I Just Realized Why We Are All Mean
Some thoughts on "Dinosaurs!"
written by Jon on June 21, 2025

"Dinosaurs!" was a popular and rather exclamatory kids' educational video about dinosaurs that was released in the late eighties.  Within, Fred Savage makes his first-ever acting performance, which by coincidence also happens to be the most abrasive in the history of the world, to such an extent that after I finished watching today I was able to pop the tape out of the VCR and sand my deck with it. 

So as I undertook the painstaking task of VHS-sanding my deck this afternoon, I got to thinking.  I thought of how confrontational and belligerent everybody seems to be these days, and I played host to an epiphany:

We are mean because as children, we watched Fred Savage smart-mouth grownups and omniscient beings about dinosaurs.

I'd like to take a moment to note that the title screen of just about every 80s film featured the title in underlined pseudo-cursive.  Everything from Harry and the Hendersons to Pretty Woman.  The strangest occurrence of this is at the beginning of Red Dawn.  You see the title that looks like it was written in red lipstick and you think, "Oh, shit, I think Red Dawn is some kind of mascara.  What the hell did I rent?"  Five minutes later, you breathe a sigh of relief when a kindly old schoolteacher is machine-gunned to death in front of his students by communist paratroopers. 

We find ourselves in Philip's room as he struggles to come up with an idea for a school report.  He spends the first minute or so saying things like, "Science projects.  Who needs 'em?" as he writes two or three words on a pad of paper, crumples the paper into a paper ball and throws it at the trash can.  Oddly enough, this chronicles my writing process to a tee.

Actually, he clearly doesn't have a pencil in his hand.  He's just ripping out pages wantonly, which coincidentally is what I do as well.  Then I strip down to my underwear, smother myself in guacamole and recite the first one hundred digits of Pi while throwing myself against a wall.  Fred Savage does not do that in this video.  Moving on.

Let's take a look around Philip's room.  There's dinosaur bullshit everywhere.

Obviously this kid shits pterodactyls.  What the hell could he have been writing on that notepad?  "NOT DINOSAURS" over and over?  It takes a song on the radio to give Philip the idea of writing his report on dinosaurs. 

What follows is an animation sequence of a dinosaur rock band.

This is a rock band made up of dinosaurs who play guitars without strings and sing about going back in time to meet the dinosaurs and being scared of the dinosaurs because they are not as big as the dinosaurs.  I submit that this footage is doctored and that this is not actually a real rock band!

Philip goes to sleep and another sequence begins, this one of Philip being a little shit as some lady who I guess is supposed to be God tries to tell him about dinosaurs.  Philip's inane questioning technique consists of him yelling things like "WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DINOSAURS" and "WHERE ARE THE DINOSAURS" and then following it up with "WHY?  WHY?"  God starts reading off fortune-cookie answers like "If you know where to look, they're all around!"

This kid evidently has no capacity for abstract thought.  God tells him, "They're right under your nose!"  Philip actually looks at the ground and gets mad because dinosaurs are not there.

Granted, this is a kid who wears dinosaur pajamas and lives in a room with dinosaur wallpaper, a dinosaur trash can, dinosaur bed sheets, clay dinosaur models, dinosaur fish tank ornaments, dinosaur drawings, a dinosaur light switch, several dinosaur dolls, dinosaur hats hanging on the dinosaur coat rack, and a bookshelf full of dinosaur books, sits in a room for hours, then says, "I'VE GOT IT!  DINOSAURS!!!" 

God-lady keeps patiently teaching Philip about dinosaurs, but he keeps being an indignant little crapface.  This is kind of what did it in for us as a generation.  Sure, movies like "Problem Child" were around, but we knew that was an example of how not to act.  That wasn't really made clear here, so we figured that being snide and unappreciative was acceptable..  That day, after watching the copy of "Dinosaurs!" our parents rented for us, we countered our parents' order to go to bed with "You're not  the boss of me."  A few years later, we entered a whiny adolescence and said things like "My life is overrrrrr" while stomping up the stairs to do homework and giving our mothers nasty looks when they offered to make us a snack.  Now we go on Internet forums and say needlessly belligerent things that work us all up into a whiny fuss when we could be learning from each other.  Ten years from now we'll whine about the inadequacy of our college educations or entire lack thereof and shove the blame off on our parents or the system.  As the years pass, we'll lose our status as the world's superpower because we're too concerned with drawing attention to ourselves and being obnoxious about it and we'll say things like "Don't you understand?!?" or "Ask me if I give a care" while manning the assembly line and making toys for kids in China.  Our 200+ years of history will be irrelevant.  It only takes one generation to fuck it all up.  And it only takes the unchecked example set by a demanding, confrontational kid in an edutainment videotape to doom a generation. 

The second part of the video, the one that really makes it famous, is the admittedly cool claymation scene.  It consists of Philip, who for some reason is no longer voiced by Fred Savage, narrating his report on dinosaurs while it's illustrated on a claymation chalkboard.  The tables are cruelly turned here, as Philip changes persona from an unpleasant brat into a nerd who just wants to tell people about dinosaurs.  And how is he treated?  The class spends just about the entire time making fun of him. 

Visually, the claymation follows the pattern of Philip drawing or writing something about dinosaurs, and the rest of the class, which apparently hates him, fucking it up by drawing over it or something.  It's as though the writers and animators were so insecure about doing something boring about dinosaurs that they felt the need to say, "Yeah, we know, this isn't any fun" and just screw around by drawing a bunch of random crap.  The class gets in on it verbally too, heckling Philip and each other without mercy the entire time.  These kids are carbon copies of those kids you went to school with who rattled off one-liners like "TRY THIS ON FOR SIZE", and "YOU AND WHAT ARMY", and "THAT'LL TEACH 'EM TO MESS WITH ME!!" in an ambiguous Jersey accent that somewhat mimicked that of Gilbert Gottfried.  He was generally considered cool in the same way that being able to stay up late to watch Arsenio Hall or having divorced parents was cool.  My closest encounter with this kid was one time in second-grade recess when he shoved me while running past and yelled, "TRY THIS ON FOR SIZE!"  I spent a moment regaining my balance and wondering how a shove could be custom-tailered for my height or weight.  He kept running as he looked back at me smiling and yelled back at me, "WAIT'LL THEY GET A LOAD OF ME!" in his best Joker voice.  I watched silently as he continued to run without looking where he was going and smacked right into a tree.  He broke his nose and had to miss some school after that one, if I recall.

Another disturbing item is Richard (Philip's primary heckler) making jokes about Margaret's (another classmate) mother.  Apparently she is large and wears glasses or something, because every other time an large or ugly dinosaur appears onscreen, eyeglasses are drawn onto it and Richard cackles, "THAT LOOKS LIKE MWARGARET'S MOTHER!!!!" 

What in the world could have been the point of making fat jokes about somebody's mom in an educational film?  Does anyone else think this is weird? 

I did a lot of thinking this afternoon while sanding the deck, and I've decided that I can legitimately point to this 30-minute featurette as the source of most of the mean things I've done and said to people.  Like when I laughed when a girl I wasn't interested in asked me out in front of all my friends.  Or when my best friend moved away in sixth grade and I kept ignoring all the letters he wrote me for no good reason.  Or in high school, when I didn't sit next to the class nerd at lunch even though I knew I should, and sat at the table with all my friends as I looked across the cafeteria at him sitting by himself, peanut butter sandwich half-unwrapped, head buried in his hands.  These are things I hate myself for.  If it turns out that there really is no such thing as time and that it's all just an infinite number of universes serving as motionless dioramas of each physical possibility, I will dedicate myself to traveling to one of these universes so I can destroy these selves of mine with my bare hands.  Sure, I can forget about this kind of stuff long enough to get to sleep every night, but it's never going to truly leave.  I'm sure Fred Savage nor any of the cast and crew of this featurette knew what they were creating, but I wouldn't want to burden them with that kind of guilt, because that would be mean, and at that point everything would begin to fully perpetuate itself.

Well, we know what specifically gave us the notion that being mean was an okay thing to do.  But why do we still accept that today as twentysomethings?  Why haven't we looked inwards to question the things we do?  Don't we know that if we were all less mean, our lives would be more enjoyable?  Why can't we seem to raise ourselves out of the muckhole of self-destructive human behavior?

Why?  Why?