The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Generic Dinobot unboxing!

 

To start the new year, I've been sticking with a plan to slow things down while I decide how much I might want to shake things up. In that spirit, I decided to do a post for this, my longest-running regular feature (see the patchisaur post, from even before I was doing movie reviews), on a weekday instead of the weekend slot it has long since settled into. I'm doing this in part because I just acquired something that wouldn't make for as long a post as many I've made under the Legion banner, and I needed an unboxing to give it its due. Here's a few pics of the item in its glorious, terrible packaging, photographed with my camera phone.

This is a little line I have sighted independently at a couple different places over the last few months. You can  see on the box that there are four of them, of which I'm sure I've seen at least 3. What may not be entirely clear is that the labels are hilariously mixed up. The name of the Ankylosaur, present here, has its name under a T Rex, whose name is given to a ceratopsian. Less explicably, the actual ankylosaur pic is labeled "Dragon King Kong", while a spinosaur is dubbed "The Dragon and The Spirit".  Note that there's already two names visible for the line, "Dinosaur World" and "Dragon Knight", of which the former might well be the name of some wider line that has yet to emerge on my radar. All in all, it looks like an unremarkable example of a knockoff/ generic line that isn't that much like anything else, beyond giving another retread of the venerable "dinobot" concept. But what's on the inside? First, here's a couple more pics of the box, because the "real" collectors always love packaging and I love to make them cry.

Now here's the open box and interior packaging, which can get interesting. The big surprise was a floral background that wasn't visible at all from the outside. We now know that plant life in the Mesozoic wasn't as different as we once thought, but I doubt it included sunflowers...

Now, we have the dino. It looks pretty nice, stylized and a little old-school, almost like something from Lego. Now for transformation, the first thing that stands out is that the back piece comes off as a shield. It's a design choice that's cropped up now and then for a very long time, which can be convenient for the designer and the collector, though to quote Toy Galaxy, you will lose the shield.

This brought me to the really ugly surprise: To complete the transformation, you also have to remove the tail. That's no great loss, considering how convoluted dinobot robot modes already get, but it's very difficult to put back, and not immediately obvious if you broke it outright. An extra detail is that the head (helmet???) you see on the box has to go on top of the one on the figure. Here's the bot mode with and without the attachments. I kind of like it with the "small" head; it's odd and kind of goofy, but at least it doesn't look like a direct copy of Optimus Prime.

"I have no hips, and I must dance."

And for an extra pic, here's the bot with a dino I picked up at the same shop. It's a soft-rubber brackiosaur with a sound gadget, also definitely old-school. (Depictions with a resonance-chamber thingy still haven't caught on.) You don't really see that many brachiosaus, so I bought it for more than I'd usually pay. Still a long way from the worst in my collection; I'm looking at you, bigmouths.

With that, I'm wrapping this up. If anything, I offer this as a snapshot of what dino collecting is like. It's a field of wide variety and wildly varying quality. Outside of Marx and Jurassic Park, there isn't the market ecosystem and unifying community you get if you're collecting a brand or franchise. For those who are really into this, it means that every item is potentially one-of-a-kind, and every encounter an opportunity that may not be repeated. Sometimes, you find something good; sometimes you get junk; but you rarely buy something you regret paying for. And with that, I'm done for another day. That's all for now, more to come!