Forbidden Fruit.

Hey kids (of all ages), it's Saturday Morning Cartoon time again!

Dinosaurs were a bit of a pop-culture trend in the early 1970s. Hanna-Barbera rarely saw a bandwagon they didn't like, so they jumped-on with Valley of the Dinosaurs. A series in which a 20th Century family goes on a rafting adventure and somehow winds-up in a weird valley with dinosaurs and cave-people.

Unfortunately for Hanna-Barbera, their show wound-up going head-to-head with the Krofft brothers' Land of the Lost, which premiered at the same time and date, had the same premise, along with the novelty of being live-action. (Backed-up with stop-action animated dinosaurs, the odd puppet, forced perspective tricks, and lots of green screen.) LotL beat-out VotD pretty soundly... The_Doctor_2099 has many episodes of the Krofft series on his BitChute channel.

Of course, both series fared far better than KORG 70,000 BC. It didn't run directly against the dinosaur shows, but going half an hour later put it up against SHAZAM and Sigmund the Sea Monster. KORG was a scientifically realistic, live-action portrayal of Neanderthals, which meant it had a woeful lack of dinosaurs, and bit the dust pretty quick.

With parental groups bitching about the lack of educational value in children's TV, all of these shows managed to squeeze some in. (VotD may have been the least subtle about it.) Our 20th Century refugees got to explain and demonstrate basic science and tech to their Neanderthal friends as needed to survive in the Valley.

I always wondered if this was the same valley that Dino-Boy was lost in during his adventures in Hanna-Barbera's series from some years earlier. (Back-up segment in Space Ghost's show.) You'd think they might have stumbled across his bones or something.

Anyway... From September 1974, here is the very first episode of Valley of the Dinosaurs!

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