Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: W@lmart Marx clone dinos?

 

It's time for another round of silly AWESOME dinosaurs, and this time I'm revisiting some material that's come up before. Back in the patchisaurs post, I covered some dinos in circulation that were clearly based on vintage Marx dinosaurs. The examples I covered then were still mainly from my own childhood collections, but I have certainly continued to make sightings and acquisitions in the wild. With this post, I'll be covering one of my biggest and most recent windfalls, made on the shelves of Walmart. It happened 4 or 5 years ago, when I picked up something I had already seen on the shelves some time before. Here's a pic of the item as I found it, still up on the retailer's website.

As seen above, this little pack was sold as coming with 20 items. By my own breakdown, this consists of 4 large dinos, 1 mid-sized stego, 8 little guys, 4 rocks and 2 tree thingies. The most prominent and interesting is the pterosaur, an unusually large variant of a ubiquitous design. As previously recounted, I believe this originated from the same unknown crew that created the patchisaurs. The big tyrannosaur, already shown above, on the other hand, is clearly of recent origin, conceivably made for the set. Here's a pic of the "large" dinos together, plus a little one that got left out of other pics.

The remaining large dinos are also fairly intriguing. The orange one is a Parasaurolophus (see Definitely Dinosaurs/ Dino Riders), sculpted with incongruous visible teeth to look fierce. It is sometimes classified as a patchisaur, but I believe it is of earlier origin if anything. The one on the far left, which I think of simply as the Abomination; I discussed it very briefly with the patchis, but didn't come close to doing it justice. It is clearly based on a Marx Tyrannosaurus, but equally clearly done disastrously wrong. The obvious mistake was the left foot, not really visible here. In the Marx original (itself introduced to replace a notorious "pot-bellied" early version), the foot was sculpted as raised for a pose that was presumably meant to be dynamic but really looked a little awkward. The imitators (the patchi crew again being prime suspects) managed to make it too hideously deformed to bear any weight. 

That brings us to the remaining dinos, which consist of the stego, a Dimetrodon (really a synapsid from before the dinosaurs), a duckbill/ hadrosaur, a Triceratops and a generic carnosaur usually referred to as an Allosaurus. I am satisfied that all of them are based directly on a Marx design. I had a little trouble sorting out how many of them I still had, as well as which ones really came from the set, but finally accounted for the stego plus two each of the little guys. Other pictured examples show a third duckbill, but that could have varied. Here's a couple lineup pics.

Something that will be apparent on closer examination is that the Marx sculpts were already all over the map in terms of accuracy and quality. The duckbill and Dimetrodon are okay, though the latter looks more like its herbivorous relative Edaphosaurus than the primordial apex predator it was in life. The stego looks a bit wonky, mainly for its strange head, while the allosaur looks bizarrely unthreatening. It's the Triceratops I find inexplicably off. The horns always seem to end up misshapen or askew, a problem that apparently started when Marx altered the sculpt to use less plastic. Even with that factored in, the design still strikes me as archaic and oddly crude. I have wondered if it was based on dinosaur movies, particularly the silent version of The Lost World.

In a new development, I just acquired an original of the stego, joining a Dimetrodon I picked up at a relative's house. Unsurprisingly, the originals are larger than the new(er) bunch. I further compared a stego that I'm sure came with my old batch of patchisaurs, and found it identical in size with the clone but still of better overall quality, with possibly better detail. (If you don't look as good as a patchisaur, that's really saying something.) Here's a few more comparison pics.

In many ways, the most intriguing part of the set to me has been the "landscape" pieces. I have not been able to trace them, and I'm sure I would have succeeded by now if they were copied from Marx or its major competitors, but I suspect they are from some older original. Of these, the plants just look like plastic parsley, too crude for further comment. The rock pieces are more interesting. Two of these are simply boulders or outcroppings, serviceable enough that I've occasionally used them to support figures in pics for this blog. In contrast, the other type seems more like something for a diorama backdrop than a functional play piece. Even as such, they bear little resemblance to any terrestrial geologic feature. Again, they make me think of dinosaur films even older than the Marx dinos, especially The Lost World and King Kong. Here's a pic.

With that, I'm ready to wrap this up for the day. Here's one more pic as a remember what good toy dinos look like.

Reminder, the sailback creature is a closer relative of the sloth than the dinosaurs.

That's all for now, more to come!