Spectrum of Madness: Dino Squad: The Not So Great Outdoors (Snark)

Been a while since I reviewed this! Kind of feels like…coming home.

That title reflects everything I remember about this show.

Veloci’s out in the woods, having his flunkies spray his neon orange goo on some unearthed dinosaur fossils to try to reanimate them. Unsurprisingly, the bones aren’t much use without the rest of it, and they just sit there. Chalking up another failure, they leave without noticing the orange fumes covering a herd of moose and turning them into dino hybrids.

Over to the Dino Squad themselves, who are hanging out at their lighthouse headquarters. One of them’s seriously playing with a jack-in-the-box, which, to me at least, gets even dumber when they’re using it to scare their dog.

Because despite coming out in 2007, the writers were still using a lot of the same tropes they wrote into scripts for hero team shows in the 80s and 90s had. Like a pointless team mascot.

Roger, the gadget guy, and Caruso, the slightly effeminate fashion-forward guy, both laugh at their prank. Buzz, the weird kid with the mohawk, rakes them over the coals.

“You wanna know what’s really pathetic? You teasing poor Rump.”

No, Buzz. What’s pathetic is naming your dog after his butt.

Or worse, your own butt.

Wonder if Roger and Caruso get an ironic comeuppance for playing a prank on a dog, when they have to go into the woods to look for moose mutants.

Their watches go off, and they check their magic screen to find out about the moose mutants. The kids note they’re in Baxter State Park, which to the show’s credit is a real place in Maine, and evidently moose do in fact live there. I have to take those points back right away, though, because apatosaurus habitats that we know of were out west, like Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. In fact, Maine’s evidently kind of known for a lack of intact dinosaur bones.

Max, the jock team leader, immediately decides they need to prepare to camp out if they’ll be searching such a large area because of how long it could take. That’s not a bad idea, but it does kind of clash with the team’s usual desire for secrecy. The longer they take to wrangle the mutants, the more likely it is some party of nature hikers will run into one.

Max packs a ton of things, which Roger and Caruso also make fun of him for. They insist they don’t need to pack anything: Roger has his brains, while Caruso has his “good looks, and my excessive charm”.

Yeah, I’m sure the squirrels and crows will be very impressed.

Or maybe the joke’s that they did actually pack things. Everything, actually.

Maybe I’m thinking much about it, but what about that’s something a kid would find funny?

I kind of ask, because once they get to the park and the sun’s going down, Max says they should set up camp right away. The goofy way he says “You don’t want to be messing around in the woods at night” makes it sound like he’s about start telling some kind of cheesy ghost story, but then his next line, with total seriousness, is, “Too easy to get lost or get hurt.”

Max and Fiona, the girl, go for a look around. She wonders if it was a good idea to leave the other three alone (If we’re asking that, then was it a good idea to bring them in the first place?). Max doesn’t think they can get into any trouble, despite, the multiple computers, TV, microwave and electric lights the other boys brought with them on a camping trip. Predictably, they plug in everything at once and immediately burn out the generator.

Which was hooked up to the car battery, so it’s toast too.

When the group reunites, the others are indeed mad, but it doesn’t last long before they hear something creepy. Max goes to investigate, and transforms into his dino mode when he hears it again. The awesome theme song and transformation sequence end up feeling a little wasted when it turns out the sound was just an owl.

Which would be silly if this was just a one-time thing. With the show’s no-violence rules, though, I can’t think of a single cool thing the kids have done with their dino-morphing powers. Yeah, this show was made for little kids, but come on. Look at the cool T-rex! He’s…standing there, looking at an owl!

To my relief, Veloci and his goons are still around, so the whole episode won’t just be cliche camping hijinks. He dispatches the minions in a helicopter to capture the moose mutants for study.

Buzz and Caruso are sharing a tent, and due to the low budget are wearing their earrings, dress clothes and neckties to bed.

They start wondering what else could be out in the dark. Not unreasonably, actually, considering they came there to hunt down a herd of mutants. They start going nuts with it, asking what if they run into something so big they couldn’t defend themselves even in their dino forms, or something so small it can just crawl in your ear and kill you.

When Fiona, who can’t sleep, comes out to look at the car and growl in frustration at her teammates, then grunt (?) when she rolls underneath the car to fix it, they think it’s a monster. Then they hear somebody snoring and think that’s the monster. They can’t hear anything and think the monster must be invisible, and Caruso decides to walk back to town. Scared, Buzz runs after him.

They mess around in the woods for a bit, and get so scared hearing an animal in the bushes that’s obviously something lame like a rabbit, they transform. Buzz tries to fly, but gets stuck in tree branches and thinks their monstrous antagonist caught him. Caruso runs away, and hearing him stomping around makes Max and Roger think a monster’s around too. They transform without stepping out of their tent first, destroying it.

Oh look, Max actually took his jacket off for bed.

Caruso stampedes through the camp in fear, and Roger and Fiona go after him in their own dino forms. When Max stops for a minute and realizes there’s nothing there, everyone else has raced off.

I know I’ve complained about these characters’ intelligence in previous reviews. We’re just over halfway through, and this might have more dumbness from the kids than any other two episodes I’ve reviewed put together.

Even if I’d actually been in this show’s target audience, I can’t think of a single thing that would make me want to emulate these characters.

After commercial, the sun’s coming up, and the dinosaurs are still rampaging about in the woods. Max tells the others that panic is your enemy (Telepathically, which I guess is a shared power they have? Sorry if I forgot that). They calm down when they realize there never was a monster, and they could’ve gotten badly hurt by panicking at the first indication of danger.

Although you may understand how that moral falls a bit flat when the reason they came out here was to hunt four monsters.

You may also understand the other danger that results from the kids panicking isn’t exactly relatable to the audience: because they spent all night charging around in the woods as dinosaurs, Veloci picks up the kids’ scent and goes hunting for them.

In fact, the kids have managed to be so useless, Veloci’s goons have already captured the moose mutants offscreen and brought them back.

Back at camp, the kids are packing up while Max delivers an extremely long and ridiculously unnatural lecture about the true nature of courage:

“Courage isn’t the lack of fear, guys. It’s recognizing fear for what it is: fear is fear. It’s natural, but there’s a difference between healthy fear and unhealthy fear. Healthy fear is the painful emotion caused by impending danger. A state of alarm that can drive our awareness and can make us react in a way that just might save our life. It’s an instinct that has helped us survive as a species.

“But unhealthy fear is a dread or anxiety that comes from the imagination of something that isn’t there. This can cause us all sorts of problems, like making us panic, act carelessly, and possibly hurt ourselves or others in the process. You have to first of all make a judgement call: is what you’re experiencing healthy fear, or unhealthy fear? The key is to do a reality check. If you’re aware of the situation you’re in, that fear you’re feeling, is it based on a real danger, or is it based on your imagination? Is your imagination creating and fueling the fear? If it’s real danger, then use the fear to help you get out of that danger. If it’s imagined, then take deep breaths, focus on the moment, and try to understand what it is you’re imagining, and why.”

That lasted literally an entire minute of a 21-minute episode. Might have wanted to pare it down a little for the little kids you were trying to reach, guys. And yes, the fact that I used that word proves I’m way outside of anyone this show was meant to reach.

At the exact moment Max is done with his shpiel, the truck’s fixed, and the kids notice Veloci cruising up in a dune buggy. The kids split up: Roger and Caruso lead Veloci to a cliff they almost ran over in their blind panic before, while the others go to rescue the captured moose mutants.

Veloci sure doesn’t have any trouble driving among the trees, going so fast he barely spots the cliff in time to avoid killing off the show’s villain. He turns into his dino form to try to fight back, but the dino-kids have already twisted his roll cage in so tight he can’t escape. Leaving me wondering once again why these dino-morphing powers are supposed to seem cool.

Meanwhile, Buzz flies away with the platform and the four moose mutants on it clutched in his claws (yeah, ok), while Max roars at the goons and knocks over their vehicles before leaving. As some kind of reinforcement of the show’s moral, they were really scared of him. Specifically, his “big teeth”.