The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Walk on the wild side!

 

It's time for this month's dino blog, which as always means the most work for the least views. This time around, I'm doing another clearance of the backlogged material, specifically stuff that I didn't buy but still photographed to have proof it exists. And it you've been here long enough to get a feel for what I'll pay money for, you can already guess this is going to be a rough ride. To start with, here's pics above and below from the store where I got the Dragon Knight dinobot.

For contest, these pics are from two different trips. The big brachiosaur in the opening pic is an electronic/ animatronic toy made of foam rubber, I'm sure considerably larger than the Dormei Godzilla. The packaged set immediately above looked like they could be knockoffs of 1980s vintage dinosaurs. The resemblance is especially strong to the Imperial dinos, though not enough to convince me these are direct copies. It's one of the most interesting things I've seen for sale new, and in 20/20 hindsight, I definitely should have gotten this rather than the dinobot. It's the kind of thing that fascinates me just by continuing to exist. While I'm at it, here's another mall sighting, from a semi-classy shop.

What interested me about these is that they are about on the level you might see in a museum gift shop. To me, they really aren't any more interesting than the patchisaurs and other obviously outdated dinos that are still out there. Of course, they're nicer and more polished, but they have their own scientific flaws, as evident especially from the brachiosaur. Next up, here's something that was at the grocery store not long ago.

This one is as far as I can tell a bagged version of the Walmart Marx clone dino set, complete with the patchisaur Pteranodon and the Hideous Abomination. (If it looks like you're seeing a frog foot in the lower pic, that's the Abomination....) The weird part is, they also threw in a uintathere, which almost convinced me to buy this thing. I might have eventually, but the set got sold out. Next, here's a sighting at the unidentified restaurant/ shop where I found Gumby and Pokey. Don't know that I have anything to say...

And to wind things up, here's even more from the store where I got the dinobot.

Apparently, you can make a Carnotaurus look goofier than the real thing.

On the other hand, this looks more realistic than the Dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park.

Why is the bootleg packaging rip off a movie nobody remembers?

And multiple Godzillas!

And with that, I'm wrapping this up. These truly are what I do this featuer and the blog for. I may not get much of my traffic from these posts, but it's always worth it, and sooner or later, I might even turn this into a book. (A reminder, I just got a new ebook out!) And here's one more thing...

That's all for now, more to come!

Rogues' Roundup: Christmas robot toys!

 

It's time for yet another Christmas post, and as you might guess, I have a big backlog of junk I could use. The big surprise is that a lot of this is stuff people just give to me, or at least things I got in "white elephant" exchanges. For this post, I also did some maintenance and even took a bit of video. To kick things off, here's the central exhibit and I believe the first one I got, a jazz reindeer!

Legalize it! Mistletoe, that is...

For the history, I think I got this in 2016 or so. When I got him, he would play "Jingle Bells" and do a sort of dance. The tag that would give the usual date and manufacturer's info appears to have been deliberately removed. To my further recollection, there was some extra stuff tacked on that I removed. However, I never seriously doubted that the saxophone came with the figure, though at this point, it's only securely attached to his mouth, which makes it look like an oversized pipe. He proved to pose the most issues when I tried to get him to work, something I'll get to further in. For now, here's one more pic with generic Godzilla. The big guy's taller, but not by a lot.

"Oh yeah, I was tripping every frame of Godzilla vs. Hedorah..."

Next up, we have the most elaborate gimmick of the group. It's a regular dancing reindeer, except it also has a light-up fan that spells out a holiday message. I got it in a box I lost track of. A tag says "Newtoys", but doesn't give a date. Here's the toy.

And here's the other two. The first is a more or less realistic dog that "sings" and rolls around. A tag gives the company name Kids For America and the date 2007. The other is a more cartoony character that swings his head around to the tune. A tag on one ear gives the product name Puppy Precious, and advertises that it plays 10 songs, but I can find no other info. Both make a barking sound tuned to the music. Another common denominator is that they are very overpowered, which I will get to. Here's a couple pics, with a Marx Soviet soldier for reference, because we haven't had giant Marx lately.

"Gaahh! Capitalist consumerist killer robot attack dog!"

With this lineup in places the real question was if I could get them to work. I set up a work area on the Couch Mark 2, got out a bunch of batteries, and set things up to upload to my misbegotten Youtube channel. As alluded above, the big reindeer required the most work. At the start, he would play a few notes of music without doing anything else. With a change of batteries, he would play music again, but didn't move. I turned the neck and joints, and gave it a few more tries, and eventually he did start dancing again. Unfortunately, he's very prone to falling over, an issue I had noted previously. Here's the before and after.

The reindeer with the fan posed a different kind of problem. A change of batteries got it to play and light up. The real difficulty is that the head isn't clear of the fan. To get a good recording, I had to adjust the head to keep the fan from snagging. Here's the Youtube clip.

Singing Reindeer with LED fan! - YouTube

The kaiju dog proved to be the easiest to deal with. The Dogzilla is billed as singing and dancing, but he really just swings the giant head back and forth like he's shaking a rat. Here is his big moment.

Then for the finale, I had the rolling dog. I had him working before the others, with just a change of batteries. Most if not all the action is from the massive tail and what must be a very powerful motor. I quickly learned not to hold onto the toy during a demonstration, because getting your hand in the way borders on painful and certainly can't be good for the toy. For this post, I set up a squad of the giant Marx figures for a little fun. The humanity...

Vintage Marx figures vs. Christmas robot dog! - YouTube

And with that, I'm done for today. Merry Christmas; life and light; and praise to the Logos made flesh. That's all for now, more to come!

Mystery Monday: Imperial rubber monsters sequel

 

It's The start of my first full week of the month, and I decided to hold off on the movie reviews. That left this slot for Mystery Monday, and I was reminded it's been a while since I had a "real" mystery (compare the mystery red guy that started all this). It's been quite a while since I covered something that posed a challenge even for my knowledge and investigative abilities. (I will freely admit, there is one case still unsolved!) However, I have said all along that there are mysteries great and small, and it just happens I have a few loose ends from my last dino post, which covered the infamous products of Imperial. In the course of that post, I considered some additional material, far enough in to take a number of pics. I decided, however, that I already had enough, and some of these things didn't quite fit. To get this going, here are the ones that were closest to getting in before, a pair of genuine prehistoric animals including a dino.

Of these two, the dino is by a wide margin the one I've had longest, and I suppose I wouldn't have hesitated to include it with my Imperial lineup if it had been the only one already in my collections. It's essentially the same style and material as other Imperial dinos, usually assigned a comparable date of 1985. The cat, on the other hand, was its own thing. It's made of softer and probably cheaper material, almost on par with a "bigmouth" dino. What was even more striking was the quite late date of 1989. The icing on the cake of wonkiness is those ears, which look like they belong on a dog rather than a prehistoric predator. Here's a closeup.

Meanwhile, the one I've really been holding out for is a find I made at a collectible store that closed a few years back. I long debated putting it in a dino post. Obviously, it's not a realistic dinosaur, but neither were the patchisaurs and generic Godzilla. It's still in the same style as plenty of dinos, particularly the "big mouth" types. The real counterarguent is just how goofy this thing is. By comparison, even the patchisaurs could be vaguely menacing. This guy, however, is so completely unthreatening that the least of the patchis (probably the rust monster) would laugh at him. Here's a few pics of him in full glory, for lack of a better word, with the Imperial Tyrannosaurus.

"Well, at least you didn't get knocked off by the worst GI Joe set..."

This creature was originally made for a knockoff genre I had previously investigated, intended as unauthorized "riding" animals for He Man and other fantasy/ sci fi toys. I further determined that it was part of an actual line, originally dubbed Dragons And Daggers. Somewhat later, they tried to shift to science fiction with Robots, Lasers And Galaxies, which was really many of the same creatures with more technological-looking accessories. (See 2 Warps To Neptune here, here and here.)Here's a pic of the beast with Sidekick Carl and the giant Tonka lady aka the Nine-Foot Woman to show how it would have worked.

"Could you please stop trying to eat my boyfriend? Apart from anything else, he's made from a lot of stuff that's not edible..."

And here he is with the ca 70 mm Marx knights and Timmee fantasy figures.

"A king's duty is to command from a safe distance..."

It was this one that gave me an angle on the whole lot. This got me thinking, were any other beasts released as mounts? Were there any repurposed when the fantasy craze died down? I was especially suspicious about the sabertooth, which would have been hitting the shelves just a little after Masters of the Universe went through its prolonged and painful death. Alas, I found no hard data to show it was released in this fashion. The real test, however, was first-hand experimentation. For history, yeah, let's go with that. Here's the beast with a couple of my very few remaining TMNT figures.

Ironically, judging from this test, the dino that was made independent of the "riding beast" niche works about as well at the cat which would have been made at the tail end of it. It's further apparent that late lines like the Ninja Turtles offered decent compatibility with holdovers from He Man's heyday. Here's one more for kicks.

And then there was one more thing to try, a rematch with the Gas Station Duchess and the Imperial tyrannosaur. I think Connie might be ready for a long-term relationship...

"How did T. rex mate? Asking for a friend..."

And with that, I'm wrapping this up. As always, more to come!

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Invicta vs. Imperial mixed lot!

 

It's getting close to Halloween, and I haven't yet done my dino blog for the month. I decided it was time to do something I've had for a little while. About a month ago, I ordered a lot of three dinos, mainly because I recognized one as of much more value than the others. What I got was a group more eclectic than a lot of the mixed army man lots I have. To kick things off, here's a pic of the one actually worth something.

This guy is a Baryonyx from Invicta, dated 1989 per Dinosaur Toy Blog. We last met this manufacturer with the plesiosaur last month. The company is a UK manufacturer, best known for selling to and through the British Museum. This was of further note as probably the first toy/ collectible to portray the species and by extension a "modern" spinosaur (see the Spinosaurus post), which many consider to be among the manufacturer's best. I had long since figured out that that these command some of the highest prices of any vintage dinos, usually with an extra hit for overseas shipping.  The upshot was that the Baryonyx alone was easily greater than the total price for the group put together. Here's some more shots of what I got.

Overall, this one is a nice enough find, but not really living up to its reputation. The best thing I can say is that it arrived in good condition, albeit with a gritty feel. It also gives good texturing for the skin, and a fair likeness of the head. As a nice extra touch, it's sculpted with a fish in one hand. But then there are things that are just unnecessary strangeness. The nostril is too far back on the head, for example, and the claws on the hand don't look quite right. The egregious problem is the feet, which are much too small and shaped so oddly they don't even match each other. What it feels like overall is something made too late and too early. It's bigger than a Marx dino, without being anymore playworthy, while still lacking the accuracy and overall quality that would come into play in another decade. Here's a closeup to show what I mean about the feet.

And here's a shot with the plesiosaur.

The other two were from a brand I have long been familiar with, Imperial. I mentioned them in my post on "bigmouth" dinos, the cheapest of the cheap vintage dinos, as well as the mystery Godzilla knockoff. I described Imperial as a maker of "bigmouth" dinosaurs, but I have gone back and forth whether their products deserve what that label means to me. They certainly made dinos and other creatures that look like bigmouths, but there are certain characteristics that are difficult to confirm or rule out without direct handling. As it happened, the lot was filled out with not one but two Imperial dinos. Here's the first, a stegosaur.

Grr. Rawr. I must be British because I'm not showing my teeth.

This one shows the Imperial style. It's clearly cheap, but not egregiously so. Conspicuously absent is the open, hollow mouth of a "bigmouth" dino. The material reflects the intermediate quality, flexible without being entirely rubbery. It's just good enough that I don't have a lot to say. Not compared to the motherlode...

This guy was one I ran across in research for the "bigmouth" post, and the pictures I found left me wondering if I might have owned it. I specifically remembered having a very large dino of the bigmouth type, with a yellow and green paint job. This one came closer than anything else I could confirm existed, especially in the color. Beyond that, it was clearly a successful design that still gets decent prices. Alas, even a cursory inspection confirmed this was not the dino I remembered having, and undoubtedly of far better quality. In particular, while it is sculpted with an open mouth, the internal space is cordoned off. Here's one more pic.

In the process of this post, I dug up a little more material I decided could wait for another day. What invited further attention was the perfectly unthreatening posing of those thin, little arms. It's so ineffectual, it calls to mind any number of stereotypes (not to mention the saga of When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth). As I pondered it, I realized I was feeling a certain deja vu, and that was when I thought of this.; image credit Joe A Day.

This is the GI Joe Dino Hunter playset, released in 1992 as a preemptive Jurassic Park cash in. I personally have no recollection of it, though I remember well the pitiful state of the final days of the Joe line. (I kept buying them anyway...) Among the few who know about it, this is remembered not just as a low point for GI Joe (really not even that low if you really remember), but one of the most notorious low-end dinos of all time (and one of the most expensive if you try to get it). Once I thought of this angle, the first thing I wondered was if Hasbro had simply bought up a stock of the Imperial dinos for the set. On examination, there were quite clear differences, especially the crossed arms, which if possible make the dino look even more ludicrous. On the other hand, the resemblance is far too strong to doubt that this is a direct ripoff. Just how Hasbro could have come to the point of stealing from Imperial is a whole other mindboggling can of worms. For extra hilarity, here's the box art.

And now, of course, I had to have a shot with the Truckstop Queen, with the Couch Mark 2. Holy kaka, this thing is big!

And the Duchess aka Connie...

"He's all apex predator to me!"

And with that, I'm wrapping this up. It's just enough dinos for a month that's been very busy, and I have plenty more lined up. That's all for now, more to come!