As the central hero of Jurassic Park, Alan Grant is probably the figure kids will ask for first. He's smarter than your average audience surrogate, and having the bulk of the leads of a big action movie be smart people and kids is certainly the kind of thing we don't see as much these days. The figure is vaguely like the movie - but not really. If you collected old Star Wars figures, you kind of know the drill - parts of him are more or less correct. He's got a similarly colored hat in the movie. The shirt in the movie has a collar, so it's not a perfect match - but it is blue. The coloring of his pants matches, but I gotta assume the kneepads were a decision to make him more action-oriented for some reason.
Were it not for the ID card with a "JP" logo on his chest, you could probably make a case for Dr. Grant being a bootleg. The likeness is coincidental at best, and this figure could easily be repurposed as another character entirely. He's got a big chest and is posed like he's about to pluck a tool off his belt. He doesn't really need hands posed to aim a gun, because his backpack launches nets and for some reason he comes with a nuclear smart bomb to carry around. The book involved the destruction of the island, but I don't seem to recall Grant doing it, or a nuke being lobbed at the landscape. It's a big, knobby weapon with a radioactive symbol and no deco - the grip is huge, but it fits in his hands adequately. Much like the net launcher, it ain't great.
I hate net launchers as figure accessories, mostly because they don't work well. Rolling up the net and launching it is a trial. Getting it on his back is a pain. Making it so it unrolls and actually catches something is dang near impossible. It is a fun projectile, though - it lobs a few inches and knocks things down nicely.
Grant's look and feel is as generic as they come - had this been another actor, you'd probably find it about as accurate. He can stand just fine, and he sits adequately. His companion dinosaur is far more interesting with leathery skin, a white JP logo, and a blue an white head. The little guy has a 4-inch wingspan and could really benefit from a display stand. Unfortunately all he's going to do is just sit on a flat surface, sort of wobbling on his belly. The sculpt is certainly adequate, but the beak could probably have benefitted from being a different color. It's still pretty slick, though, and gives you a pretty good idea of how the shifting concept of how dinosaurs look and move through the years. These guys were a mix of state-of-the-art and movie magic, so those looking for scientifically accurate dinosaurs will continue to be disappointed.
I don't remember seeing this figure sitting around as much as some others (Nedry) and I'm surprised to see that it's still somewhat cheap. $15-$20 is a perfectly acceptable price for a figure that's 22 years old, but it's also not exactly a very good figure. I'd say all of the Alan Grant figures are, at best, interesting. The smaller ones for the third movie are fun throwbacks, these ones are fairly good examples of what a toy from 1993 looked like (and why it needed to change), but I would love to know if the elementary school target audience of 1993 hold these figures in particularly high esteem. At 20, Star Wars t-shirts featured the action figures. Maybe it's a bad example, but it doesn't seem like any of these popular toys stand as an iconic plastic representation of one of the biggest properties of the decade. If you get a chance to look it over in person you should, but I'd say get one of the figures from the third movie - or hold your breath for a new better one - just in case someone is considering it now.
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