The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Capsule toy cartoon dinos

 

It's another weekend non-review post, so it's time for another dino blog. This time around, I have what is by my standards a recent set of acquisitions, from early to mid-2017. They're also unique in that I got a full run of these things new. Here's a pic of the very first one I got.

"Okay, you go left, I'll go right, and you get put in the Field Museum...."

My first sighting of these guys was at a restaurant across the street from a former workplace. They were sold as Dinosaurs And Fossils, for maybe 75 cents a capsule. I bought one and unpacked it in a breakroom. What I found was a bag of unassembled parts with a text-free instruction sheet. It came together as a cartoony dino with a single point of articulation for the head. As an extra gimmick, there's an extra piece of a different color of plastic, in this case representing the paws of an unfortunate meal. I was impressed enough to spend the next month or so putting way too many quarters in the capsule machine until I had a full set. Here's the second one I got, as far as I recall, and maybe the best.

 This is their Stegosaurus, and the realism is iffy even for this little line. It does show off the two-tone casting; this time around, it looks like it's plants sticking out of the mouth. Again, the one point of articulation is in the neck, allowing the head to swing back and forth. Both the sculpting and the action are quite a bit better, so of course, it's downhill from here. Here's more from the line.

Here we have two copies of a triceratops, plus a wonky ankylosaur. The triceratops is just odd, with a strangely proportioned head and what looks like tail spikes. The ankylosaur is a bit more interesting, if only because you can move the head and the tail, though all the head does is wiggle back and forth a bit. I think I might have had one more trike, but I'm sure I only had one ankylosaur, and I definitely wanted one. Meanwhile, I kept getting a lot of the filler for this line, toy dinosaur skeletons to provide the "fossil" part. Looking through my storage, I found several of these that were still bagged or in in the capsules. Here's a couple of them.

And here's a bagged example with a sample of the printing.

 All of this money and plastic built up to what looked like the most intriguing of the lot on the card, an old-school sauropod. I had duplicates of most of the set before I got one of them, then I ended up with two. Here they are with one more, apparently  a hadrosaur, which I would have had two of except that I got a capsule with the head missing.

The long-necks were a nice note to close on. They look nice, though not quite as good as the card (still visible here) might have led one to believe. The odd part is that there's no articulation like the others, which made me wonder if this was designed separately. There's also some odd sculpting, especially in the tail, which looks kind of scrunched. Once I ended up with two of these, I decided it was time to quit, and I never noticed when they finally disappeared.

All in all, these are toys that have come to impress me more over time. They're certainly among the best capsule toys I've seen, and a cut above average for dinos this small. I thought of them especially when I got to the Lido dinos for Odds And Ends. At this point, they serve as a further reminder of a specific time in my life, and all the good and bad that came then and since. (I've wondered now and then whether there was something that set off the Evil Possum adventure, and never came up with anything except that certain things were going from bad to worse.) With that, I end this little snapshot of collecting life. That's all for now, more to come!