The Dinosaur craze of the 1990s

[IlluminatiPirate]

Is it just me or was anything related to dinosaurs really fucking huge back in the 90's and very early 2000's?

You had the original Jurassic Park trilogy, Walking With Dinosaurs, Dino Crisis, Land Before Time, the Dinosaurs TV show, Disney's Dinosaur movie from 2000, even PBS kiddie shit like Barney. Even the shitty 1998 Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick tried to ape Jurassic Park.

Like, this was most obvious with children's media like Land Before Time and Barney, but you even saw it elsewhere in the 90's, like the Toronto Raptors I guess the first Jurassic Park was where it all kicked off, considering how huge that movie was in the early 90's and a lot of the craze fittingly died down with Jurassic Park III, which was the worst of the original films in a lot of people's opinions (including my own)

 

[saint6ix]

My favorite indoor kids party place was called "Dino Rex". They had bumper cars and a fucking indoor roller coaster.

 

[Ross_Я]

Also Cadillacs And Dinosaurs, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Primal Rage, etc, etc...
Yes, dinosaurs definitely were a 90's thing, and they were hella cool. This is one of the things I miss.

Dinosaurs!

I have socks with T-Rex riding a skateboard, and this is awesome. If I'll ever do my own website, I'll steal that and make it my logo.

 

[AnHero]

Next we should discuss the gorilla craze of the 1950s

 

[Ross_Я]

I now have a small collection of dinoaurs on skateboards on my HDD.

Dinosaurs!

 

[Chuffed]

Terrible Thunder Lizards / Eek the Cat cartoons too.

 

[Sketch Relics]

This reminds me of a painting/poster that I had as a child, it had 4~5 different dinosaurs on it in a fern forest. Each dinosaur was primarily a different color, it was something like a red T-rex, yellow stegosaurus, blue triceratops, purple anklosaurus, and a green pterodactyl.
It's been so long since I've seen it I probably have the dino's/ colors wrong.

Also power Rangers

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBHKeRWKqN8

Surprised this wasn't mentioned already

 

[nsequeira119]

Is it just me or was anything related to dinosaurs really fucking huge back in the 90's and very early 2000's?

You had the original Jurassic Park trilogy, Walking With Dinosaurs, Dino Crisis, Land Before Time, the Dinosaurs TV show, Disney's Dinosaur movie from 2000, even PBS kiddie shit like Barney. Even the shitty 1998 Godzilla movie with Matthew Broderick tried to ape Jurassic Park.

Like, this was most obvious with children's media like Land Before Time and Barney, but you even saw it elsewhere in the 90's, like the Toronto Raptors I guess the first Jurassic Park was where it all kicked off, considering how huge that movie was in the early 90's and a lot of the craze fittingly died down with Jurassic Park III, which was the worst of the original films in a lot of people's opinions (including my own)

Absolutely not just you. This is a clear trend with lots of documentation. The 90s were insanely oversaturated with dinosaurs, but I don't mind because it's much less cynical for pop culture to be oversaturated with something legitimately interesting in the public domain than it is for pop culture to be oversaturated with Iron Man and shit

 

[Lolcow]

Barney: The Backyard Show (1988) - 1990 VHS

I was surprised to learn this is from 5 years before Jurassic park, because I'd assumed that movie had started the dinosaur fad that led to dinosaurs being seen as kiddie fare.

 

[Vitnira]

Yes and we need to resurrect it with feathered dinos

The Exodite Eldar of 40k (SPACE ELVES RIDING DINOSAURS!) were made in the middle of the craze and they are the best 40k faction hands-down I will hear no other heresy. Demand GW release Exodite Codex 2025 to begin Dino Craze 2.

 

[Ross_Я]

The Exodite Eldar of 40k (SPACE ELVES RIDING DINOSAURS!) were made in the middle of the craze and they are the best 40k faction hands-down I will hear no other heresy. Demand GW release Exodite Codex 2025 to begin Dino Craze 2.

Dinosaurs were also an option for imperial rough riders at some point. The option has been called "xeno mount" or something. 2nd edition, perhaps? No official models, but it was there for conversions. Good ol' days.

 

[Ross_Я]

Oh my goodness, I've just found a song named literally Cadillacs And Dinosaurs.



By all Gods, this wave of 80's/90's revival in 2010's was so damn good. I hope it won't be the last good thing in my lifetime.

 

[Ross_Я]

Man, this here is a pretty cool thing. Lyrics are as cheesy as possible, but it really works, in my opinion.

Dinosaur Warfare - Legend of the Power Saurus

Victorius - album - 2018 - 6 songs

www.deezer.com

 

[willhelpme]

Isn't it interesting that right there, in the depths of your head, you have a thing called the R-Complex:

It handles all the basics of life and is also the most densely connected as it deals with our survival. Look at these kids that were primed and wide open by the near constant influx of resonant amusement via the TV set that then links to this aspect of Self and then consider they stepped into a world, once Adulterated, that was filled to the brim with never ending threats of obliteration in ways most unpredictable that kicked off with two planes and a couple of towers being swiftly crumbling and all that came next.

After that the stress didn't abate as more and more of these things happened and thus their R-Complex remained hyper-vigilant and in order to escape this they couldn't wait to dive head first into the web and all the distractions it brings as, from the next level up (Limbic) they constantly flick the switch for happy chemicals via near constant notifications and the rest. All of this leads to a drain on the higher order thinking which has now been alternately scared to death and amused beyond its capacity to handle what would be available in natural events.

Could this be why creativity tanked from this generation to the next and continued to dwindle as it became reboot season instead? Methinks there maybe a link as you can see it the way people comport themselves and other things or maybe my tinfoil turban is too tight as I'm typing. What do you think?

How Conspiracy Theorists Are Made

We have the image of a tinfoil wrapped loon saying crazy things hammered so firmly into our heads that most people automatically categorize such events with a "Pay no heed" tag and discard the cons...

willhelp.me

 

[幽邃森林]

Kids loved dinosaurs in the 1990s. Want to sell something to kids? Throw a dinosaur in there. Nintendo introducing Yoshi in the flagship game of the SNES wasn't a coincidence.

As for why they stopped becoming popular, I think it's due to more and more people discovering that dinosaurs had feathers and many were similar to birds. We started getting hypothetical images that would shatter children's dreams as their beloved T-Rex went from looking like a badass dragon to a giant chicken.

 

[Ross_Я]

I think it's due to more and more people discovering that dinosaurs had feathers and many were similar to birds. We started getting hypothetical images that would shatter children's dreams as their beloved T-Rex went from looking like a badass dragon to a giant chicken.

I think no one cares, especially children. Why not just keep peddling fantasysaurs, who gives? I'm definitely up for that.
That being said...

 

[Punp]

I come baring excellent news in many forms:

Dinosaurs are still incredibly popular today (though they have competition from Iron Man). Go to any dinosaur-themed event or museum and see kids flooding it with dinosaur themed clothing and their favourite dinosaur toy. It is one of the archetypes of being a child, the others being vehicles, phones or action heroes.

There's roughly one new species of dinosaur discovered and named every two weeks.

I went to a local animatronics event at my local park where they showed all these huge models of dinosaurs in peak summer and it was flooded with families. They had an excellent time (so did I).

While birds are """technically""" dinosaurs, a bird and a t-rex is a dinosaur in the same way a mouse and a cow are mammals. The definition of "dinosaur" is very shaky and autistically specific.

In summary, it isn't the world that has changed, it's you.

 

[Punp]

I was thinking on this subject, and the dinosaur craze has been around since they were discovered back in 1842 when Sir Richard Owen coined the term "Dinosaur" (terrible lizard) in latin.

Victorians only had to wait another ten years for Waterhouse Hawkins to furnish Sydenham's Crystal Palace gardens with guesstimates of what these creatures looked like. This was to be the first dinosaur park, a hundred and forty years before the Jurassic Park film.

Here's an etching of Waterhouse Hawkins' studio as he's going about crafting the creatures out of concrete. HRH Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited the display twice, and the opening day was absolutely swarmed with people. I'm struggling to find numbers for the opening day right now, but it was a lot. If memory serves, 40,000 people on the first two days of opening.

Hop ahead to 1964's Sinclair Dinoland at the World's fair. Sinclair is an oil company who prided themselves on having the oldest crude for the best results. 34 million people visited the 1964 world's fair that year, and six million of those were visitors to dinoland. There's a colour video of it here (click the image)

(Video from sinclair oil's website: https://www.sinclairoil.com/dino-history)

It probably made it more popular that Sinclair gave coupons for one free gallon of oil. Dinoland had some large dinosaur reconstructions, but was ultimately a very short experience of a path weaving between several dinosaurs and back out.

I've visited the Crystal Palace dinosaurs and really enjoyed it. I'd love to visit the Sinclair dinosaurs, which are now scattered through various museums in the states.

(I've scanned a bunch of pictures from Donald Glut's "Dinosaur Scrapbook" if anyone is interested in more pictures of the Sinclair dinosaurs, which is where the pic above comes from)

 

[llillilll]

It probably made it more popular that Sinclair gave coupons for one free gallon of oil.

Did they give free coupons to everyone that bought one gallon of oil or vice versa?

 

[Punp]

Did they give free coupons to everyone that bought one gallon of oil or vice versa?

From the video: every adult who entered the (free) dinosaur exhibit was given a coupon for one free gallon of oil from their local Sinclair gas station (one per family). In California in 1964 it was $0.30/gallon, roughly the price of a loaf of bread.