Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 20, 1991 TAG: 9104200465
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Tall, lanky and gentle - a beardless, fair-haired version of his father - Brian Henson gives a similar response every time. "Jim Henson Productions was not all Jim Henson," he says. "My father surrounded himself with many, many very talented people. When it all gets too much for me, I lean on them a little more, so the legacy keeps going."
He is 27, the third of five children and the oldest son; he has been puppeteering professionally since he quit college at age 18. Complicating his transition to company president was a buyout effort by the Walt Disney Co. that was underway when Jim Henson died.
The deal fell through in December, reportedly in part because of an overblown asking price, leaving Henson Productions with a long list of co-production schemes that had to be scrapped. So Brian Henson's challenge is not only to lead the company, which has 100 employees, and offices in New York, London and Los Angeles, in new directions, but also to dig it out of a quagmire.
"We just want to get back to work, to get back into the groove," he said in a recent interview at the CBS/MTM Studios in the San Fernando Valley. He was taking a brief break from taping "Dinosaurs," the company's first major effort unguided by its founder.
The half-hour ABC situation comedy will have its premiere Friday (at 8:30 p.m. on WSET-Channel 13 in the Roanoke viewing area), and it stars the Sinclairs, a family of protoreptiles powered by animatronics, a combination of puppetry and electronics. Cynics have dubbed the show "The Flintstones Meet the Simpsons," but Brian Henson calls it "very ambitious and very unique" as well as "a show my father would have loved."
A relatively firm lid is being kept on "Dinosaurs": sets and scripts are off-limits. In nearby buildings, about 100 people were working nearly around the clock to complete the 13 episodes that ABC has commissioned.
In adjacent offices, Michael Jacobs, executive producer, and Bob Young, co-executive producer, were supervising six writers who were churning out scripts designed to attract children and entertain adults.
This much is known about the show: the head of the Sinclair household, Earl, is a blustery but lovable megalosaurus who makes his living knocking down trees, squandering resources, so that dinosaur suburbias like his own can spread.
His allosaurus wife, Fran, is patient and forgiving; their teen-age son, Robbie, is rebellious; Charlene, the pre-teen daughter, is spoiled, and the freshly hatched baby cries constantly.
Early episodes will deal with such issues as neglect of the elderly and teen-age angst: Earl will set about tossing his mother-in-law into a tar pit, and Charlene will fret over her tail, which refuses to grow and which she will someday need to seduce male dinosaurs.
Most episodes will include a live-action scene or two of dinosaurs observing cave-person behavior. For example, Earl will stumble upon a human couple struggling to generate sparks with rocks, and he will snigger at them as he sets off his torchlike lighter.
"We're trying both to show how humans would have looked to another species, and to make people see themselves in the dinosaurs," said Jacobs. And, he added, apparently taking his comedy very seriously, "We go around as if we're kings of the Earth, but who knows how much time we have left?"
Jim Henson dreamed up the show's basic concept about three years ago. "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.
ABC has given "Dinosaurs" a showcase that signifies high if not unbounded hopes between "Full House" and "Family Matters," sitcoms that rank among the network's more successful prime-time wares.
What may also enable "Dinosaurs" to attract attention is its technique: no other network seems to be venturing into prime-time animatronics, and few other production companies could achieve the quality of Henson's creatures.
Henson executives assert that the animatronics for "Dinosaurs" is more sophisticated than anything even the Hensons have produced before and yield more finely tuned facial movements.
A Disney executive agrees. "The technology has never been around before," said Dean Valentine, a senior vice president at Disney.
by CNB