YMMV / Dinosaurs

• Anvilicious:
  • Lampshaded and mocked to death in "A New Leaf", where Robbie acknowledges that the episode was a Drugs Are Bad episode and tells the audience they should avoid using drugs not because of the dangers of addiction and the life-threatening consequences of overdose, but so that television shows would stop feeling pressured into doing shoddy anti-drug episodes.
  • The "Nuts To War" two-parter has a very strong War Is Hell message.
  • The Grand Finale threw together so many Green Aesops that it created an "Everybody Dies" Ending even more fatal than what is believed to have really happened to the dinosaurs. See: Fanon Discontinuity.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The show itself has gained an amount of infamy for its Drama Bomb Finale. If you mention Dinosaurs to those who saw it or have at least heard of it in passing, chances are the dark and depressing series finale is the one big thing they will remember or know about it.
• Awesome Music: "I'm the Baby, Gotta Love Me."
• Base-Breaking Character: Baby Sinclair: the funniest character on the show, or annoying little dipshit who never stops talking? His debatable Creator's Pet status doesn't exactly help things either.
• Broken Aesop: "Earl's Big Jackpot" has Earl get injured after Mr. Richfield made him work unpaid overtime in the dark of night and fired after he asks for some paid leave. This results in Earl reluctantly suing Richfield and getting $800 million dollars in damages. The story then turns against Earl as his court victory is the result of the jury being petty and biased against rich people. Earl is portrayed as being incompetent and increasingly selfish with his newfound wealth, and Richfield fires all his employees and raises his prices sky high to recoup his losses. The overall moral of the episode is seemingly that suing your corrupt, abusive boss and getting a big payday from it is wrong and only hurts everyone else.
• Broken Base: The finale. Is it an unnecessarily dark and cruel ending that sours a comedic series, or is it a great one with a message that's only gotten more relevant as time passes on?
• Common Knowledge: A number of retrospectives on this show definitively state that Robbie is a Hypsilophodon and Charlene is a Protoceratops. While they do resemble those species, Word of God is that Robbie and Charlene weren't based on any specific real dinosaur species.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: "Endangered Species" ends in a bittersweet with Richfield devouring the Grapdelite couple, believed to be the last two of their kind, which would make the species extinct. Robbie, however, finds two Grapdelite cubs under a blanket in his room, which means that the species avoided extinction in the end. The problem is, since the now last two Grapdelites alive are related, the only way the species can continue existing is through incest, which is prone to lead to a mess of genetic disorders in a few generations. And even *if* they weren't related, two individuals just aren't enough to perpetuate a species, far from it. Meaning that the Grapdelites were already doomed no matter what.
• Ethnic Scrappy: In "Getting to Know You," the entire Poupon family is portrayed as hideous, jerkish French-accented birds just for the sake of subverting and inverting the typical Prejudice Aesop.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans were so upset and saddened by the Downer Ending Grand Finale where everyone dies that they understandably try to forget it. Yes, we all knew it was going to happen eventually, but the cast were so likable in spite of their dimness that it was straight up depressing that their stupidity ended up causing their own extinction.
• Genius Bonus: Earl's job is pushing trees, which are largely made up of wood. Paper's made from wood, so he's really a paper pusher (a slang term for a low-level office worker).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show was incredibly popular in Brazil, having reruns for years and the show's derived comic book even running longer with locally made stories. For a couple of years in the 1990s, you could hear Baby Sinclair's catchphrases everywhere you went, and the show was far, far more widely watched than The Simpsons, who was seen as more of a cult show for a highbrow audience.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • There are many that involves the finale:
    • In the episode "And the Winner Is..." Earl has a nightmare where the world ends as a result of him being elected as Chief Elder. In the Grand Finale, Earl causes the end of the world (albeit inadvertently).
    • "The Last Temptation of Ethyl" deals with her temporary Near Death Experiences in "The Afterlife." After the Grand Finale, it's safe to say that she and everyone else have gone there for good. Even worse, during her second near death experience in "Last Temptation," her husband Louie's spirit assures her that she'll be with him forever "soon enough." It ends up being sooner than anyone expected.
    • Any episode with the Framing Device of future paleontologists finding the Sinclairs' stuff and (wrongly) guessing what happened becomes this after you guessed it, that ending. Now you know why their stuff was all found in the same places where it was used in the show's present day - this world died both suddenly and soon!
    • At the end of "And the Winner Is..." Baby is officially named Baby Sinclair. The name is all too fitting, since as of the Grand Finale, he's not going to live past infancy.
  • "Nuts to War" treats the idea of countries going to war over something like pistachios as inherently ridiculous. But pistachios have been the source of real-life geopolitical conflicts, particularly between the United States, China and Iran.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In one episode where Earl becomes a TV executive in charge of producing new shows, he creates a Diabetes-Flavored mindrot called "Box Full of Puppies". These days "Box Full of Puppies" comes in the form of overly-cute YouTube videos featuring kittens and puppies, as well as the Animal Planet series Too Cute. A few years after the show concluded, there was also a short-lived "Puppy Channel" in America, a cable channel that broadcast footage of puppies playing 24 hours a day, with relaxing instrumental music as the only sound.
  • The Shallow Parody The Simpsons did in one episode accuses Robbie of being a rip-off of Bart. If anything Robbie's personality is closer to the one Lisa would evolve into after this show was cancelled.
  • The episode "Georgie Must Die" begins with Earl being driven crazy by Baby's Georgie videotape, to the point of ripping the tape out of the player and preparing to destroy it. When Fran demands to know what Earl is doing, the latter exclaims, "Morning, noon and night, it's Georgie, Georgie, Georgie! Georgie on the Farm, Georgie at the Zoo, Georgie at the Beach!" By the turn of the century, the character of which Georgie is a blatant parody would release the home video titles Let's Go to the Farm, Let's Go to the Zoo, and Let's Go to the Beach.
• Ho Yay: Spike and Robbie in a big way. Apart from their friendship being the only consistent relationship Robbie has with anyone outside of his family, Robbie "experiments" with being an herbivore (treated as a metaphor for homosexuality, amongst other things) and later on runs away to live with Spike in the woods, where they plan on eating plants together; on Spike's end, his idea of a plausible explanation for Robbie's sudden (faked) death begins with "He was standing naked in a field." Robbie and Spike may be bi as Robbie did ask if "it was true," what they said about herbivore girls, and a running joke was his tendency to "pick up girls" at places like the mini golf course.
• Informed Wrongness: In "License to Parent", Earl's attempt to renew his "parenting license" had him deal with a number of situations in truly horrible ways. However, one of the situations was his child receiving a vaccination. The other parents simply encouraged their children to be brave, or bribed them with rewards. Earl told Baby a number of symptoms that could supposedly happen if he didn't get his shot. This was treated as horrible, despite the fact that what he was doing was basically just telling his child the truth: he could get really sick if he didn't get the shot.
• It Was His Sled: The planet freezes and everyone dies. The end. This is often one of the first things discussed about the show for the severe Mood Whiplash it caused for viewers at the time, making it pretty well-known to those who haven't seen the show.
• Lost Aesop: In "I Never Ate for My Father," Robbie's experimentation with vegetarianism is treated as a metaphor for homosexuality, and the whole two-parter episode is about how parents should still love and respect their kids for it. However, the metaphor gets lost when Robbie shows some reluctance to eat certain plants...only to eagerly dive in when he catches the attention of an attractive vegetarian Granola Girl.
  • Fridge Brilliance: It's a better metaphor for bisexuality. When Earl shows up to bring Robbie home, the girl demands Robbie choose once and for all whether he's a carnivore or herbivore, and Robbie exasperatedly says he doesn't see why he has to choose. There's also the fact that Robbie is surprised to learn that his friend who is known for eating meat secretly likes to eat vegetables as well.
• Memetic Mutation: "We're gonna need another Timmy!" (Also counts In-Universe.)
  • Not the momma, not the momma, not the momma...nnnnnnot the momma!
  • I’m the baby, gotta love me!
  • The Drama Bomb Finale.
  • From the German Dub we have Earl's Line in the Opening
    • Earl: Bin da, wer noch?^note I'm here, who else is?
  • "SINCLAIR!!!!! IN HERE!!!! NOWWWWWWW!!!!!!!"
• Moral Event Horizon: Richfield crosses it in the final episode, when he brushes off the fact that his and his employees' actions have doomed the world because said actions have given the company its "biggest third quarter ever" while the apocalypse is a "fourth quarter problem". Made even scarier by the fact that this is a rather scathingly cynical depiction of modern business tycoons.
• Popular with Furries: You think scalies wouldn't latch onto this show, particularly with regards to Robbie?
• Rainbow Lens: The episode "I Never Ate For My Father" treats vegetarianism like a combination of drug use and homosexuality.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Can you believe that Jessica Walter (the voice of Fran) once played a mom who wasn't a drunken, narcissistic, sexually promiscuous old crone (as seen in Arrested Development and Archer)?
  • A young Christopher Meloni voiced Spike. No, that is not a joke.
  • Before he was in American Dad!, Jeff Fischer got his start in voice acting doing extras here.
• Special Effects Failure: While the animatronic costumes are impressive and still hold up, many of the hand puppets, particularly the ones with rod arms, look gangly and stand out compared to the rest of the effects.
  • The Prop Recycling of those costumes and puppets can also be rather obvious at times. Such as in "The Last Temptation of Ethyl", where the same four puppets are multiplied dozens of times for a choir.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Being a prehistoric Sitcom that looks like modern day. It can be seen as a Live-Action Adaptation of The Flintstones if the humans and the dinosaurs switched roles.
• Superlative Dubbing: The German dub went out of its way to adapt some words and phrases for the dinosaur setting: instead of dollars the dinosaurs pay with "Dino-Marks," references to houses and the beach are changed to caves and the swamp, malls are referred to as "shopping-caves" and candy and doughnuts are renamed 'meat pralines' and 'meat-pastries'.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Some people feel find the dinosaur costumes to be unsettling and creepily lifelike, especially the eyes and teeth.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In the season 4 episode Life In The Faust Lane, Baby Sinclair tries to steal Earl's "Bad Mug" only to be caught by the security system, leading to one of the only times when Earl actually scares Baby by yelling at him. Earl ordering his security guard to lock Baby up and throw away the key was supposed to be the final Kick the Dog moment that drives his family away. However, considering what a Spoiled Brat Baby is and how little discipline he gets for any of the abuse he puts Earl (and sometimes Robbie and Charlene) through on a regular basis, seeing Baby burst into tears at the prospect of actually being punished for once can be more cathartic to some people than intended.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Even though the animatronic dinosaur costumes can be creepy at times, they're very impressive for their time and are very expressive and detailed. It's like watching a live-action cartoon.
• Watch It for the Meme: "We're gonna need another Timmy" and the "Everybody Dies" Ending are mostly what the show is known for nowadays.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Dinosaurs was a lot like The Simpsons in its early days, in that the show looked like it could be for kids (The Simpsons had childish, crude animation and art^note and most of the episodes centered on Bart's and Lisa's problems in school and life while Dinosaurs had puppetry and animatronics), but the writing and subject matter both shows took on was very adult for something that looked like kiddie fare.
  • The show itself lampshaded this. One episode has Earl watching a sock puppet sitcom on TV that noticeably contains a lot of adult humor, but Fran dismisses it as just a kids show. Earl explains to Fran that the sitcom may look like a kids show because the characters are puppets, but it's actually better-suited for adults because of the witty dialogue that has a risqué slant to it that older viewers will readily understand.
  • Downplayed somewhat, like most of Henson productions work the show is meant to be for general audiences. Some humor may fly over kid's heads, and (at least in the first season) there is some mild language (i.e. "damn", "hell"), but for the most part it's suitable for all viewers. The show's first season carried Touchstone Television's logo, but perhaps reflecting on it growing more family-friendly, the rest of the series carried Walt Disney Television's logo instead.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
  • During the 2016 US Presidential campaign, someone did a compilation of clips from the episode where B.P. Richfield ran for the position of Chief Elder comparing him to Donald Trump. The result speaks for itself, and twenty years before it even happened!
  • Entire war plotline in Nuts For War was made during the first Gulf War, but became lumped together with 2003's Invasion of Iraq due to controversies of both wars being about oil.