Let's Watch This: An Episode of "Dink, the Little Dinosaur"

Now, I'm not going to say that this show was made to cash in on the success of The Land Before Time... but I'm not NOT going to say it. Funny thing is, some of the voice actors here actually went on to voice characters in the Land Before Time sequels.

Okay, I'm being harsh. It's entirely possible that Dink, the Little Dinosaur was greenlit not to be a cash-grab but rather just because, hey, people like dinosaurs. The creation of Karen Wilson and Chris Weber, this show was produced by Ruby-Spears Productions for CBS, where it premiered as part of their Saturday morning lineup in September 1989. It got two seasons.

It takes place in prehistoric times (natch), focusing on the adventures of a quintet of young dinosaurs: Dink the Apatosaurus (voiced by RJ Williams), Amber the Corythosaurus (voiced by Anndi McAfee), Shyler the Edaphosaurus (Ben Ryan Ganger), Flapper the Pteradon (S. Scott Bullock), and Scat (Frank Welker) the... tiny crocodile? Per usual for 1980s cartoons, the five learn life lessons about teamwork and tolerance and stuff like that. This being the 1980s, none of the dinosaurs have feathers - in fact, I wouldn't expect a whole lot of scientific accurary here in general (and not just because the dinosaurs talk).

Dink, the Little Dinosaur is another one of those 1980s cartoons you don't see folks talk about much nowadays. It did get two seasons and a DVD release in 2017, if nothing else. But obscurity does not automatically equal bad, so today we're going to watch an episode and see if the show's any good... or if it really is just a weak Land Before Time cash-grab.

The episode that we'll be watching is the show's fourth, which consists of the segments "Phantom of the Cave" and "Dry River".

It's a beautiful morning in the dinosaurs' home turf of Green Meadow. Dink and his friends are having fun in the pond... but their fun wakes up Crusty the turtle (Frank Welker) from his nap. Who is Crusty? He's the wise old turtle whose job is to serve as a mentor and teach life lessons to Dink's crew. Ever notice how many animated things depict turtles or tortoises as wise sage-like beings? Kung Fu Panda, Dehli Safari, Animals United, this... I wonder where that stereotype came from.

Since he's voiced by Frank Welker, I can't resist the urge to make this joke...

"WHO DISTURBS MY SLUMBER?!"

Master Oogway's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather emerges from his cave to nag the kids for messing up his pond and the lily pads that float in it. Amber is all "They're just lily pads.", but Crusty knows how to get the kids to leave his poor lily pads alone - with a story.

Also, I'm gonna try to avoid making too many Land Before Time references, but... Flapper looks a lot like Petrie. Like, almost suspiciously so.

Incidentally, how does a turtle grow hair?

Long before Crusty was born, he claims, the land was ruled by a species of "thunder-makers". But then they disappeared, and nobody's seen hide nor scale of them ever since.

Where did the thunder-makers go? Maybe they left Green Meadow to find the Nesting Grounds. Or maybe the people of Bedrock captured them all and started using them as slave labor. I'm just theorizing here...

"For the seventeenth time, Ted, I am NOT re-enacting the 'Rite of Spring' sequence from
Fantasia with you!"

Legend says that the answer to where the thunder-makers went might be found in the "Cave of Spirits" - called that because it's a cave haunted by "spirit phantoms". Crusty suggests that the kids find the cave and see for themselves. Okay, I can see where this is going...

Oh, and by the way, Scat was absent while all of this was going on. He doesn't show up until after Crusty's story. I'm still not one hundred percent sure what kind of dinosaur Scat is... TV Tropes calls him a Compsognathus, but he doesn't look like one to me at all. Compsognathuses apparently looked similar to velociraptors, whereas Scat... honestly, I still think he's just a tiny crocodile.

Also, he sounds a bit like Figment from the Journey Into Imagination ride at EPCOT.

We cut to our five little dinosaurs... or rather, four little dinosaurs and one tiny crocodile... making their way through a rocky briar-filled environment as thunder and lighting fill the sky. Dink just HAS to know what's in that cave Crusty was talking about.

Remember when the apatosaurus was called the brontosaurus? I do. Feels like just yesterday...

They come across this:

...and, yep, I'm pretty sure that's the cave. Rule of thumb - if the entrance to something looks like a sharp-toothed creature's open mouth, going inside probably isn't such a good idea. Scat understandably does not want to head in, but Dink says, "Don't be such a scaredy-Scat!" Ba-dum ksssh.

Into the cave they go, ignoring the warnings of the random talking wind that emerges from it. The interior of the cave is just as charming as its exterior, with pools of bubbling lava and a dinosaur skeleton standing on a rock. Just put up some nice curtains and it would make a wonderful summer home.

"I bet this guy has a BONE to pick with us! Get it? BONE? 'Cause it's a SKELETON?"

Suddenly there's an earthquake, causing the ground to give way and sending Dink and his buddies down through a subterranean tunnel that spits them out into a room filled with dinosaur bones. Well, I guess it's pretty obvious what happened to the thunder-makers now... but are there any g-g-g-g-GHOSTS around?

Those kids are oddly casual about seeing a bunch of dinosaur bones scattered around,
aren't they? Wouldn't this be like the prehistoric equivalent of a catacomb?

After a skull falls from the ceiling, the dinosaurs (and tiny crocodile) realize that there's something else in the cave. Judging from the shadows on the wall, I'd say they're GIANT RATS. Rodents of unusual size, in other words.

Oh, jeez, is the implication here that they ATE the thunder-makers? Nibbled the skin right off their bones? That's very disturbing.

Or worse... if there are giant rats around, does that mean Dink and his pals have stumbled into
a Chuck E. Cheese?!

Dink and his chums assume that the shadows belong to spirits. Ah, so they're GHOST rats?

Oh, wait, false alarm. They're just normal rats. Or whatever the prehistoric equivalent of rats were.

They're still awfully large for rats, though, aren't they?

Further into the cave they go... incidentally, what does any of this have to do with lily pads? Isn't that what was bothering Crusty at the beginning? Well, anyway, they hear some creepy roaring and then a giant boulder heads their way. Please start humming the Indiana Jones theme as you look at the following screencap.

After evading the boulder, we finally get to see who this "spirit of the cave" is - an elderly thunder-maker sticking his head in a log. He's the only remaining thunder-maker. His name is Red (Hal Rayle).

How does a DINOSAUR grow hair? Or is that "hair" actually made of feathers, making Red
here the only dinosaur in the show to have feathers?

He explains to the kids that the other thunder-makers went extinct because they didn't take care of their habitat. They neglected the trees and leaves they ate, so they ran out of food. This is why Crusty got mad about the lily pads - if the dinosaurs don't take care of THEIR habitat and its flora, they'll suffer the same fate.

Oh, and apparently those shadows from before belonged to scavenger dinosaurs, hungry for rats... wait a minute! Those shadows clearly didn't belong to dinosaurs. They looked like the rats! Weren't THEY the ones making the shadows?

"Okay, there are three of us, and only two bones. How are we gonna figure this out?"

"We could play rock paper scissors."

"With these tiny arms?"

Fortunately, Red has a way to get rid of the scavengers. He breathes in the smoke from the lava pools (doesn't he know that smoking kills?) and sprays it out at them through his blowhole. Then the kids puppeteer a giant thunder-maker skeleton to scare the scavengers away. And just to make sure they stay out, they put the skeleton outside the cave to act as a makeshift scarecrow. And then Red vanishes into thin air, implying that he's actually a g-g-g-g-GHOST!

"WHAT A TWIST!"

And thus concludes "Phantom of the Cave". Next segment...

Crusty wakes up one morning hoping to take a bath in the pond. But as soon as he dives in, he gets his head stuck in the muck at the bottom because there's barely any water in it. After Flapper pulls him free, he laments that the river's drying up. Dang those pesky prehistoric beavers and their dam-building.

Actually, there was indeed a prehistoric beaver. It was called the Castoroides, or giant beaver, and it was apparently the size of a bear. In that case, it must have built very big dams...

I don't know if the Castoroides lived in the same time period as the dinosaurs, but as we've
established, this show isn't super scientifically-accurate...

"Rivers flow south. Maybe if you go north, you might find the source of the problem!" Crusty suggests. It's kind of pathetic that out of all the dinosaurs, it's the kids who are the only ones doing something about this. Then again, dinosaurs weren't exactly known for being smart.

So Dink and his friends walk, walk, walk for hours until they come across a pile of rocks that fell into the river and blocked all the water. Wow, they found the source of the dry river already? This is gonna be a very short episode...

If I know my cartoons, all they need to do is remove one or two rocks and water's gonna start
gushing out.

They decide to remove one rock at a time, but as they're trying to push the rock at the top off, this obnoxious duck-billed dinosaur (Charlie Adler) shows up and starts taunting them.

Birds are descended from dinosaurs, right? If so, does that mean ducks are descended
from the duck-billed dinosaurs?

According to Duckface here, the only thing that could possibly move those rocks is the monster that put 'em there in the first place - the EARTH-SHAKER. "He came down for a drink, see, the ground rumbled, and the rocks filled in the river!" he claims. So now all Dink and his amigos have to do is find this "earth-shaker" and tell him to clean up his mess. Only problem? They'll have to cross through a hot desert with very few shade.

Fortunately, they are able to find SOME shade. Unfortunately, this is what's creating it:

That's one of those long-necked dinosaurs, and they were herbivorous if I'm not mistaken, so what exactly does it plan on doing to Dink and his friends if it doesn't want to eat them? Or is this specific long-necked dinosaur just a rebel?

The earth-shaker, as it turns out, has very powerful sneezes, and one "AH-CHOO!" sends Dink and his crew flying into a chasm. Another sneeze uproots a tree and sends IT into the chasm as well, allowing the five (well, except Flapper since he can fly) to climb back out. Alas, that tree has a beehive attached to it...

No, I'm not gonna put that Nicholas Cage quote here.

Flapper takes out the bees, and then the five try to talk to the earth-shaker. He shouts at them that he has better things to do than push rocks out of the river. What's this guy's problem?

Well, as it turns out, he's got a thorn stuck in his foot. They pull it out, and the earth-shaker thanks them... by blowing smoke out of his mouth at them. So this isn't some sort of "the mouse pulls the thorn out of the lion's paw" situation? The good guys do something nice and get no reward for it?

Nope.

Thank goodness. I was worried this would lead to a moral about not helping people.

The earth-shaker smashes the rocks, the water starts flowing again, and... that's it. Shyler says that he helped them because they were nice to him, and the episode just kinda ends. Okay, then...

What's the Verdict?

I wouldn't say Dink, the Little Dinosaur is SPECTACULAR, but it's a decent show. The characters are cute and likeable (and probably sold a lot of plush toys), and the plots are engaging. My only real complaint is that the animation is mediocre. Aside from that, I thought the show was pretty good. As far as 1980s cartoons go, I'd put it about on par with something like The Snorks or The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy. It just goes to show you that for a decade often considered a darker time for animation, there actually were a couple diamonds in the rough. It wasn't all just poorly-animated toy commercials.

If you want to check out Dink, the Little Dinosaur for yourself, you can find episodes of the show on YouTube. And now, because I haven't made enough references to other productions about dinosaurs already...

"I'm the baby, gotta love me!"