The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs Anniversary Special: The Silliest Dinosaur???

 

As I write this, I'm still in overdrive actually finishing an actual novel, and I realized I actually had an extra week that I could either take off or make one post for. I also very much had in mind that this month would be none other than the third anniversary of the first post of my feature on silly AWESOME dinosaurs. (Yes, that was always supposed to be the gag...) Since I had already scaled back to bimonthly posts to keep my blog sustainable, I could have still have skipped, but then, the whole point of this feature has been to make a little time for something that's been a part of my life as long as I've been alive. So, I'm going through with this just a little after the actual anniversary, and as luck would have it, I just spent way too much money on a dino that fit the bill. Behold the... uh... Allo-Cerato-Thingysaurus???

It looks like there's not enough light. Actually, there's kind of too much...

Now for the story, I sighted this guy in a used bookstore where I've made a fair number of acquisitions featured here (including the worst-ever bigmouth and for that matter my favorite/ most useless reference model the Truckstop Queen), and I knew this was worth taking home just to have absolute proof it actually exists. As a further incentive, I discovered there were no obvious production markings, making this at least a minor mystery. So, I bought it for a price in the high single digits that was still definitely on the steep side for what I was getting, and brought it in for closer inspection. And here's another pic of this damn thing.

Once I had already paid for it, I did what I could have at any time and tried a search with a few terms that might identify the manufacturer. I quickly confirmed my early suspicion that this was part of the Fisher Price Imaginext line, which got in here with the Jurassic World Therizonosaurus. Further inquiries indicated that it was part of a 2005 set called T. Rex Mountain, which also included a caveman. Of course, that begs the question of what this is supposed to be, and that's where the horror begins. But first, a couple closeups...

Foot pegs never lie!

To begin with, this is a clear case of a "composite" dino, which really isn't a bad thing in itself. Its strongest affinities are with Ceratosaurus (which got its own post and an appearance together with a W@lmart hadrosaur before that), complete with the ridge along the back, but the number and placement of the horns don't exactly match. In other respects, it's more like a generic allosaurid, particularly in terms of the hands and the shape of the head. But with all these forgiving considerations taken into account, it still does an amazing number of things exactly wrong. The posture is a redundant combination of the "modern" horizontal orientation and the classic "tripod" pose that in terms of design functionality gives the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. The arms are in the basketball-dribbling pose that the nitpickers have been saying was impossible, and in any case are hopelessly ill-proportioned and grotesquely sculpted to boot. The feet are their own kind of mess, outlandishly small yet still clunky to a degree that may not fully show in the pics. The cherry on this sundae is the head. It has a bit of what now gets called "shrink-wrapping", which I have thought of as a "mummified" look. That only brings out the real problem: The eye is much too far back, in what would really be the anchoring windows (I know, fenestrae) for the jaw muscles. On casual inspection, it might look like someone mixed up which opening is the eye socket, but it's really worse than that. The head is too short for its comparatively limited depth, which didn't leave enough room to sculpt the details of the skull structure. It's all the more striking that these issues really came out because people were clearly trying to do this as a "realistic" dino rather than a dinosaur-like fantasy monster like the  patchisaurs. Yes... this is beautiful. 

And because this was a little bit thin, I decided to take a few pics of my reissue Marx Tyrannosaurus, which I don't believe I featured except as a pic for my T. rex-vs. research post. This is another epitome of bad dino design. As covered in my video on the Hideous Abomination, this was made as part of the 1950s "large mold" group, along with the great Brontosaurus and less great Kronosaurus pliosaur/ plesiosaur hybrid. This, on the other hand, was easily the worst dino Marx ever did. The pose is wrong, the teeth are wrong, the expression is just goofy, and the arms are... actually right??? It's the kind of mess that can be endearing long after well-meaning "scientific" restorations are forgotten. Here's a few pics.

"Howdy, is this where I audition for Valley of Gwangi?"

And why not a pic with the Abomination?

"Yeah, my agent said I was going to be in Dungeons and Dragons..."

And an interactive pic...

So, that finishes my anniversary post. As I already rambled at the beginning, this feature is one of the things that keeps this blog going, and the blog has been a major reason I've gotten back into writing far enough to be close to finishing a novel. (Too bad about the ones I actually posted here...) It's a small thing, but like a tiny fossil, small things can be everything. The bottom line is, I'm glad to have come this far, and I hope to go a lot further. And I couldn't end this without the Truckstop Queen!

"When they said cowboys and dinosaurs, this was not what I had in mind..."

That's all for now, more to come!