Nightmare Fuel / Dinosaurs

• The setting itself showcases Deliberate Values Dissonance at its most disturbing. The biggest and strongest dinosaurs mistreat or eat the weaker ones either for petty reasons or because of rules that are laughable nonsense at best, or cruel perversion of an understandable one at worst. They even eat creatures who have some degree of sentience. Furthermore, they care nothing but for themselves, brainwashing spineless and naive dinosaurs, and destroying their own land for greed, which eventually leads to their downfall in the finale.
• Some people have found the costumes quite off-putting. Particularly Baby's.
• In "Germ Warfare", when the Baby first gets sick, he says "not the mama" in a deep, scary voice, and then his head turns around in a circle.
  • From the same episode, the Baby is given medicine, which only makes his illness worse. He proceeds to hallucinate that his family was devoured by evil clones who plan to eat him next! Yipe!
• In "Hurling Day", Robbie and Ethyl encounter a massive feral dinosaur that we never see, only their fearful reactions. Ethyl orders Robbie to hide himself and forget about her, and they watch as the massive, unknown creature stomps by.
• In "Monster Under the Bed", Baby imagines a monster trying to get him from under his crib, and the music and scene gets dark as we look at the seemingly endless darkness under Baby's crib. Later in the episode, as Charlene is checking under it, she is grabbed and dragged under by an actual monster! He turns out to be a decent guy, though, just angry that the Sinclair family home was built over his burrow.
• BP Richfield in general is quite terrifying.
  • Especially in the final episode. He doesn't care that his company's actions have doomed the dinosaurs to extinction because he's making an immense profit from it.....hmmmm.
    Earl: (panicked) I think you're missing the point, sir! The world may be coming to an end!
    BP: Well, that's a fourth quarter problem. We'll drop a bomb on that bridge when we come to it! Right now, my biggest problem is trying to figure out what to do with all this money! (begins gleefully tossing his money around, without a single care)
    • Even worse, you can tell that there's a hole in the ceiling in his office (it’s been there so that he can fit his horns inside), and as he is tossing his money around, you can clearly see that it's been snowing directly on top of him. And he still doesn't care that the world is ending.
• A fair amount of "The Terrible Twos", as it entails Baby Sinclair becoming an outright monster on his second birthday and causing all sorts of destruction and havoc to the family. Things are especially frightening in the scene where they consult the Babysitter to return him to normal, not helping matters is the fact that the scene spoofs The Exorcist. The worst part of it all is that it is made clear that this process is normal for all dinosaurs when they are two years old and we are only vaguely informed on how bad it was when Robbie and Charlene were two, as Ethyl notes those two events were traumatic to the point Fran and Earl blocked out the memories.
• "Scent of a Reptile" is every teenage girl's worst nightmare. Charlene develops her scent gland, meaning that she is destined to marry whoever finds the scent attractive. Which turns out to be a fat, inbred, unintelligent janitor who is roughly fifteen years her senior. To make matters worse, her father enthusiastically encourages the two to tie the knot. The idea of marrying him almost drives her to suicide multiple times throughout the episode.
• In "Charlene's Tail", Charlene goes out on her first real date. Earl stays up worrying about her, something many parents can connect to... But when she comes home, alone and sad, not reacting to his yelling, his first reaction is to go quiet for a moment and ask what the boy has done. It's just for a moment, but it's pretty clear what he fears that may have happened.
• The ending, "Changing Nature", is potentially the most foreboding sitcom finale ever made. As WESAYSO's actions have led to the start of the ice age, there's nothing anyone can do but wait to die, and the situation is played DEAD SERIOUS with nary a shred of comedy (sans one quick joke where Stan tries to seduce Charlene, only for the latter to whack him in the face, and even then, it only barely lightens up the mood by a tiny bit). The only survivors of this disaster will be the mammals, the cave people, and any animal that made it to the present, all of which are too primal to restart civilization until probably centuries, if not more, pass by.
  "And taking a look at the long-range forecast: continued snow, darkness, and extreme cold. This is Howard Handupme. Goodnight... goodbye."
  • The ominous fact that this Downer Ending was foreshadowed from the first line of the first episode when Howard reported that an asteroid due to collide with Earth was going to miss. Nature doesn't kill the dinosaurs like it did in the real world... the dinosaurs are fated to cause their own demise.
  • Even worse when you consider the implication. The dinosaurs in the show live in a society very similar to our own in most regards, which the show uses for satire constantly...And the show ends with their greed destroying themselves and setting civilization back a million years. What does that mean about US?

---