The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Retro Raptors!

 

It's getting toward the end of the month, and that means it's time for another dino post. This time, I have a few new acquisitions, some old finds, and one that's turned up before but never been front and center, and I'll be nostalgizing up a storm along the way. Here are the "raptors", a group of dinosaurs that revolutionized our understanding of dinosaurs both in science and pop culture, yet are still best known from depictions that were outdated even at the time. First up, we have the egregious offender, the Jurassic Park Velociraptor.

This is the dinosaur Velociraptor mongoliensis as portrayed in Jurassic Park, translated faithfully into a toy. Even back then, it was widely criticized as inaccurate, especially on the grounds that the "real" dino would have had feathers. The important context to consider is that this was how the group, broadly known as maniraptors, was portrayed through at least the middling 1980s. The creatures as further translated into the novel were a composite of Velociraptor with certain relatives, especially Deinonychus, the most famous raptor prior to the movie. The book further specified a figure of "six feet" for the raptors, but in all my many re-readings, I always understood their mass to be about the same as the human characters, a significant exaggeration for Velociraptor but in line with Deinonychus. The movie, with necessarily less flexibility, further scaled up the dinos to 300-350 pounds. From what can now be known, their depiction with scaly skin instead of feathers may have been partly dictated by the limitations of the CGI effects. As finally realized in the Kenner line, it was a no-frills dino with an action feature that snapped the jaws when the leg was pulled. With the present condition of my specimen, it's more like a head bob, which actually makes better scientific sense. When I first got him in the later '90s, I paired him with a little toy computer, an image I thought about reusing as the avatar for this blog, but as usual, I never got around to it. Here's a couple more pics, including a closeup.

The next up in the lineup is from a lot later, yet easily the most archaic in this group. I picked him up from a big box store's dollar bins around 2014. Like several other items I recall, it had the infamous Toysmith brand name, previously sighted in connection with generic Godzilla. It looks almost exactly the way Deinonychus was portrayed in the dinosaur books I read in the 1980s, complete with vestiges of the "tail dragger" pose. From what can be independently known of the brand, I have no doubt Toysmith snagged the mold from some much older line. Given the further longevity of generic/ knockoff dinos, it's conceivable the thing is as old as or even older than the first Jurassic Park movie. At any rate, its a nice, moderately detailed sculpt that captures why the dinosaur first attracted interest. Here's a few pics.

Cool never goes out of style.

That brings us to the biggest and latest in the lineup, an absolutely colossal specimen from the same Walmart Adventure Force "line" that provided the especially accurate Spinosaurus featured last time. It's an obvious contrast with the spinosaur, clearly modeled after the Jurassic Park/ World movies rather than published "science" then or now. Nevertheless, it's a very well-done sculpt with some very nice touches on the paintwork, and again it's absolutely huge. Here's a lineup of pics, including a reference shot with the spinosaur and the Truckstop Queen.

"So, where are you boys headed?"

Meanwhile, I took some pics of a few more raptors in my collection that I was ready to add, but as usual, I ended up with more material than I planned on already. The one I decided was worth including is another very recent find, picked up of all places at a gift shop for a charity. It was advertised as hand-made artwork from the developing world (and priced accordingly), which made it a lot more interesting to me. It's clearly another design from the JP mold, and as such a striking indicator of how far the franchise's influence has filtered down. In most other respects, it's as "silly" as this feature can get, in exactly the kind of way I find interesting. Here's the one pic I took.

As a postscript, I have my further thoughts on Jurassic Park. I may well be among the youngest to have read the book before the movie came out, and while the movie did a reasonable job condensing the material, it never made quite the same impression the novel did. In further hindsight, I think the biggest "problem" with the movie is simply that it was too influential for a full remake to get off the ground. That would have been the best way to introduce fully modern depictions of the dinos. It would also have been a chance to put a new emphasis on the darker elements of the source material, the way the 1982 version of The Thing did. (I still don't understand how the movie left out a scene where Dr. Grant actually takes down three of the raptors.) To me, the most tempting approach of all would be a TV mini-series treatment, able to go longer than a feature film yet on a low enough budget to capture some of the grit of an '80s movie. With Jurassic World now 5 years past and still going strong, that kind of re-envisioning seems like one more lost opportunity. For me, the definitive raptors will remain the wiry, cunning and ugly wraiths I first pictured reading the book, and that is good enough for me.

That's all for now, more to come!