The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Return of the Marx clones!

 

I'm starting my weekend post really late, and it happens to be the point where I would usually do a dino post. Fortunately, it also happens that I have a dino set I just posted an unboxing video for... and it is exactly the same as one I made a post about in late 2020. To kick things off, here's the glorious packaging post-unboxing.

I honestly don't know how this happened...

Now, I did have a reason for this. Over time (see my Hideous Abomination video), I've said quite a bit in praise of a figure that came with this set, which I've called the generic tyrannosaurid. It's a carnosaur sculpt that's vaguely impressive if you have had my level of traumatizing experience with knockoff and generic dinos. It's a good-sized dino in a "modern" pose that looks more or less like a tyrannosaurid. Which tyrannosaur is admittedly hazy; it's the wrong shape for an adult T. rex unless it's a juvenile. But call it Albertosaurus or Alioramus (see T. rex vs.) or even Allosaurus, and it will work well enough. In the course of my further recent experiments with "diorama" scenes (see last month's dino post), I decided that this was my best option for a general-purpose carnosaur. That, in turn, convinced me to get another one if I had the chance. That brought me back to a set I had sighted at the grocery store rather than Walmart, with the very familiar name Jaru (see Winston the Uintathere), and sure enough, this was in there. Here it is on The Couch Mark 2.

And here are a couple pics of the pair together.

It will be obvious from these pics that they aren't identical, and the newer one is in a number of ways worse. The paint and colors look vaguely overdone, the blue in particular is heavy enough to look less realistic, the paint on the teeth is wonky, and the plastic itself has a cheap, waxy look. Still, it's not a lot worse, and they managed to get one of the eyes in about the right place. Here's the regular dinos that came with the set, all clearly copied from Marx.

And here's most of the rest (I realized I missed a "fierce" hadrosaur on my new desk), alas including another Hideous Abomination and the patchisaur Pteranodon. (Okay, I admit it, I actually like the pterosaur...) 

After the generic tyrannosaur, the most interesting and flat out good thing to come with these sets was some rock/ terrain pieces. Both came with four. Two are just rock outcroppings that have already served me well as stands and general decorations. More intriguing, if not quite as useful, are a set of cliff/ mountain pieces that look more suitable for "distant" background elements. I have long been convinced that they are based on the matte paintings of Skull Island in the original King Kong. It has also crossed my mind that they look pretty close to how the edge of a meteor crater would from the inside. As with many things, the new set looks a bit different, though this time in no way worse. Here are the new pieces with examples from the old set in the middle.

And with the Space Guy Who Doesn't Care for scale!

And here's some alleged plants. I suppose they could be giant alien parsley...

And here's the whole pack of Hideous Abominations, including the "original" from the mystery box lot. If I had nightmares, it would be of these guys chasing me, only they'd fall over and scream for me to kill them or something. But no, I just dream about shopping...

For a creature that couldn't walk, it's embarrassingly easy to make these guys stand up...

Then for something different, it happens I also got an army man set from the same company. This was really very good, clearly made with a lot of effort or at least a good choice of who to copy. Here's a selection of sculpts. Several of these are different in style, color and material, enough to make me wonder if they came from (at least) two different suppliers. Despite this, they are uniform in overall quality. And look at the beautiful barbed wire...

And here's the vehicles and terrain pieces. As I commented unboxing this, the walls are clearly man-made, but it could still fit into a fantasy/ sci fi piece as ancient ruins of one sort or another. The funny part, I'm absolutely sure that helicopter is a transport called the Hind... made by the Soviet Union.

Now, it's time for the main event, the tyrannosaurs vs. the space marine analogs!

And that's a wrap for now. This is another reminder why I collect this stuff. It's always interesting, and once in a while, you get a thing of beauty. That's all for now, more to come!