Thanks to some technical difficulties the BW Panelling I planned is going to have to wait. Instead, we have this:
I checked my email last night and saw a promo for a new Dinosaucers comic, and the creator of the show appears to be the writer. But I’m not seeing the tone of the show in the tagline.
Reptilon has just found its sister planet— Earth —complete with water, fauna, and a billion pieces of MEAT.
I highlighted that last part, as if the bad guys of the show, the Tyrannos, are coming to eat us. It just sounds a bit more vicious than the original show. Now maybe that’s what Michael Uslan had wanted the show to be, a bit more dark and serious (although being a kids show in the 1980s probably not involving eating people), much as the creator of Miami Vice finally got his version when he made the movie. But since gritty remakes of the more fun shows of my childhood are the trend this is kind of odd to me. Especially after skimming an episode list to see Uslan had written some of the sillier plots, like the one about dino-Santa Claus or the time Plesio, the plesiosaur, fell in love with the Loch Ness Monster, or other episodes involving Earth culture and customs, often with the dinos misunderstanding how we humans work. Kind of like Fizzbin in my comic.
The original series is about evolved dinosaurs from the planet Reptilon, one of those planets on the opposite side of the sun from us some sci-fi likes to go with. For reasons unexplained members of the competing factions, the benevolent Dinosaucers and the evil Tyrannos, come to Earth and bring their battles here. The Dinosaucers are led by the kind Allo (an allosaurus) and the Tyrannos by the nasty Genghis Rex. The Dinosaucers, as shown in the intro, ally themselves with four humans who help keep their existence on Earth as secret as possible, giving them rings that can temporarily boost their strength and reflexes. The plots are generally silly. Tonight I’ve chosen one of the more relaxed plots by Uslan (who was also one of the producers and wrote or co-wrote numerous but not all the episodes)…and it still gets silly in execution. In episode 5, “Divide And Conquer”, the Tyrannos plant a fake news story as part of a plot to draw out Allo and his second-in-command, Bronto Thunder (the apatosaurus was originally called a brontosaurus, and he has a girlfriend named Patty Saurus–the dino puns run wild on this series). Enjoy!
