Original subtitles

honey

i'm home i like it

i love being a dinosaur dinosaurs was

about

what caused the dinosaurs to go extinct

which was marrying and having children

which killed them immediately everybody

just

loved working on that show if people

really knew how demanding it was going

to be going in

would we have done it the same i'm not

sure certainly there was nothing else

like it on television it's

one of the most ambitious shows ever

made

it started with gemiini having lunch and

talking about this idea

let's do a show about dinosaurs and

dinosaur thinking and let's do it as a

sitcom

he had the idea of a family of dinosaurs

and

that they live very irresponsibly and

bigger than life and everything's

reckless

early in his career he did ads for

lachoy

chinese food and he did the la choy

dragon the lachoy dragon just wrecks

everything and i think my dad always

thought that was a hilarious character

and i think maybe it had the roots

in there dinosaurs in a nutshell was

about dinosaur style thinking there's an

endless supply of natural resources and

we can use them at our will and sort of

we're the we're the biggest species on

the planet and everything else

can kind of you know if it's good for us

it's good for us and that was originally

jim henson's concept

and we're gonna rule the world forever

kirk was designing the characters and

those designs and sketches and paintings

went through

several iterations because he really

liked to visualize things and sort of

get kind of the world sketched out

before he started worrying about

specific details

we just started talking about that and

kind of the fun you could have in the

different various characters so i went

off and started sketching

and then uh unfortunately jim passed

away

and because jim had died they knew they

needed uh

creative help from sort of situation

comedy veterans so they brought in

michael jacobs and me

what i wanted to do was be able to tell

contemporary stories using

the dinosaurs as a frame of reference

i think that's what it was about i mean

it branched off from all the different

aspects of that from the environment

to political things to war but it was

again that sort of old-fashioned

thinking

you could attack issues much better when

the characters

are not quite human we are required by

our constitution

to let the voters think they have a

choice that's democracy

then from there michael frith actually

who is one of our art directors in new

york

and a very very fine illustrator he then

put those characters into environments

that represented

sets and living rooms and how the show

might look and those were very

compelling

dinosaurs arrived at a really

interesting time on television

at this point comedy was flourishing and

abc

had their tgif evening the antediluvia

broadcasting company now begins its

broadcast day

luckily abc agreed to make 13 of them

because it was a show that you could

never pilot the way that we wanted to do

it i think at one point we

calculated how much a pilot would have

cost and it was like six or seven

million dollars

an entire creature shop that doesn't

exist in any other situation comedy

an entire group of 30 or 40

professionals who are there to

keep the dinosaurs running create these

odd-shaped costumes every costume had to

be built from scratch

and we decided to do animatronics

animatronic characters the likes of

which you'd never seen on television

up until then we have this incredible

technology that we've been doing with

the um

ninja turtles movies we thought what a

great technology to use in

a in a weekly sitcom well the network

didn't quite believe it and i didn't

quite believe it until

i saw the process take place really we

were taking what was

film techniques from our creature shop

in london

and bringing it over here and trying to

do a very ambitious

animatronic show on a weekly basis one

of the ideas originally was we didn't

want them all to be the same because it

was just kind of uh

more fun to play with the rules of

evolution all that the father was a

megalosaurus

the wife was more of a like a

tyrannosaurus type and the son and the

daughter were sort of

made up charlene moana proud of you dad

go get help i remember one of the the

design issues with earl

earl earl snead sinclair

earl sinclair and he looked much more

gruff i looked at him

and my first thought was he was too

fierce

i say this with all love and everything

but i don't give a damn about your day

he's got sort of this big uh you know

kind of lantern jaw

and we softened that and made him kind

of more of a chubby kind of you know

second chin when we changed earl earl's

aspect softened he became

less a bar room brawler than he did

a dinosaur every man which is what we

always wanted to do

one of the characters that that changed

through the design process was the

mother-in-law

fran's mother originally was a

pterodactyl who's going to hang upside

down with all this jewelry and like hang

upside down in the closet

at the end of the day we actually used

her some good story concepts

and if she was just hanging around in

the closet it wouldn't have been as

useful at my age

what do i have to live for friend i am

not letting your mother move into my

house and spend the rest of her days

making my life miserable

take me home dear we weren't trying to

go for realistic dinosaurs it wasn't

obviously a scientifically accurate

show so it was a lot of fun in that

respect because dinosaurs

traditionally had been done very

realistically and we were trying to do

sort of you know make fun of human

foibles and human nature so

they were much more anthropomorphic than

than most dinosaurs had been

the writing really was fabulous on that

show my feeling

was that we were going to be able to

write for these characters

things that you just couldn't write out

of the mouths of human beings

dad you're not going to turn into one of

those land raping executive types are

you

you if they'll only give me the chance

we had to decide

what they were going to be what were we

trying to say

the catch phrases i am i'm home i'm

hungry

i think they mostly came from michael

jacobs so we thought let's have a baby

let's have the baby talk right out of

the egg i sort of just

watched what was going on at home in my

house what

horrors my third son ethan was going

through as a baby

bob immediately sitting next to me

started saying not the mama

[Music]

not the mama not the mama i really wish

you'd grow out of this

well that's great catchphrase number one

and bob

said i'm the baby gotta love me hi

i'm the baby brand new just out gotta

love me come on

gotta love me and we were off and

running with this character the creating

of the dinosaurs themselves the original

build that first build was really

primarily in

england so the characters were built

over there and then once they were here

the show stayed here and they started by

sculpting the characters

in what we call maquette form what a

maquette does is you can do it over a

small sculpt of a human with the right

human proportions and know

okay this is a design that works

physically but it's going to weigh 200

pounds

once the designs and the maquettes have

have been made we then have to work out

how we're going to actually make

the characters we'd start building on

both the

suit i either neck down and we'd start

sculpting the head

the heads were where all of the

electronics were going to be

and then there's really like a football

helmet inside there that the actor will

wear

that holds all that and all that's

coming off of the head you can see

the different eye mechanisms these are

eyelids

this particular character performer

inside was able to see out of

the mouth that's where the eyes his eyes

were inside there

um it also has a headphone so that they

can listen to

the puppeteer uh that's operating the

face and there's a microphone as well so

that he can communicate

it's just kind of like wearing a

football helmet with a face on it

in the case of the head that's molded

and then

we cast out a foam latex rubber skin the

end result is this

lovely flexible light

foam skin that acts very much like real

skin

it's like a dream somebody pinch me

i love you what they do in the mechanics

shop

um is basically come up with all the

animatronics hi i'm john criswell and i

make dinosaurs

they'll even engineer their own devices

to achieve the correct effect

[Music]

the eyes moving the eyes blinking the

eyebrows moving up and down we're often

achieved with

a couple of different levers that would

that would move up and down the

mechanics

they really do a tremendous job i mean

it's an engineering feat

when you take the skin off and you

realize what's going on underneath there

whoa that's genius the animatronics like

dinosaurs there's two puppeteers one

inside one outside both equally

performing the character and there's a

wild

mind meld that happens between them it's

magical yeah it's mostly smoking mirrors

it's all fake if you leave this house i

will never

talk to you again throw in the rest of

the family then you got yourself a deal

it all has to do with letting the

audience know

what the character is thinking and

feeling at any given time

so for me so for bill it's it's through

gesture for me it's through voice

uh pacing and eye focus the character

became the lead after a while the

performers all knew

how to feed that character the

coordination between us wasn't so much

of an issue anymore because there was

this third thing we were all relating to

essentially does that make sense uh yeah

to me then they have to be physically

adept enough and have

you know real hand-eye coordination

because these control systems are like

playing a piano they're very tough

controls to work so they have to get so

good

technically that that they don't really

have to think about what their hands are

doing

get my hand in here turn the power on

and you can see how i have control over

all of these movements on her face

she can blink and you can see i'm using

my left hand here

just my finger to make her blink like

that and i can move her eyeballs around

with my thumb

and when she talked i would use this

thing over here called a waldo and so so

as i talked i would move this around

to make the uh the proper lip shapes for

the vowels she was saying

oh earl i was always keenly aware that i

had the cushy job

that i didn't have to get into the suits

i think the hardest thing though was

probably

figuring out how to walk across the room

when you can't really see

you got to figure out how many innocent

steps or what the feel

where you're going to grab or if you're

going to lean on something you just kind

of had to

remember where things were in your mind

there was communication

between myself and the puppeteer but

while you're shooting

you can't really tell someone to move

left or right

it was usually for me to remember where

everything was if i needed to pick

something up or if i needed to sit

somewhere

the only time i could really see was

when the mouth was open

if you watch some of the episodes and

earl is crossing the room

he tends to kind of um sigh a lot

and that was just so i could see for the

next 10 feet

you know where i was going to go and

sometimes i'd have to you know back

through

to sit down and sit so that maneuvering

stuff was always

really tricky but you ever fall asleep

inside the suit always

even when we were shooting

baby joy baby toy oh i like this

i think the thing that helped get us

through

was that none of the creators except

brian probably who had done this many

times before

quite realized what we were getting into

it was almost an impossible shoot to

anticipate

how the day's shoot would go all of a

sudden there were hammers and nails and

stages being built

you had smoke everywhere and you had

these gigantic

lumbering beasts six seven eight feet

tall

we were constantly being barraged by

variables

bob and i had to go oh yeah we

understand completely what's going on

here and we go back to the writer's room

and go

what the heck is happening here no i'm

so confused

but i think it's one of the magic things

about film particularly when

every shot is an illusion and with

dinosaurs every shot's an illusion it

only works from where the camera is

and it and and that's the only place

that shot works is where that camera is

placed and it's making the illusion work

from that point of view

because we were doing something that

nobody i think had ever done

everybody really wanted to work hard and

when we worked hard it was

fun that it was really one of those

peak career experiences that

you don't get too often if at all

[Applause]

the camera oh yeah we didn't know there

was a camera

now i'm nervous that's right it's just i

don't think it's on okay