Baby Sinclair

So did NECA recently re-release their Freddie Mercury action figure because they knew this was coming and they wanted you to be able to re-create the meme? Baby Sinclair is the youngest child of the Sinclair Family and has enough attitude for the whole clan. His favorite pastime is walloping his father, Earl, on the head with a frying pan. He is "The Baby!" Despite starring giant puppets, ABC's Dinosaurs was generally a pretty muamced show, relying heavily on the tropes of sitcoms but still tryng to tell stories that matter in a brief half hour. And then there was The Baby, a catchphrase-spewing merchandising machine that went so far beyond parodying the "cute bratty kid" archetype that he ended up just fulfilling it exactly. But just like having a heat sink lets your computer work harder, having this obnoxious smoo on the show let the creators get away with making the plots more serious, because there was still something dumb the network could use for promos. Baby (that's his actual name: they changed it from "Aaah Argh I'm Dying You Idiot") was puppeteered and voiced by Kevin Clash, most famous for his long stint as Sesame Street's Elmo - and once you know that, good luck hearing Baby as anything other than a manic and exaggerated version of the little red monster. I mean, it's not like the guy only had one voice: he also did Clifford on the Muppet Show and live-action Master Splinter. Like Earl, this figure includes two heads. Both have the same cherubic Eric Barnett sculpt, with the standard one having its mouth open, and the alternate closer to closed. The secondary head also has a horn growing out of it, as in the Season 2 episode "The Golden Child": when Baby gets a bump on his head that grows into a horn, it turns out he's fulfilling an ancient prophecy and is the King of the Dinosaurs. Unfortunately, that does mean he'll have to leave his family and live with the Elders in order to properly rule. No wonder he looks so stern in this portrait! While Earl was a full-body suit with an animatronic head, Baby was a more traditional puppet. He's small and chubby, and is posed to be permanently sitting. He can stand, but the design of the figure means when he does he'll be staring down at the ground with his tail in the air, so it's obvious the toy wasn't meant to work this way. He has swivel/hinges for the ankles, knees, wrists, and shoulders, and balljoints for the hips, chest, tail, and head. NECA says the figure is in a 7" scale with an actual height of 4", but neither of those are true: you know from the Earl review that these are closer to a 5" scale, and Baby by himself is 2⅛". Because he's so little, this set is really heavy on the accessories. First is a highchair, so Baby doesn't have to sit on the ground all the time. The chair is about 4¾" tall, and features a removable tray that fits around Baby in the front, as well as a folded blanket that drapes over the back. When the show was being developed, Baby's chair was thick and looked like it was carved from a single piece of stone, rather than having a metal tray. The blanket was used as a way to hide the puppeteer working Baby's arms (with Kevin working the head from underneath), but it can't come down that low on the toy because there still needs to be room for Baby's tail to poke out the back. It's also hard to pose his arms when he's sitting here, because of the way they bump against the tray. But enough about scenery, let's talk props! Baby's signature weapon is the frying pan he uses to bonk his father, so of course they had to include that. For times when that's not violent enough, how about a baseball bat? Or a slingshot? In more domestic realms, there's a large blue bowl, a long wooden spoon, and a baby bottle. Also a TV remote, but not the same Earl came with - it's silver, rather than brown. And because he's a little kid, there are plenty of toys for him to play with: several stuffed animals (a green T. rex, a purple ankylosaurus, and a yellow brontosaurus) as well as a figure of George the Hippo, Dinosaurs' parody of Barney. Naturally, he has alternate hands sized to hold all this various stuff. But we're not done yet! There's a caveman cookie (cavemen, in the context of the show, typically being like dogs or wolves), as well as the Cookie Creature. Some kind of ghastly, golden-haired mammal that lives in the Sinclairs' wall and steals Baby's cookie, leading to a very "Tom & Jerry" B-plot in one episode. Again: as long as they did dumb things with Baby the network didn't care how serious the rest of the show was. Baby Sinclair was the show's merchandising star in the 1990s, almost to the level Baby Yoda is for The Mandalorian today. So it's not even remotely surprising he's one of the figures NECA has chosen to release. While it would be kind of fun to get the entire family as toys, if Earl and Baby are all we end up getting, it will still be more than anyone ever expected to see 30 years after the fact. -- 06/22/25 Do you want other family members? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.