Legion of Silly Dinosaurs! The Patchisaurs And Friends, or Knockoffs Are Forever

For this installment, I'm bringing you what this blog was always meant to cover, the world of dinosaur toys. I have loved dinos (for which this blog is named) and prehistoric creatures for all my life, and I have been indulged by family and friends with all manner of related toys and collectibles. In the course of time, I have had some of the very best, from high-quality toys to museum grade models. But as with many things, the ones that have always stayed in my memory are the small, cheap and obscure. This fascination has led me to discover genre which I call the "generic dino": The seemingly untraceable yet oddly specific designs and sculpts, often dated or wholly fanciful even for much earlier days, handed down like oft-told tales from one anonymous manufacturer to another, to appear and reappear years and decades apart. And in this already vast and tangled category, none are more notorious and seemingly unkillable than a group of Asian sculpts known as the patchisaurs, which look less like dinosaurs than alien monsters from another dimension as portrayed in a Godzilla movie seen during an acid trip. Here are pics of what I am convinced to be the "main" group:

The tale of these creatures has been told often enough that I will recap it quite briefly. In the early to mid 1970s, sets of strange toys believed to originate from Hong Kong began appearing in American discount stores. It was clear that the sculpts were influenced heavily by Japanese "kaiju" movies and related TV shows, to the extent that sleuths have directly tied several to specific movies. They soon gained notoriety among adults as well as children, particularly when several were incorporated into the original "Dungeons and Dragons" games. Despite this attention, their origin remained mysterious both then and now. In the course of my own research, I found pictures of at least one preserved bag bearing the legendary Arco name, which will certainly be appearing here. However, it is possible (particularly given the company's known reputation) that they either copied another manufacturer's designs or simply packaged and distributed figures produced elsewhere.

My own experience starts a decade later. In the late 1980s, I picked up at least two and possibly a good part of the set as prizes at school and perhaps arcades. I particularly recall one I named Clubtail, and now find suspiciously similar to Gorgo. I also remember the one now sometimes called umberhulk based on certain red copies but which I only ever saw in white as shown above. I took that one as a sort of a dragon-like alien, and as far as I recall I considered the bits around the mouth to be insectoid mandibles. I think I also had at least one more of the "upright" creatures, which I have dubbed the Armadillo Guy and Flattop. I'm almost certain I had or at least saw the one I have always thought of simply of as "Leaper", an absolutely evil-looking creature that resemble nothing so much as a chubacabra. Here's a few more closeups, including a recent copy/ clone of Clubtail.

"I vant to suck your goat. My friend vill curl into a ball and roll away."

"I feel pretty..."

Then around 1990, I spent a chunk of allowance money to buy a bagged set at a local grocery store. By this time, I think I had lost at least some of the figures I had acquired before, and I believe the ones I have now are all from the set except for one (the "bulette") I bought quite recently. I recall it was at this time that I found the insect-like creature immortalized by D&D as the rust monster, which I tend to associate vaguely with the landstriders in The Dark Crystal. It also included some comparatively realistic dinos that may have been made along with the original "patchis", particularly a pterosaur/ Pteranodon that I have encountered many times since. Other "normal" dinos that can commonly be seen in patchi bags and lots are clearly copies/ bootlegs of dinos from Marx and other companies in the 1950s and '60s, and I am satisfied that several good Marx copies I still have were from the "patchi" bag. Here are pics of some "Marx clone" sculpts, and my larger collection of the Pteranodon creature. The stegosaurus looks a little too happy, while the rex looks like he's begging for extinction.

It was ultimately the Pteranodon that did the most to keep the line in my mind, in large part because it lacked the near-hallucinogenic weirdness of more notorious patchisaurs. The sculpt details are realistic and downright good enough that it could easily be taken as another clone of a more orthodox dino, and with no conclusive answers on when or how the patchis were first produced, I cannot rule out that it is just that. The one detail that is quite strangely "off" is that feathers are sculpted in place of the wing membrane. Even more strangely, as shown in an extra close up below, the neck and underside of the wing appear to have some kind of hair, an idea suggested in some 19th-century reconstructions but not widely revived until the "warm-blooded" controversies of the 1970s and later.  I also find myself hard-pressed to emphasize just how often I have seen this creature. I have found it in everything from mixed bags at second-hand stores to sets sold at Walmart. Even then, I have usually only bought the damn things if they were include with something else that caught my interest, and I may still have missed one or two that might be lying around in one place or another.

This will be as good a segue as any to their legacy in the age of the internet. By the early 2010s, collectors, D&D fans and other enthusiasts were comparing notes and recognizing the phenomenon. Various nicknames were revived or assigned for various creatures, while the term "patchisaurs" caught on for the line as a whole. Further intrigue quickly swirled around the "owlbear", a sculpt included in the D&D lore but rarely if ever seen since. Today, specimens for sale have about the same status as a Holy Grail used by Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster at Area 51. And yet, new production continues! Here are pics of a boxed set I acquired around 2017, source of the bulette and one of the mutant-rexes as well as yet another Pteranodon. As can be seen, this is more openly fantasy-themed, though it also includes reasonably good representations of the mammals Macrauchenia and Uintatherium.

What I think keeps the patchisaurs in people's minds is that they capture a way of looking at dinosaurs that can stay vivid and relevant long after earnestly "scientific" representations have gone as petrified as fossils. The only artifacts that can rival them in my mind are the very Victorian sculptures of the Crystal Palace exhibitions or the crude and wildly weird roadside dinosaurs of Holbrook, which I used as a stand in for the Apocalypse Now temple in my Terminator fan/ parody novel The Rookie. The greatest impact for me is that I have found myself thinking unbidden of the patchisaurs in connection with far more capable works: The aforementioned Gorgo and The Dark Crystal; the offbrand-kaiju Gamera series; the landscapes of Filmation's sci fi/ fantasy mashups, especially the short-lived Star Trek toon; and even Stephen King's bonkers novella "The Mist". This is surely where the patchisaurs were always meant to be, misfits in a mixed toybox with only the imagination to decide where they should go.

Rather than try to put links in the article, I have assembled a list of the most useful articles I can easily find; unfortunately, there are plenty more I have read at one time or another but either could not be relocated, having missing links and images, or may simply be gone. As often as possible, I have tried to reference material that introduced me to specific subjects.

Little Weirdos "Chinasaurs", a less fortunate name for the patchis. This blog was one of my earliest sources and many other obscure small-scale toys.

An account by Tony DiTerlizzi, including pics of several vintage bags and the recent boxed set I purchased.

A discussion on Little Rubber Guys.

A DumpStat post on the owlbear, a bit heavy on the D&D lore for my personal tastes.