Mystery Monday: Imperial rubber monsters sequel

 

It's The start of my first full week of the month, and I decided to hold off on the movie reviews. That left this slot for Mystery Monday, and I was reminded it's been a while since I had a "real" mystery (compare the mystery red guy that started all this). It's been quite a while since I covered something that posed a challenge even for my knowledge and investigative abilities. (I will freely admit, there is one case still unsolved!) However, I have said all along that there are mysteries great and small, and it just happens I have a few loose ends from my last dino post, which covered the infamous products of Imperial. In the course of that post, I considered some additional material, far enough in to take a number of pics. I decided, however, that I already had enough, and some of these things didn't quite fit. To get this going, here are the ones that were closest to getting in before, a pair of genuine prehistoric animals including a dino.

Of these two, the dino is by a wide margin the one I've had longest, and I suppose I wouldn't have hesitated to include it with my Imperial lineup if it had been the only one already in my collections. It's essentially the same style and material as other Imperial dinos, usually assigned a comparable date of 1985. The cat, on the other hand, was its own thing. It's made of softer and probably cheaper material, almost on par with a "bigmouth" dino. What was even more striking was the quite late date of 1989. The icing on the cake of wonkiness is those ears, which look like they belong on a dog rather than a prehistoric predator. Here's a closeup.

Meanwhile, the one I've really been holding out for is a find I made at a collectible store that closed a few years back. I long debated putting it in a dino post. Obviously, it's not a realistic dinosaur, but neither were the patchisaurs and generic Godzilla. It's still in the same style as plenty of dinos, particularly the "big mouth" types. The real counterarguent is just how goofy this thing is. By comparison, even the patchisaurs could be vaguely menacing. This guy, however, is so completely unthreatening that the least of the patchis (probably the rust monster) would laugh at him. Here's a few pics of him in full glory, for lack of a better word, with the Imperial Tyrannosaurus.

"Well, at least you didn't get knocked off by the worst GI Joe set..."

This creature was originally made for a knockoff genre I had previously investigated, intended as unauthorized "riding" animals for He Man and other fantasy/ sci fi toys. I further determined that it was part of an actual line, originally dubbed Dragons And Daggers. Somewhat later, they tried to shift to science fiction with Robots, Lasers And Galaxies, which was really many of the same creatures with more technological-looking accessories. (See 2 Warps To Neptune here, here and here.)Here's a pic of the beast with Sidekick Carl and the giant Tonka lady aka the Nine-Foot Woman to show how it would have worked.

"Could you please stop trying to eat my boyfriend? Apart from anything else, he's made from a lot of stuff that's not edible..."

And here he is with the ca 70 mm Marx knights and Timmee fantasy figures.

"A king's duty is to command from a safe distance..."

It was this one that gave me an angle on the whole lot. This got me thinking, were any other beasts released as mounts? Were there any repurposed when the fantasy craze died down? I was especially suspicious about the sabertooth, which would have been hitting the shelves just a little after Masters of the Universe went through its prolonged and painful death. Alas, I found no hard data to show it was released in this fashion. The real test, however, was first-hand experimentation. For history, yeah, let's go with that. Here's the beast with a couple of my very few remaining TMNT figures.

Ironically, judging from this test, the dino that was made independent of the "riding beast" niche works about as well at the cat which would have been made at the tail end of it. It's further apparent that late lines like the Ninja Turtles offered decent compatibility with holdovers from He Man's heyday. Here's one more for kicks.

And then there was one more thing to try, a rematch with the Gas Station Duchess and the Imperial tyrannosaur. I think Connie might be ready for a long-term relationship...

"How did T. rex mate? Asking for a friend..."

And with that, I'm wrapping this up. As always, more to come!