Dinosaurs

For the Sesame Street direct-to-DVD movie, see Dinosaurs!

Premiere	April 26, 1991
Finale	July 20, 1994
Network	ABC
Seasons	4
Episodes	65

The Sinclair family; Charlene, Fran, Baby, Earl, Robbie, and Fran's mother Ethyl

A cutaway showing the animatronics used to move the faces of the characters -- in this case, Earl Sinclair.

Early Sinclair family concept sketch

Dinosaurs was a half-hour sitcom which aired on ABC. The series, conceived just before Jim Henson's death, focused 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 was an effective parody of human life and the American sitcom. Dinosaurs was 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.

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.'" A 1993 article in The New Yorker said that Henson continued to work on a dinosaur project until the "last months of his life."

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.

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.
• B.P. Richfield's first and middle initials were inspired by British Petroleum.
• The family surname is Sincalir, which comes from Sinclair Oil, which has a dinosaur for a mascot.
• 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.
• At one point a Dinosaurs movie was planned, but never produced.

Cast

Puppeteers: Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Kevin Clash, Bill Barretta, Rickey Boyd, Julianne Buescher, Kevin Carlson, Mitchell Young Evans, Tom Fisher, 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, Allan Trautman, Mak Wilson

Regular Voices: Stuart Pankin, Jessica Walter, Jason Willinger, Sally Struthers, Kevin Clash, Sam McMurray, Florence Stanley, Sherman Hemsley, Suzie Plakson, Christopher Meloni

Guest and Support Voices: Jason Alexander, Shaun Baker, Jason Bernard, Pat Crawford Brown, Stephen Caffrey, Ken Hudson Campbell, Tim Curry, Michael Dorn, Conchata Ferrell, Joe Flaherty, George Gaynes, John Glover, Buddy Hackett, Jack Harrell, Sally Kellerman, Mimi Kennedy, Joyce Kurtz, David Leisure, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jessica Lundy, Edie McClurg, Kate McGregor-Stewart, Michael McKean, Susan Norfleet, Gary Owens, Robert Picardo, Glenn Shadix, Thom Sharp, Richard Simmons, Jeffrey Tambor, Fred Travalena, John Vernon, Paxton Whitehead, David Wohl

See also

• Dinosaurs category for episodes, characters, etc.