Did homosexuality kill the dinosaurs?
You might think you know the answer, but consider the perspective of the weird early 90s sitcom
Dinosaurs, featuring giant Jim Henson puppets that tackled timely topics like war and drugs
and race — and yes they even had an episode with a thinly veiled metaphor for homosexuality,
and parents who overcome intolerance.
And in a weird twist, the episode echoes theories about real-life dinosaur behavior that were
put forth by a real-life gay Transylvanian dinosaur hunter a hundred years ago.
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So let’s talk about Dinosaurs, the weirdest show to air on ABC’s TGIFridays block next
to such conventional shows as Full House and Boy Meets World.
The concept for Dinosaurs originated with Jim Henson in the late 80s, who wanted to
make a sitcom about a messy family in a flawed society that drives itself to extinction — his
idea was “the last days of the dinosaurs,” an idea that went nowhere for years because
no one thought and idea like that could possibly work.
But then a different show about a messy family happened: The Simpsons was a huge hit, and
suddenly every network was looking for their own version of the same thing.
For whatever reason, ABC decided that a show with giant animatronic dinosaur puppets fit
the bill, and Dinosaurs was hatched.
It’s a standard sitcom setup — a dumb dad named Earl, a plucky wife named Fran,
a teenager with attitude named Robbie, proud daughter Charlene, and the Baby, a talking
generator of catch phrases and merchandise.
“Gotta love me!”
That there were … similarities … between the shows was not lost on anyone.
“These talking dinosaurs are more real than most real families on TV.”
“It’s like they saw our lives and put it right up on screen.”
From the start, the show did… okay, not great, which meant that executives were fairly
hands-off and the showrunners could tackle topics that might have been a little too edgy
for Step by Step.
The gay episode came at the start of Season 2, in late 1991, and it never explicitly references
sexuality.
But the metaphor is at times blindingly obvious.
It opens with some talk about the Young Men’s Carnivore Association, the YMCA.
“I remember the day when I was initiated down at the Y.
Made quite a meat eater out of me.”
Yes, as the song says, the YMCA offers many ways to have a good time.
Their son, Robbie, is supposed to be at the Y participating in a manhood rite of passage:
Eating another dinosaur.
But walking home with his friend Dave, he confesses that he couldn’t go through with
it.
“Some carnivore I turned out to be.”
“Did you ever think you’re a … uh ... herbivore?”
“No way!”
So this is the metaphor the show’s going with.
Herbivores are the outcasts of society, they’re the ones looked down on and shunned.
And the show uses language in this scene that pretty clearly mirrors the kind of dialogue
you’d hear in a very special episode about a gay kid.
“A lot of dinosaurs eat vegetables from time to time.
… Including me.”
“Are you sure?
… How long have you known?”
“Well I always kind of suspected.
Ever since I was 12, you know, whenever I see vegetables, I feel kind of hungry.”
There’s just no ambiguity here about what they’re talking about.
It’s almost identical to lines on other shows:
“How long have you known...?
That you were gay?”
“...What, you think you have some sort of special lesbidar or something?”
“Okay, you know there's a better word for that, right?”
Dave even goes so far as to invite him to a gay bar.
I’m sorry, a salad bar.
“I sneak out of the house on weekends.
I go to this veggie place across town.
Why don’t you check it out with me sometime?”
“No thanks.”
There’s really nothing else this metaphor could be about.
But then in the next scene, things get a little murky.
When Robbie gets home, everyone’s about to sit down to a dinner of … uh, something
dead, I’m not sure what … and Robbie starts asking uncomfortable questions.
“Why should I rip apart some poor mastodon?”
“Bigger eats smaller in the carnivore kingdom, that’s the way it is.
That’s the way it’s always been.”
There you have it — Earl’s setting up some laws of nature, and that’s going to
be even more important later on.
For now, the show’s setting up that these parents are fairly conservative.
Tradition matters in this house, they don’t care for any changes to their carnivorous
routine.
Big eats small.
Those are the rules.
Don’t question it unless you want to get into trouble.
“You know, it’s possible to get nutrition from vegetables.
.. Uh oh.”
“Well, it’s happened Frannie.
The green menace has crept into our very home.”
Okay, here’s where the metaphor starts getting mushy.
That line about the green menace seems to be a reference to the red menace, a moral
panic over communism that took place around the 1950s.
You could maybe make a stretch and says it’s a reference to the lavender scare, a moral
panic over homosexuality that took place around the same time… but then Earl has this line:
“Are you now or have you ever been an herbivore?”
Well, that settles it.
That line’s almost a verbatim copy from the McCarthy hearings: Are you now or have
you ever been a member of the Communist Party.
So the episode’s metaphor has gotten a little … slippery.
It was about homosexuality at first, now it’s about communism.
And when the parents search Robbie’s room, the metaphor seems to slip again and now it’s
about drugs.
“Broccoli!”
“Someone at school must have given it to him.”
I don’t love that the show seems to be associating homosexuality with drug use.
But it seems like what they’re going for just anything that parents might disapprove
of.
And that certainly seems to be the case at the gay bar, or the communist bar, or the
drug bar?
Robbie sneaks out to check out the scene, and Earl follows him.
So it seems like we’re back to the homosexuality metaphor …
“The old dinosaur is like totally herbophobic.”
But the bar’s also full of hippie dinosaurs from the ‘60s, so maybe the metaphor is
about counterculture now?
The hippie vibe seems goofy today, but 1991, the ‘60s were only 20 to 30 years earlier,
and adults watching the show might associate the ‘60s with a time when THEY were young,
and rebelled against THEIR parents.
And whether it’s homosexuality or communism or drugs or long hair, parental conflict with
kids is at the heart of this episode.
Earl drags Robbie out to a swamp to show him how to kill and eat smaller creatures.
Remember, bigger eats smaller, that’s Earl’s law of nature.
Unfortunately, they didn’t count on there being larger creatures than them in the swamp.
A swamp monster appears and … hey, he looks familiar.
Oh, yup, there he is — he also appeared in the movie-in-a-movie in 1989’s Monster
Maker.
There’s nothing particularly gay about this fact, I just think it’s neat, and also I
like showing off my knowledge of Henson trivia.
Anyway, Robbie gets eaten and Earl trudges home to tell his wife their son is dead.
It’s grim!
But, Earl says, there’s nothing they can do.
That’s just the law of nature.
“What do you want me to do, Frannie?
The laws of nature clearly state that bigger eats smaller.”
“The laws of nature also state that we protect our young.
No matter what.”
Now this is an interesting line for a couple of reasons.
Remember, the relationship between parents and kids is central to this episode, and now
that law of nature that Earl was so fond of, bigger eats smaller, it’s taken a toll on
his own family that he didn’t expect.
As a metaphor for homosexuality, I think this is actually a pretty strong moment — the
parent whose conservative fundamentalist beliefs are so intense that they’re willing to lose
contact with their own child.
But Fran’s line about protecting their young no matter what is also interesting, for a
couple of reasons — one of which is that it echoes a hundred-year-old theory about
dinosaur behavior with some unexpectedly gay roots.
When I was researching this video, I started to wonder if there was any connection between
Dinosaurs the species and homosexuality.
The first thing I found was this old forum post, insisting that the dinosaurs went extinct
because they were homosexual satanists.
Which … it just doesn’t have a ring of scientific accuracy to it.
But then I found something way more interesting.
Picture it: Transylvania, 1895.
A flamboyant sixteen-year-old aristocrat named Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás takes an
interest in some dinosaur bones that his younger sister found on their estate.
He dives into a geological study of the surrounding land, and he gets a Ph.D. in geology at the
age of 26.
His career advances and in 1906 he meets another geologist named Bajazid Doda.
The two men fell in love and started working together, organizing fossil digs, climbing
mountains, and going on adventures.
Franz discovered a species of turtle that he named Kallokibotion bajazidi, or Bajazid’s
beautiful box, because the shape of the shell reminded him of Bajazid’s butt.
So, what is the connection between gay dinosaur hunters of the 1800s and Dinosaurs the sitcom?
Well, in both cases it comes down to family relationships.
Now we don’t know exactly how open Franz and Bajazid were about being a couple.
Some historians think it might be a case of everyone knew but nobody talked about it.
Which would make sense, since this was a time when many families were quite hostile to gay
relatives — for example, in the 1890s, Oscar Wilde was seeing a man named Afred Douglas,
and when Alfred’s father found out he raised such a stink that Oscar was arrested and sent
to prison.
But as far as we can tell, Franz and Bajazid were on good terms with their families.
For example, at one point, they went hiking in the mountains and were kidnapped by bandits.
They started to put together an elaborate escape plan, but that turned out not to be
necessary because when Bajazid’s father found out what happened, he showed up with
fifty armed guards to rescue them.
In contrast to what happened with Oscar and Alfred, Bajazid’s dad looked out for his
son and his partner, even when they got into trouble.
And parents looking out for kids turned out to be an important part of Franz’s later
work in paleontology: He was one of the first researchers to put forward a theory that dinosaur
parents take care of their young, based in part on his belief, way ahead of its time,
that dinosaurs were related to birds.
Not many people believed him at first.
It was a fringe theory for years.
Only in the 1980s and 90s did it really catch on, and now it’s generally believed he was
right — Dinosaur parents, related to birds, probably really did protect their young, no
matter what.
And now here that theory is, brought to life a hundred years later on a silly puppet show.
Even though they probably didn’t have Franz Nopcsa in mind when it was written, the show
really does adhere to some of his ideas.
Remember how Fran responded to her son getting eaten:
“What do you want me to do, Frannie?
The laws of nature clearly state that bigger eats smaller.”
“The laws of nature also state that we protect our young.
No matter what.”
It is so weird to hear this sitcom explicitly validating the theories of Franz Nopcsa a
hundred years after he lived.
And it’s also interesting to note that Fran’s introducing some ambiguity into what previously
seemed like pretty fundamentalist, conservative ideas about how they should live.
Yes, there’s a tradition that big things eat small things.
But there’s also a law about protecting their young.
Now those two ideas are in conflict, and she’s saying that they’re going to have to choose
which one to obey and which one to ignore.
In other words, those old-fashioned traditional ideals might not be as immutable as they seem.
Some values are more important than others.
And if we’re reading this as a metaphor for homosexuality and parental acceptance,
she’s saying that accepting their kid is more important than upholding old traditions.
So Earl goes back to the swamp to rescue Robbie, gets eaten by a previously-owned hand-puppet,
and finds his son in the creature’s stomach.
They start to fight, and there’s what may be one of the most vividly off-color lines
ever broadcast on television:
“Just tell me what it is that you have against me and I will happily jump down this guy’s
intestines.”
Bleh.
Robbie’s mad that Earl is so controlling.
Earl is mad that Robbie doesn’t listen to him.
But then Earl realizes that this isn’t so different from the arguments he had with his
father:
“Well maybe it’s ok if sons have different ideas from their fathers, dad.
Maybe that’s how we evolve as dinosaurs.”
“Yeah.
Maybe that’s the law of nature.”
Aha, they’ve discovered a new law!
As invested as Earl was in “bigger eats smaller,” he’s even more invested in a
law that validates his own conflict with his dad.
Like Fran, he’s found a conflict between his values, and he’s making a choice about
which one to obey and which one to ignore.
Conflict solved.
There’s not much time left in the show, so it’s time for an ending — the hastier
the better.
And it is VERY hasty: Earl and Robbie hug, which the swamp monster finds gross.
“That mushy stuff makes me nauseous.
Cut it out.”
They realize that a display of male affection is so disgusting that it’ll make the swamp
monster throw up.
So they proclaim their love for each other as loudly as possible, forcing the monster
to vomit and free them.
It’s not a great place for the episode to land — that two men hugging is THAT disgusting.
I don’t love the ending!
But in the epilogue, we see that now the family is more live-and-let-live about vegetables,
whatever they represent.
“Meat and vegetables.
Everybody can pick what they want.”
So what is this episode about?
Drugs, communism, homosexualty, hippies?
I think at times it’s about each of those things, but also there’s something bigger
at its heart, and that’s how parents deal with the conflict of loving their kid while
also disapproving of whatever the kid’s into.
And it’s about the choices parents make when their values are in conflict.
In the case of Oscar Wilde, John Douglas decided that it was more important to attack homosexuality
than accept his son.
With Bajazid and Franz, family stood by them, at least when their lives were threatened.
And in this episode, the Sinclair parents both find that old traditions can threaten
your family, and it’s ok to part ways with those traditions in favor of better ones.
I think that’s a fairly optimistic ending, especially when you consider that three years
later the show ended with the entire cast dying.
In the series finale, the characters are responsible for climate change, and cause their own extinction.
“Daddy was put in charge of the world, and he didn’t take real good care of it.
And now it looks like there won’t be much of a world left for you and your brother and
sister to live in.”
Sometimes we see the Dinosaurs — and by extension, the humans for whom they are standing
in — at their best, like when they accept their kids; and sometimes we see them at their
worst, like when they cause a mass extinction.
Remember, from the start, Jim Henson’s concept was “the last days of the dinosaurs,”
and the show was always meant to show various ways the characters brought about their own
destruction.
Despite what you read on forums, no, homosexuality didn’t kill the dinosaurs — in real life,
the best science points to climate change caused by an asteroid or comet, maybe volcanos.
And on the show, we see the characters harmed by intolerance, and slavish adherence to old
traditions.
Homosexuality — or vegetarianism in the episode’s metaphor — didn’t kill them.
Just the opposite — the survival of the family depends on getting over old prejudices
about whatever you might be holding onto.
I think if there’s a message to all of these big foam suits, it’s that humans should
try to be a little more like the dinosaurs at their best... and less like dinosaurs at
their worst.
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