. Richfield, leveling forests to make way for housing developments. Earl's wife Fran, an allosaurus, runs the house and family. The Sinclairs have three children: 14-year-old son Robbie; 12-year-old daughter Charlene; and 1-year-old Baby Sinclair, whose birth is recounted in the pilot.
The series has been released on DVD by Buena Vista Home Entertainment. The first box set, Dinosaurs: The Complete First and Second Seasons, was released in May 2006. The second set, Dinosaurs: The Complete Third and Fourth Seasons, was released in May 2007. The series has also been released to Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ (as of 2021).
==Origins==
News articles written at the time of the premiere highlighted the show's connection to Jim Henson, who had 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 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.'"Kahn, Eve M. "All in the Modern Stone Age Family", The New York Times. April 14, 1991. A 1993 article in The New Yorker said that Henson continued to work on a dinosaur project until the "last months of his life."Owen, David. "Looking Out for Kermit", The New Yorker. August 16, 1993.
Henson was working with designer William Stout in the late 80s on a feature film with animatronic dinosaurs, with the working title of The Natural History Project; Henson contacted Stout about the project again in the last months of his life. That project may have been the inspiration for Dinosaurs.
The television division of The Walt Disney Company had begun working on the series in 1990 for CBS, before the series landed on ABC.Grover, Ron. The Disney Touch. Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991. pp. 167-168.
==After the series==
Since the show ended, all of the puppets have deteriorated over time. The mechanical innards of several of the animatronic dinosaur heads, along with a well-worn Baby Sinclair puppet are on display at The Jim Henson Company Lot. A surviving (albeit damaged) Baby Sinclair puppet surfaced in a UK auction in the summer of 2023.ebay listing - July 2023 Julie Zobel explained in a 2014 interview that "Dinosaurs ended production in 1994, so it's amazing that there's anything left. The thing that breaks down foam latex is light." Peter Brooke added, "You're dealing with a rubber. It's based off of natural latex, which deteriorates over time, but you've whisked it into such a fine cell structure. The cell structure eventually over time, with light, dehydrates and gets to the point where it literally just turns to dust. And you can't save it. You can't reconstitute it."BuzzFeed. 26 Things I Learned At Jim Henson's Creature Shop by Louis Peitzman. April 22, 2014
==Notes==
* Many of the dinosaur characters' names were based on the names of oil companies (Sinclair, Phillips, Hess, Richfield) or the categories of fuels they produced, like Ethyl. Sinclair Oil in particular is known for its dinosaur mascot.
* B.P. Richfield's first and middle initials were inspired by British Petroleum.
* Seven episodes of the show were filmed and produced, but did not air in the initial run of the series. They were, however, included in the syndication package.
* The entire series was taped at CBS Studio Center in Los Angeles.Jake's Happy Nostalgia Show Episode 127: Michelan Sisti (17:07) June 24, 2023
* At one point a Dinosaurs movie was planned, but never produced.
*In 1993, Michael Jacobs produced a pilot for Fox, referred to as First Family and The Ooog Show, which would have focused on cavemen and essentially continued the same concept as dinosaurs with mammals. Jacobs and Dinosaurs staff writers Tim Doyle and Bob Young wrote the script. The cast included several Dinosaurs alums: Joe Flaherty starred as caveman patriarch Ooog, while guest actors in the pilot included Suzie Plakson as Zsa Zsa and Michelan Sisti as "4th Caveman." The series was not picked up.
==Cast==
Puppeteers:
Bill Barretta, 
Tim Blaney, 
Rickey Boyd, 
Julianne Buescher, 
Kevin Carlson,
Kevin Clash, 
Michael Earl, 
Mitchell Young Evans, 
Tom Fisher,
Dave Goelz, 
David Greenaway, 
Terri Hardin, 
Brian Henson, 
John Kennedy, 
Bruce Lanoil, 
Arlene Lorre, 
Pons Maar, 
Noel MacNeal, 
Drew Massey, 
Rob Mills, 
James Murray, 
David Rudman, 
Tony Sabin Prince, 
Michelan Sisti, 
Jodi St. Michael, 
Jack Tate, 
Leif Tilden, 
Star Townshend, 
Allan Trautman,
Steve Whitmire, 
Mak Wilson
Regular Voices:
*Stuart Pankin - Earl Sinclair
*Jessica Walter - Fran Sinclair
*Jason Willinger - Robbie Sinclair
*Sally Struthers - Charlene Sinclair
*Kevin Clash - Baby Sinclair
*Sam McMurray - Roy Hess and others
*Florence Stanley - Ethyl Phillips
*Sherman Hemsley - B.P. Richfield
*Suzie Plakson - Monica DeVertebrae and others
*Christopher Meloni - Spike
Recurring Guest Voices:
Jason Alexander, Tim Curry, Michael Dorn, Joe Flaherty, John Glover, Joyce Kurtz, Jessica Lundy, Michael McKean, Robert Picardo, Glenn Shadix, Thom Sharp
Guest Voices:
Shaun Baker, Jason Bernard, Pat Crawford Brown, Stephen Caffrey, Ken Hudson Campbell, Dan Castellaneta, Conchata Ferrell, George Gaynes, Buddy Hackett, Jack Harrell, Sally Kellerman, Mimi Kennedy, David Leisure, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Edie McClurg, Kate McGregor-Stewart, Susan Norfleet, Gary Owens, Michael Richards, Richard Simmons, Jeffrey Tambor, Fred Travalena, John Vernon, Paxton Whitehead, David Wohl
==Sources==
==See also==
* Dinosaurs category for episodes, characters, etc.
* Dinosaurs promotion
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Category:Henson Company TV Shows
Category:Creature Shop TV Shows
Category:Prehistoric