Monday, October 18, 2021

Thunder! Thunder! Thunderlizards, ho!

For the Venusian campaign, it seemed impossible that there would not be dinosaurs other giant fauna (not to mention flora). However, unless you've shopped for some recently, you'd be surprised how hard it is to find inexpensive hard plastic dinosaur toys of any appreciable size. In the name of safety, although I suspect it's mostly marketing, dinosaur toys are more often now made of "soft and safe" plastic which squishes or at least flexes and bends with ease. 

Great if you have a destructive toddler bent on destroying your flat screen with flying objects. Not so great for my purposes.

My local DollarTree, bastion of inexpensive toys from China, had no dinosaurs of note save a few that would best be described as "gummy".

However, I finally found a set of larger hard plastic dinos on Amazon with a 30% off coupon that put the price around $2 USD + change (also USD) each.

Well they are mostly hard plastic. Frankly at this point, I'll take what I can get.

Three will most definitely be pressed into service. The others will probably see life as background / set dressing or be pilfered by my son when we're playing with toys together.

Wagon train. Well, one wagon so far. Another stegosaurus though and I'm calling it a train.

Spinosaurus was either not known or was prejudiced against when I was a kid and excluded from the books I had available - loaded with illustrations of boring green and gray dinosaurs dragging their tails on the ground (amazingly we still though dinosaurs were awesome). I only learned of it when my son was born and Dinosaur Train became a staple for a time. It is, second to stegosaurus, my favorite dinosaur. I intended for it to be led on ropes by handlers into battle, where at that point it's a free for all.

Triceratops with a howdah / platform. Well, it will eventually have one, this is just to give an idea of future plans.

Size-wise these aren't far from 1/35 - well the stegosaurus isn't far from it at least. I haven't checked the others. Obviously, scale accuracy wasn't really my goal but I did want them to convey a certain mass and I think these do the trick.

8 comments:

  1. The howdah triceratops will be a sweet model John! Your soldiers and dinos really seem to go well together! Things are really shaping up and at a great bargain price too! Well done!

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    1. Thanks, Brad! I feel like there was an old Citadel model that I might have seen that was much like this concept. Time to dig through some old Dragon magazines!

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  2. I’ll second that re the howdah model! This is all moving along very nicely indeed. The dinosaurs look great beside the figures!

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    1. Thank you! I'm quite pleased thus far.

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  3. They look just right for me, especially the one not seen whan I was young. (in books!!)

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    1. ha! My son likes to refer to anything before his birth as "the ancient times".

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  4. I am working on a Gonzo 1/32 scale Pulp Alley campaign that has elements of Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Them and 50's rockabilly themes. This post is perfect. Feel free to post more like these.

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    1. That sounds excellent! And there will definitely be more posted about this collection. It's only just begun!

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