One of the many animated series produced by Hanna-Barbera, Dino Boy was a companion series to Space Ghost.
Dino Boy in the Lost Valley was a series about a young boy named Tod, who was forced to parachute from a plane that crashed, ending up in a mysterious valley, lost to the outside world and filled with not only prehistoric lifeforms, but creatures utterly alien to Earth. Saved from death at the jaws of a sabertoothed tiger by a caveman named Ugh, Dino Boy resigns himself to surviving in The Lost Valley.
See also Valley of the Dinosaurs, a later Hanna-Barbera series with a similar premise.
Tropes:
- Action Series
- All Animals Are Dogs: Bronty the dinosaur behaves like a prehistoric dog.
- All Cavemen Were Neanderthals:
- Ugh is a spitting image of the stereotypical Neanderthal, but, somewhat unusually, is portrayed as being quite intelligent; his voice is deep and somewhat monosyllabilic, but he speaks intelligible words and never grunts, and is quite adept at devising plans, such as immediately figuring out that the best way to panic a herd of mammoths into stampeding is by using a hollow log to amplify his horn's volume.
- Subverted by several other tribes native to the Lost Valley, such as the Wolf People and Bird Riders (Cro-Magnon–like) and the Treemen (Neanderthals with lion-like tails and monkey-like faces).
- Beast Man: Several of the humanoid threats of the valley appear like a strange melding of man and animal. The Worm People are bizarre humanoids who live in caves undernearth Horror Swamp, whilst the Treemen look more like some kind of mutant primate than humans.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Giant bugs appear as enemies in various episodes. The very first episode, "Dino Boy and the Worm People", features Dino Boy being captured by the Worm People of Horror Swamp, who attempt to feed him to a giant carnivorous beetle.
- Fed to the Beast: When Dino Boy gets captured by hostile tribes, they often decide to try and sacrifice him to an animal.
- In "The Worm People", the titular Beast Man tribe attempt to feed Dino Boy to a giant carnivorous beetle. It's unclear if they are sacrificing him to some kind of savage god, or if they merely do it for their own sadistic pleasure, as evidenced by the grins on the watching Worm People.
- The Treemen attempt to offer Dino Boy up as a sacrifice to a pair of prehistoric vultures.
- The Chief of the Sabertooth People orders Dino Boy and another youth fed to a sabertooth when he decides they are worthless as slaves.
- Here We Go Again!:
- In "The Worm People", the episode ends with Dino Boy clinging to Bronty's tail and trying to stop him from chasing a butterfly back to Horror Swamp, which they just escaped from.
- In another episode, which revolves around Dino Boy and Ugh helping a friend get home, at the end he comes back and wants to know if they can do it all again tomorrow.
- Honorable Elephant: Tusko the woolly mammoth who would often help out the trio.
- Laser-Guided Karma: In "Dino Boy and the Worm People", the titular Beast Man village captures Dino Boy and attempts to feed him to a giant beetle. Dino Boy escapes by having Ugh throw a torch into the dry grass at the bottom of the beetle's pit, which drives the bug back in such a panic that it scrambles its way up the other side of the pit and into the Worm People village, where it's shown rampaging amongst its former captors as Dino Boy and Ugh flee.
- Lost World: The Lost Valley, where the series took place. Its inhabitants included primitive hominids, dinosaurs, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant sloths, giant humanoid worms, giant ants and beetles...
- Three Shorts: The middle short to two Space Ghost segments.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: While Ugh and others are shown to be our human substitutes, the lost valley here contains a whole slew of human-like beings that seem to range in intelligence and motive.
- Would Hurt a Child: None of the intelligent threats in the series ever hesitate to threaten Dino Boy with death, despite his young age.
- The Worm People attempt to offer up Dino Boy as food to a giant beetle, seemingly for amusement.
- The Treemen attempt to sacrifice Dino Boy to some prehistoric vultures.
- The Chief of the Sabretooth people has zero problem offering to feed Dino Boy and a young baby up to a real flesh and blood sabretooth because they are too young to be slaves.
