The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Sketchy MPC reissue/ bootlegs?

 

It's the weekend, and since I already did a movie review, it's time for another dino blog! This time, I have a new acquisition that I still had backlogged a little while. About a month ago, I put the only bid on a lot that looked a little too good to be true. What I got for the money was the most suspicious thing since my Zombi/ Dawn of the Dead Blu Ray, yet still unquestionably good. Since we haven't had many Timmee sightings lately, here's a lineup of the lot with the Battle Mountain!

The backstory here is that this was offered as a mixed lot of MPC and Marx dinos, without a lot of specifics about provenance. My order arrived in what proved to be a sealed bag. I quickly confirmed the majority were indeed MPC sculpts (see the Odds and Ends post), many of them based on Marx designs. (The Dinosaur Toys Collectors Guide overview is as good a resource as any.) Here's the largest of the actual dinos, a parasauralophus with a kind of kung fu pose and a clear knockoff of the Marx second-version T. rex.

There's really not a lot to say about these. The hadrosaur is dated yet elegant, and still mostly makes sense. The rex, on the other hand, just looks goofy, like a Cretaceous redneck uncle. But it serves as a further horrifying reminder that the Marx rex was also the basis of the patchi Hideous Abomination, previously sighted (but I just remembered never given my head-canon name) in the original patchisaur post and the Marx clones followup. Here's a lineup of the new guy and my matched Abomination pair. Note the irony that this looks even less realistic than the infamous freaky creatures the patch crew just made up. And... holy kaka... the patchi is bigger???

"Kill... me...." "No, me first!"

Then there's the main group, which also doesn't need a lot of comment. The Dimetrodons are clearly copies of the Marx non-dinosaur dino, which I've said plenty about; note that the plastic and casting still look consistent with a single manufacturer. The prosauropods are equally clearly based on the MPC plateosaur. Then there's the pterosaur, which I regret not having for my dedicated ptero post. It's nice to see a reconstruction of a pterosaur on the ground, and the pose is still plausible. The execution, however... just no.

And here's a hideous closeup.... 

"As a bonus, you can use my head as a pick ax to dig for fossils!"

Meanwhile, the most interesting things to come from this lot are from after the dinosaurs. The most promising are not one but two ground sloths, clearly copied from Marx. The main difference is that the chest is caved in instead of filled out, a cost-cutting measure previously seen with the Galaxy Laser Team turtle alien. There's also more subtle reduction of detail on the inside of the arms. Here's a couple pics with the Marx original.

Oo, the shiny!!!

Then there's one more thing, a sabertooth that apparently really was originally made by MPC. It stood out first and foremost as the only one that really looks like it was made separately from the rest of these. For overall quality, it's a mixed bag. It's big and decently detailed, and certainly an improvement on others (see the Timmee dino post). On the other hand, it's still unaccountably odd, which is really a common denominator with sabertooth reconstructions at all levels. The sabertooths didn't simply look like lions or tigers with bigger teeth (covered when I featured Homotherium in the Sidekick Carl adventures), but it's easy to go too far trying to make them look "different". On that scale, this feels like too much and not enough. Here's a pic with my best MPC acquisition before this, a diatryma, and one more closeup.

"What do you mean, I look like a giant beaver? Have you ever had to kill a giant beaver??!!"

And here's one more pic...

"Just remember the pledge; `I'm bootleg, and that's not bad...'"

That's all for now; more to come!