Over the past (nearly two!) years, we’ve covered a lot of highly sensitive topics. And thanks to the power of television, I think we’ve become better people along the way.

I mean what you were doing when you saw your lunchbox turn into a parrot before you had this blog to turn to for answers, huh?

Thankfully, we’ve had each other to lean on when life throws unexpected curve balls, but now I’d like to talk to you about a very important topic that we haven’t yet covered on The VSB: performance enhancing drugs.

I personally thought the more pertinent topics of how to avoid witches while babysitting or how to respond when your boyfriend tries to sell your out-of-wedlock baby to some creepy baby broker when you’re just an average high school student  to be the more pressing topics that America’s youth needs answers to! But I’m not above admitting when I’m wrong, and Maria Sharapova’s recent revelation tells me that we should have talked about this a lot sooner. Which brings us to today’s episode, “Dinosaurs: Steroids to Heaven.”

Dinosaurs was a weird little show that I thought was hilarious as a kid, but as an adult it mostly strikes me as creepy and weird. Dinosaurs was a traditional family sitcom, aside from the fact that the lead characters were puppets from the Jurassic age. It was kind of like The Flintstones meets Home Improvement, I guess.

I bet you’re thinking, what’s a show like this doing with a very special episode? Well, in the 90’s even dinosaur puppets were busy scaring America’s youth straight.

Robbie is the teenage son of this dinosaur family. He’s not doing so well with the ladies, and he feels like his lack of muscle tone is probably to blame for this. As his father tells him, “Chicks dig big guys.” Well, that’s news to me as a proverbial chick. And also it’s pretty terrible parenting. So Robbie decides to start pumping iron in the hope of transforming his “geekphysique” into that of a body builder.

But he doesn’t transform as quickly as he’d like. That’s when his friend, Spike, tells him about “thornoids.” Thornoids are these really terrifying creatures that look a lot like Gremlins (the wet kind). Robbie eats these Gremlin-like creatures and starts looking like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of dinosaurs.

It doesn’t take long for the ‘roid rage to take hold because Robbie punches his romantic rival while they’re both trying to ask the cool dinosaur lady to the dance. Also, he’s starting to exhibit another unpleasant side-effect of Thornoids: he’s growing spikes…which actually seems like kind of an advantage in the dino-world…

But things quickly go downhill from here. He gets mad that his sister left a mess in the bathroom sink, so he picks up the sink and tosses it out the window. He even breaks his baby brother’s rattle. (Do be fair his baby brother is incredibly rude and the most obnoxious part of this show. He’s like a really, really lame version of Stewie from Family Guy.)

He ends up on a terrible date with the cool lady dinosaur and comes to realize that the reason she never went out with him pre-Thornoids is that he never asked her. Omg. Seriously? She liked him before he had muscles and now she doesn’t like him (because of the ‘roid rage, understandably).

So what does it take for Robbie to finally see that he’s headed down the wrong path? His spikes get so big that he accidentally gets stuck to a wall of lockers. I guess the Thornoids don’t make him strong enough to push himself off of the lockers, but whatever. His best friend gives him a lecture about the dangers of cheating on your body building.

By the next morning, the Thornoids have worn off and he’s back to normal. Except for a massive headache from his “Thornoid Hangover.” He then apologizes to his dad and offers to help him move the refrigerator (which he refused to do when he had tons of muscles and it would have been a lot easier, but that’s what Thornoids will do to you).

Very Special Lesson: Don’t eat weird spiky prehistoric creatures. I think that’s all something we can get behind, right?