Dinosaurs

The Dinosaurs are an animatronics stone-age working-class family created by Jim Henson for Disney. Incredibly overweight, even for a dinosaur, Earl Sinclair (Stuart Pankin) is married to Fran (Jessica Walter) and tries and fails to support fourteen-year-old valley girl Charlene (Sally Struthers), sixteen-year-old Robbie (Jason Willinger) (whose crest eventually turns into a mohawk and gets dyed purple), widowed, cranky Grandma Ethyl Phillips (Florence Stanley), and terrible-twos Baby Sinclair (John Kennedy and Kevin Clash), the true master of the house. Sharp social commentary was featured surprisingly often. Earl is a tree-pusher for the Wesayso Development Corp., which regularly implements schemes to screw their workers even more and destroy the world for marginal profit increment. Chilled, but live prey, are kept in the refrigerator and are helpful when you can't find the milk, and caveman humans make occasional appearances as wild animals and pets. —Dave Blake