Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Jurassic World/ W@lmart dinos

 

For the weekend post, I felt like doing a dino post, and it happens I had a new acquisition plus one more I had from not too long ago. It also brings us forward to the present, which is a good thing, because there's plenty of new stuff that's silly as well as stuff that's actually good. The present entries are by my own reckoning a little bit of both. Here's another pic of the pair.

"Well, I was in Jurassic Park 3...."

The newcomer and the most interesting is the hadrosaur, sold as Edmontonosaurus in the Jurassic World line. What got me interested is that he's sculpted in a quadrupedal stance, which is the way modern reconstructions have leaned for a long time.  The head is also pretty well-done, with some nice touches on the colors. The body is comparatively plain and a bit chunky, but you can't have everything. Here's some more pics with Bossk and the Truckstop Queen.

"Can you say no to that face?"

The extra gimmick with this one is that he has a sound feature that's been standard for a long time, as well as a more traditional motion feature where the head moves if you pull the tail. Unfortunately, the two are interconnected, so that a light touch on the head or tail will set off a very loud roaring sound. Another downside is that the dino doesn't easily switch to a bipedal stance. From limited experimentation, it has to be four on the floor or all the way back to be stable. Here's a pic to show just how awkward it looks.

"Please let me in, I promise I'll be good..."

The other is a Ceratosaurus, one of my all-time favorite dinosaurs, inexplicably neglected in movies and toys. I picked him up at the local Walmart last year. It's well-detailed, as would be expected for the line. The sculpting is a little "generic", which is a recurring problem with how this very unique dinosaur is portrayed and perceived. Still, it gives some sense of its more unusual features, including a spiny back and proportionately large teeth. He has snapping jaws plus the sound gimmick, which at least only activate if you press a button toward the back. Here's a few pics of him.

It's easier to keep him standing up this way than on his own.

"I wanna hug!"

All in all, these are some of the nicer dinos available, and a good indicator of how far things have come. They're certainly bigger and more detailed than the original JP line, though still smaller and less play-worthy than the Definitely Dinosaurs. In terms of overall realism, they probably have about as many flaws as things like the Marx dinosaurs, except the flaws are subtle enough to stand out only to those who study paleontology. As with all things, it's two or three steps forward and one step back. And we can't wrap this up without a lineup pic.

That's all for now, more to come!