- Title: Super Dinosaur – My Best Friend’s a Dinosaur
- IMDb: link
The first episode of the CGI-animated Super Dinosaur, adapted from the all-ages comic of the same name, introduces us to young genius Derek Dynamo (Valin Shinyei) and his best-friend SD (Deven Christian Mack) – a genetically-altered Tyrannosaurus rex with a robotic harness. The two live with Derek’s absentminded father (Alessandro Juliani) in the Dynamo Dome, working for Earthcore to prevent other walking, talking Dino-Men under the control of Max Maximus (Marco Soriano) from taking over the world. The show premiered on Amazon Prime to such little fanfare that I wasn’t made aware of its existence until two-years later happening upon it on a completely different platform.
The first episode introduces both of our heroes, and their friendship, highlighting Derek’s intelligence and his struggle to keep his father’s deteriorating mental state from Earthcore. In “My Best Friend’s a Dinosaur” Derek and SD fight to recover some Dynore from the Dino-Men. The feel of the comic book is well-captured here, even if the voicing of the dinosaurs characters as normal human voices was not what I expected. While the tone of the episode feels a bit more Nickelodeon than the comic, there’s quite a bit of fun here seeing Derek and Super Dinosaur in action. The Kingstons aren’t introduced here, but the the episode’s epilogue does set the stage for their introduction in the next episode.