Dinosaurs

1 9 9 1 – 1 9 9 4 (USA)
65 x 30 minute episodes

This series set in the year 60,000,003 BC and starring an animatronic working-class family of dinosaurs was created by Jim Henson for Disney.

Incredibly overweight (even for a dinosaur) 43-year-old megalosaurus Earl Sneed Sinclair was married to 38-year-old allosaurus Fran and tried his best to support 14-year-old valley girl Charlene, 16-year-old Robbie (who eventually turned his crest into a mohawk and dyed it purple), cranky Grandma Ethyl (Fran’s 72-year old mother who called Earl “Fat Boy”), and Baby – the true master of the house.

Robbie and Charlene both attended Bob LaBrea High School where he studied Prehistory and she was an average (C grade) student. Grandma observed, “the only way Charlene will get into college is in a cake at a frat house”.

Baby Sinclair hatched in the first episode and spent the rest of the series watching TV, hitting Earl on the head with a pot while saying “Not the Mama” and remarking “I’m the baby, gotta love me” whenever he did something wrong.

The family kept chilled but live prey in the refrigerator and had a pet cavegirl called Sparky, who they later set free.

The Sinclairs lived in a city called Pangaea where Earl worked as a tree-pusher for the Wesayso Corporation, which regularly implemented schemes to screw their workers even more and destroy the world for marginal profit increment.

Earl’s boss was a vicious three-horned triceratops named B.P. Richfield and his co-worker and friend of 27 years was a T-Rex called Roy Hess. Earl’s favourite watering hole was the Meteor Tiki Lounge.

The Henson company developed the animatronic puppets for this show. Each one used a person inside a huge rubber bodysuit with several additional people to operate the facial expressions and certain movements to bring the character to life – all while syncing up to the voice actor for that puppet.

Earl Sneed Sinclair
Stuart Pankin (voice)
Bill Barretta
Mak Wilson
Dave Goelz
Francis ‘Fran’ Sinclair
Jessica Walter (voice)
Allan Trautman
Tony Sabin Prince
Mitchel Evans
Charlene Sinclair
Sally Struthers (voice)
Bruce Lanoil
Michelan Sisti
Robbie Sinclair
Jason Willinger (voice)
Leif Tilden 
Steve Whitmire
Rob Mills
Baby Sinclair
Kevin Clash (voice)
John Kennedy
Grandma Ethyl Phillips
Florence Stanley (voice)
Brian Henson
Roy Hess
Sam McMurray (voice)
Sparky
Hanna Cutrona

Video