Dino Boy in the Lost Valley
Episode 1: Marooned!
Episode 1: Marooned!
Now, a word of warning first. If you have never seen the actual intro to this show (and it was a show for you smart mouths that have only seen it on Boomerang), then you will never know how a 9 year old boy ended up with a caveman and a dinosaur with animal shelter tags around its neck. But, hey, I'm an enabler, so I'll hook you up. First one's free, after that, you pay. And, oh how you'll pay...but I digress. Kid parachutes out of a crashing plane, lands on a godforsaken island, fights a sabertooth tiger with a machete, gets saved by a caveman named Ugg (yes, shut up) and a dinosaur named Brawny (I guess it says it on the name tag). And so begins the wacky, madcap adventures.
Okay, so we begin our episode with the boy (name withheld due to never catching his name) teaching Ugg and Brawny how to read. Education was important back then, and strangely enough, the boy felt it was more important that these two learned how to read 20th century English than it was for Ugg to teach the boy how to defend himself in a vast, forbidden proto-land where everything is trying to eat everything else. Yeah. Plants, too. As the child tries to become the teacher to these rough and tumble prehistoric anachronisms, they fall asleep. Like you do when a 9 year old is trying to teach you something. Suddenly! giant poison wasps come along, and like any Hanna-Barbera critter, they know only two things: 1) killin' 2) bein' killed. Ugg, the caveman of action, grabs his club and starts to swing wildly at the creatures, to largely little success. If you blacked out there, let me recap the villain. They are wasps. They are poisoned. And they are giant. And by giant, I should do them justice by saying that they are man-sized. Thinking back on it, the Hanna-Barbera folks are probably responsible for more nightmares and awful 80s horror movies than Mary Shelley.
Back to the action! Ugg, having learned his combat skills from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, keeps swinging the club until he's off-screen. Once off-screen, Ugg turns into clobbering fool the likes of which you'll never see (mainly due to an animation budget equal to a cup of coffee), dispatching the giant! poison! wasps! with a mighty thud. But what's this? Ugg has been stung. Because you can't sting the 9 year old. Not even in the 60s. What's never discussed is how Ugg wasn't visibly impaled on a stinger the size of a baseball bat. What is discussed, however, is that there's no problem sending the young boy, fresh from the trauma of having everything he's ever known and loved crash into a mountain in a fiery ball of death, off to Mist Island to get a plant that can cure Ugg of the poison. Um...yeah.
So, Dino Boy goes off to the coast, fashions a raft out of magic and rainbows and an apparent engineering degree, and sets off to a mist-shrouded island in search of a plant that he can spot thanks to his apparent horticulture degree. While rafting, thanks to his maritime training while in the Navy, Dino Boy puts his paleontology degree to use to spot a sea-dwelling brontosaurus. However, Dino Boy must have been sick during alligator day when getting his animal husbandry degree because he thinks it's a great idea to keep a 14 foot gator at bay by smacking at it ineffectually with a 4 foot tree branch. What's that? No! He doesn't get eaten! I know! I was just as shocked as you. That's not to say that Dino Boy isn't punished for his hubris by having half his stick and half his raft ripped asunder. But half is all he needs to make it to the island. And we haven't even gotten to the insane part yet.
I should point out at this time that a 9 year old has the attention span of a cocker spaniel. Why would I mention this? Because in the time that it took Dino Boy to get a masters at the University of Life Sucks, he's kinda forgotten why he's out on this trip in the first place. That's why, when he sees two Moss Men about to ritualistically slaughter one of their own, he decides to stick his nose in their business. Does he ask if the Moss Man staked to the ground deserved him a killin'? Hell no! Cowboys don't have time for that kind of crap. But, thanks to his anthropology degree, he knows that he must create a god to frighten the others off so he can free the endangered. Using the skills he learned as a set designer and his aforementioned engineering degree, he crafts a 10 foot tall walking monument to death and proceeds to cause a monumental shift in the Moss Man polytheistic mythology that would be studied for decades to come. Long story short, Moss Men run off. Dino Boy cuts the captor free. Captor does whatever anyone in his position would; he commences a beatdown on the new god that's cut him free from his prison and takes off in a canoe. Yeah, Dino Boy should have really stolen one of those canoes.
By this point, any normal caveperson would be dead at this point. You forgot about him, didn't you? I did, too, and I just finished watching this thing. So, after reading over the script, Dino Boy remembers to get the plant needed to Save The Day, hops on his half-a-raft with his half-a-stick and makes it back in just enough time to apply a compress and salve, thanks to his nursing degree. And what better way to celebrate not dying than by...having to finish the grammar lesson. If I'd been that caveman, I'd have clubbed the kid first so I could have died in peace...
Okay, so we begin our episode with the boy (name withheld due to never catching his name) teaching Ugg and Brawny how to read. Education was important back then, and strangely enough, the boy felt it was more important that these two learned how to read 20th century English than it was for Ugg to teach the boy how to defend himself in a vast, forbidden proto-land where everything is trying to eat everything else. Yeah. Plants, too. As the child tries to become the teacher to these rough and tumble prehistoric anachronisms, they fall asleep. Like you do when a 9 year old is trying to teach you something. Suddenly! giant poison wasps come along, and like any Hanna-Barbera critter, they know only two things: 1) killin' 2) bein' killed. Ugg, the caveman of action, grabs his club and starts to swing wildly at the creatures, to largely little success. If you blacked out there, let me recap the villain. They are wasps. They are poisoned. And they are giant. And by giant, I should do them justice by saying that they are man-sized. Thinking back on it, the Hanna-Barbera folks are probably responsible for more nightmares and awful 80s horror movies than Mary Shelley.
Back to the action! Ugg, having learned his combat skills from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, keeps swinging the club until he's off-screen. Once off-screen, Ugg turns into clobbering fool the likes of which you'll never see (mainly due to an animation budget equal to a cup of coffee), dispatching the giant! poison! wasps! with a mighty thud. But what's this? Ugg has been stung. Because you can't sting the 9 year old. Not even in the 60s. What's never discussed is how Ugg wasn't visibly impaled on a stinger the size of a baseball bat. What is discussed, however, is that there's no problem sending the young boy, fresh from the trauma of having everything he's ever known and loved crash into a mountain in a fiery ball of death, off to Mist Island to get a plant that can cure Ugg of the poison. Um...yeah.
So, Dino Boy goes off to the coast, fashions a raft out of magic and rainbows and an apparent engineering degree, and sets off to a mist-shrouded island in search of a plant that he can spot thanks to his apparent horticulture degree. While rafting, thanks to his maritime training while in the Navy, Dino Boy puts his paleontology degree to use to spot a sea-dwelling brontosaurus. However, Dino Boy must have been sick during alligator day when getting his animal husbandry degree because he thinks it's a great idea to keep a 14 foot gator at bay by smacking at it ineffectually with a 4 foot tree branch. What's that? No! He doesn't get eaten! I know! I was just as shocked as you. That's not to say that Dino Boy isn't punished for his hubris by having half his stick and half his raft ripped asunder. But half is all he needs to make it to the island. And we haven't even gotten to the insane part yet.
I should point out at this time that a 9 year old has the attention span of a cocker spaniel. Why would I mention this? Because in the time that it took Dino Boy to get a masters at the University of Life Sucks, he's kinda forgotten why he's out on this trip in the first place. That's why, when he sees two Moss Men about to ritualistically slaughter one of their own, he decides to stick his nose in their business. Does he ask if the Moss Man staked to the ground deserved him a killin'? Hell no! Cowboys don't have time for that kind of crap. But, thanks to his anthropology degree, he knows that he must create a god to frighten the others off so he can free the endangered. Using the skills he learned as a set designer and his aforementioned engineering degree, he crafts a 10 foot tall walking monument to death and proceeds to cause a monumental shift in the Moss Man polytheistic mythology that would be studied for decades to come. Long story short, Moss Men run off. Dino Boy cuts the captor free. Captor does whatever anyone in his position would; he commences a beatdown on the new god that's cut him free from his prison and takes off in a canoe. Yeah, Dino Boy should have really stolen one of those canoes.
By this point, any normal caveperson would be dead at this point. You forgot about him, didn't you? I did, too, and I just finished watching this thing. So, after reading over the script, Dino Boy remembers to get the plant needed to Save The Day, hops on his half-a-raft with his half-a-stick and makes it back in just enough time to apply a compress and salve, thanks to his nursing degree. And what better way to celebrate not dying than by...having to finish the grammar lesson. If I'd been that caveman, I'd have clubbed the kid first so I could have died in peace...
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