Dinosaurs

Jim Henson conceived Dinosaurs in 1988 and kept working on the idea until the last months of his life; he died in 1990, about a year before the show premiered on ABC on April 26, 1991. Produced by Jim Henson Productions with Michael Jacobs Productions for Disney, it became a showcase for Jim Henson's Creature Shop, which built full-body, radio-controlled animatronic suits for the Sinclair family — each principal character took two puppeteers working in tandem, one inside the suit playing the body, another running the face by remote.

The Sinclairs were a working-class family in rubber dino skin: Earl (voiced by Stuart Pankin), a tree-pusher for the WESAYSO Corporation, Fran (Jessica Walter), kids Robbie and Charlene — and Baby Sinclair, performed and voiced by Kevin Clash, who was simultaneously turning Elmo into a superstar. Baby's catchphrases, "Not the mama!" and "I'm the baby, gotta love me!", were inescapable in the early 90s. The show aired in ABC's TGIF-era Friday lineup from 1991 to 1993, and under the puppet slapstick ran surprisingly sharp satire: WESAYSO's cheerful indifference to the natural world was played not as villainy but as ordinary corporate logic.

That satire cashed out in the finale. "Changing Nature," aired in July 1994, ends the series with WESAYSO's environmental recklessness triggering an ice age — and the entire cast facing extinction on camera, delivered as a straight environmental parable rather than a joke. Across four seasons and 65 episodes, Dinosaurs proved Henson's vision stretched far beyond whimsy: a show that could be genuinely funny and genuinely unsettling in the same half hour, with one of the bleakest endings in sitcom history.