Adult Themes
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Dinosaurs had several episodes with adult themes or references. At the end of the episode "A New Leaf," Robbie made a short
public service announcement (asking to help put an end to preachy anti-drug episodes) in which he described the show as "adult-themed." In another episode, Earl made a self-referential joke while watching a puppet show, arguing that while the show had an aesthetic appeal to children, its humor was aimed at adults.
Indeed, despite the cartoonish violence that often occurred in the series, many jokes were aimed under the radar at adults. Sometimes these jokes were in the form of references to events or people children would likely not know of. For example, at the end of "When Food Goes Bad," the defeated General Chow (a refrigerator creature and source of food to the dinosaurs) states that "Old food never dies. It just goes bad," a reference to
Douglas MacArthur's famous speech in which he stated, "Old soldiers never die. They just fade away."
Many of these references alluded to
sexual intercourse. Several references to "Thursday night" made it clear that this was a scheduled mating night for Earl and Fran. Sexual themes were also ascribed to something called the "Mating Dance," thus allowing the show to make sex-related jokes by showing the (non-sexual to humans) dance. While not overt to children, adults would obviously understand the jokes ("If you are going to dance with a stranger, always wear protective footwear!" advises a character in a sex-ed style video).
Other themes featured in
Dinosaurs include
environmentalism,
women's rights,
sexual harassment,
censorship,
civil rights,
drug abuse,
racism,
peer pressure, rights of
indigenous peoples, and
corporate crime. Several of the episodes have
liberal themes or morals. The two-part episode "Nuts to War," in which the two-legged dinosaurs go to war with the four-legged dinosaurs over rights to
pistachio trees, aired in February and March of 1992, and was almost certainly in response to the
Persian Gulf War. Dialogue in the episode addresses
war profiteering (by the WeSaySo Corporation of B.P. Richfield, Earl's boss), the
casualties of war (limited to one two-legger, which the Sinclair family thought for a time was Robbie), the war's use as a distraction from domestic issues during an election year, government suppression of information, and the harassment of the
antiwar movement.
The series finale of
Dinosaurs revolved around the irresponsible actions of the dinosaurs toward their environment, which triggered the
Ice Age and their demise. The episode begins with the failure of a beetle swarm to show up and check the spread of a form of creeper vine. The reason is later shown to be the destruction of the beetle's breeding ground to create a wax fruit factory. The WeSaySo
corporation takes charge of the attempt to destroy the vine, which it does by spraying the planet with
defoliant. The operation destroys the vine, but kills off all plant life on the planet as well. B.P. Richfield assumes that the creation of clouds will bring rain, allowing the plants to grow back, and so decides to create clouds by dropping bombs in the planet's volcanoes to cause eruptions and cloud cover. The dark clouds instead instigate
global cooling, and viewers are left in no doubt as to the fate of the dinosaurs. The episode contained a clear message of environmental responsibility, and while not overt in its portrayal of the extinction of the dinosaurs, the episode was still a marked change from its normal humor and merited a parental warning in the TV listings.
