Welcome to the twelfth installment of Flashback to the Present. I’ll be your contributing writer, Charles Knauf.
After parking my Bugatti, I stride through my glass enclosed beach house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I pour a snifter of Louis the 13th, loosen my Hermes tie, and slide into my custom Eileen Gray chair and gaze into the sunset.
I can’t forget that tune.
Even at the top; after I’ve laid waste to my enemies, climbed the tallest corporate summits, and made friends of both kings and sultans, I still have one tune I simply cannot forget. There’s one tune that crawls around my head and troubles my deepest thoughts.
I launch up in fury! Why does this song not leave me?
I smash my tumbler into the fireplace and, when they approach, dismiss the bevy of stunning women stating, “It’s alright; nothing but a bad memory. Please make you way to the guest mansion and leave me to my thoughts.”
But it isn’t alright. That tune…
After the mansion is quiet, I finally succumb to the lyrics just as the ever fading sunset turns from orange to red to purple.
“Denver the Last Dinosaur… He’s my friend and a whole lot more. Denver the Last Dinosaur…
Shows me a world I never saw before.”
Denver the Last Dinosaur was a cartoon that premiered in 1988 about a precocious little dinosaur hatched from an egg by his multicultural (see: Burger King Kids Club rejects) friends Jeremy, Mario, Shades, Wally, Casey, and Heather.
As the group teaches Denver how to skateboard and BMX, Denver (through positive reinforcing adventures and mystical flashbacks emanating from touching its eggshell) teaches the kids about friendship.
The kids and the dinosaur have an 80’s fun time all the while keeping away from the evil concert promoter, Morton Fizzback.
That’s about it. Seriously, this show is just E.T. with a dinosaur and his magic eggshells.
There are so many things that make absolutely no sense about this cartoon I’m not even going to start. I mean, there’s a moment where Morton Fizzback states, “There’s got to be a way to unload this dinosaur and make a profit at the same time.”
Oh, you mean the LIVING DINOSAUR that has a rudimentary understanding of the English language? Yeah, the one that likes to wear 1980s accoutrements like wrap-around shades and wild OP button-down shirts? Gee; I have no idea who would want to buy that.
Look, I get it; it’s a cartoon.
But Denver the Last Dinosaur was trying so desperately to fit into the times that it dripped over its own tail.
(Sorry, that pun was low hanging fruit.)
Between the half-assed animation, the silly villains and the offensive accents of the kids, you wonder if people really didn’t like kids in ’88. I mean, really; this show was bad.
Really, really bad.
There is absolutely no reason for you to watch the full length pilot below. You won’t be a happier person, it won’t fulfill some sad sense of nostalgia, and it won’t make your day better.
…and yet, the theme still haunts me like a lover lost at sea.
Why is that? There’s nothing particularly special about the theme; nothing different than any of the other 10,000 cartoons appearing at that time.
Sigh. I guess I’ll just never know.
I sip the last of the Louis and watch the moon’s reflection ripple atop the tide.
Until next time!
