Timmee Tuesday: Dino crossover!

 

I'm back with another post I'm telling myself will be short, and I decided this blog is overdue for more Timmee. I looked through my collections just to see what I could find, and what I settle on was a collection of dinos I picked up a while back, part of the long line of Timmee reissues over the last decade. To get things rolling, here they are with the Battle Mountain.

As with most Timmee products, I vaguely remember having some of these mixed in with other small toys. The ones I most clearly remember are a sabertooth, an ankylosaur and a stegosaurus I could probably find. They seem to have been first made in the 1970s, which also seems to have been when the Processed Plastic parent company started putting the Timmee name back on new products. It's not entirely clear if they were made before or after the Galaxy Laser Team, though I suspect they came from earlier in the decade. The overall style is about right for the early '70s, before more newfangled ideas about dinosaurs emerged. Here's a pic of the most orthodox of the group, the tyrannosaur, duckbill and sauropod.

"Have you heard of the one true Godzilla?"

As usual, a number of the sculpts aren't actually dinosaurs. There is a Dimetrodon, which famously is more closely related to mammals than dinosaurs, plus the sabertooth cat and a wooly mammoth. It's with this group that the set starts going off the rails. The Dimetrodon is ordinary, the cat is okay, though the teeth make it look more like a giant beaver (which did exist). But that mammoth is just not right. To me, it looks more like the Space Jockey from Alien than an actual animal. Here's pics to show what I mean.

Something else that may be evident is that many of these sculpts look strangely narrow when viewed head on, a pattern already in evidence with "army man" figures. For toy soldiers, this can be traced back to a time when they were literally flat, leading to recurring poses that had the figures in profile or turned sideways. The designers at Timmee were presumably concerned with saving plastic and also simplifying the molds. Here's a lineup of the most pronounced examples, including the stegosaurus.

The remaining sculpts are all quadrupedal dinosaurs, and these are in many ways the most unusual. By comparison, the carnosaur and duckbill were based on standard reconstructions, with perhaps some further influence from the man-in-suit effects of the kaiju movies. Here, however, the sculpts are quite different from how the dinos were reconstructed before or since. The Triceratops is the least objectionable, evidently a copy of a Marx design, with the already wonky original head looking squashed. The stego is seemingly ordinary, except that it has a longer, curved neck compared to the actual creature. The ankylosaur, however, is even more messed up than the mammoth. Here's a pic og the group and a closeup of the ankylosaur.

That's it for this group, and I'm wrapping things up. These little guys were a fun little find that I'm glad to have. What they really represent is a transition in how dinosaurs were portrayed, from the very stately poses of the Marx dinos to the lively raptors of Jurassic Park. For that period, these are one side of a spectrum that the patchisaurs were off the other end of, no longer committed to strict realism but still intended to portray real creatures rather than the denizens of a Godzilla movie. They may be forgotten now, but the world wouldn't be the same without them.

That's all for now, more to come!