Origins
News stories written at the time of the show's premiere highlighted Dinosaurs' connection to Jim Henson, who died the year before. "Jim Henson dreamed up the show's basic concept about three years ago," said a New York Times article in April 1991. "'He wanted it to be a sitcom with a pretty standard structure, with the biggest differences being that it's a family of dinosaurs and their society has this strange toxic life style,' said Brian Henson. But until The Simpsons took off, said Alex Rockwell, a vice president of the Henson organization, 'people thought it was a crazy idea.'"
In the late 1980s, Jim Henson worked with illustrator/designer William Stout on a feature film starring animatronic dinosaurs with the working title of The Natural History Project; a 1993 article in The New Yorker said that Henson continued to work on a dinosaur project (presumably the Dinosaurs concept) until the "last months of his life."
The television division of the Walt Disney Company began working on the series in 1990 for CBS before the series landed on ABC.
Read more about this topic: Dinosaurs (TV series)
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