Why Dinosaurs?

I am often asked this question - why Dinosaurs? Don't you ride horses? Why didn't you make Happy Horses? Well, for one thing, horses' legs are too long.

I truly believe dinosaurs will always hold a special place in every person's imagination. They are the closest real thing we have to fantasy because dinosaurs actually existed. We have just enough allure and information to give them stories. They're still a mystery though, and the process of discovery is both attractive and complicated.

You can ask a paleontologist: "If a velociraptor's femur is 25 inches long, how much would he have weighed?" And a biologist: "What kind of plants did herbivorous dinosaurs eat?" You can ask a film maker: "What species of Dinosaurs will sell on the big screen?" or you could ask a marketer: "What dinosaur archetype will promote this brand?" And everyone will give you a straight answer.

But when you ask a child: "What do you think this dinosaur will do?" They will ask you:

"Well, can my dinosaur fly? What if my dinosaur can breathe fire? I want my dinosaur to go on a party boat...wait, is my dinosaur a boy or a girl?" (These are real questions!)

A child will take something that adults started for them and then use their imagination, they will start with curiosity and questions and don't care about historical accuracy or sales.

Dinosaurs are the closest real thing we have to fantasy, because even as we grow up - and maybe sit behind a computer or cubicle, pay taxes and shop for groceries - humans will always be drawn to fantasy. Humans will desire a little mystery, a little what if? and a little wonder.

So I choose dinosaurs because it is the wonderful, human thing to do.

Happy Dinosaur and AI

Here is my view on AI and Happy Dinosaur…and if you want to know what the dinosaurs think about it—keep reading:

There are two things I would never use AI for:

1. Engineering creativity

2. Engineering activity

As an artist, creator, builder and doer, I hate to engineer creativity out of my life for the sake of saving time. I’d rather engineer away tedious tasks, and use AI as a PA so that I have more time to be creative, and more time for activities. The only AI I use for graphic design is Adobe’s background removal tool.

Some people have probably heard me ask: “If AI prompting becomes the most sought after skillset, will human capital be homogenized in ten years?” I sometimes wonder if people, who spend their education developing their individual ideas, may cease to be important if just developing good prompts replaces ideation. I think it’s important to preserve original thinking in the next generation, so for Happy Dinosaur, all our creative processes are done using human minds—especially those of kids.

I’m always interested to see how entrepreneurs use AI, but for this entrepreneur, you can be sure that every story comes from real kids and every drawing comes from my pen. ;)

Here’s what our dinosaurs think about AI:

Happy Dino: “I like GPTs, I have a lot of questions and AI never gets sick of answering”

Clever Dino: “Why would I use AI when I can think? If you need AI, think harder.”

Chill Dino: (declined interview, he was at the beach)

Loyal Dino: “I have shares in NVIDIA.”

Social Dino: “Robots??? Beep boop.” (doesn’t get it)

Happy Dinosaur Vs. Himself

This is the year of narrative design for the Happy DinoStories our major theme is “How to solve problems like a dinosaur.” As I’ve been pitching and discussing this with people in the publishing and producing world, a unique item on my value chain kept popping up, which is that there is no “villain” in the dinosaur world. 

Many kids’ cartoons will have “antagonists,” that may manifest as the villain of a show’s season or as an inciting incident in a book: think of No Heart Bear in CareBears, or Captain Hook in Peter Pan. “Bad Guys vs. Good Guys,” are a popular characters in kid’s stories because they teach kids about right and wrong and is a trope reflected in kid’s playground role play. But for Happy Dinosaur, all the dinosaur’s problems and inciting incidents are simply caused by themselves. 

Five years of customer discovery concluded that “self-inflicted” problems are what made my dinosaurs so relatable across many age groups. For children, a small mistake that is their fault feels like the biggest problem in the world (does anyone remember slamming their bedroom door and sulking in guilt and rage and crying, only to see that your mistake did not mark the doom of all time?). For young adults, we are still the victims of our own choices and have our cringe moments or suffer the consequences of our actions—we simply don’t grow out of “messing up.” 

All our stories feature problems that are very simple—perhaps even very stupid, but always very real. The dinosaurs are just like us, they make mistakes, they look in the mirror and criticize themselves, they say the wrong thing, they procrastinate; but just like us, dinosaurs are constantly evolving. They solve their problems by forgiving themselves, by forgiving each other, by learning from their mistakes and doing things differently (although, if you’re Loyal Dinosaur, you’ll keep tripping over rocks). 

I like to think that today’s kids can be their own “good guys”. We don’t have villains in the Happy DinoStories because we don’t want to place the blame for mistakes on someone else; it’s just too easy to evade responsibility by making someone else the “bad-guy.” By fixing their own problems, our dinosaurs can help kids and even young adults find the heroism in themselves. Solving a problem like a dinosaur requires a little forgiveness, a little creativity, and a lot of making mistakes.