Dino-Riders Dinosaur
Item No.: Asst. ??? No. ??? Manufacturer:Tyco Includes:Nothing, but should have had Sky, a saddle, and a bag of blasters and a ladder Action Feature:n/a Retail:?? Availability: ca. 1987 Other: Dino-only was sold under the Smithsonian brand, but you could get versions of it with gear under Dino-Riders and later Cadillacs & Dinosaurs
I don't know for sure what this is - I found this Deinonychus at a Goodwill before COVID in a sack with two other partially incomplete Dino-Riders toys. This little fellow had a broken and incomplete bit of his gear. The kicking mechanism sort of works - pushing the button doesn't do anything, but if you move the legs you may see the lever move. Clearly, it's a survivor - and a reminder that we're all temporary stewards of these toys. This one made some kid happy at some point, wound up in a closet, and despite Dino-Riders being sought-after collectibles, he just got dumped in a bag at a thrift store in Phoenix at some point in the 2010s. Good toy finds are still out there, for those who are blessed with the tenacity or dumb luck to find them.
These toys were the absolute peak of 1980s dinosaur toy nonsense. Most toy dinosaurs were devoid of articulation prior to the 1980s, thanks to their being popular creatures with kids that were in the public domain. Companies like Marx would make some, and others would make bigger or smaller bootlegs - and later we'd see companies make superior products, be they Bone Age, Definitely Dinosaurs, and the like. But Dino-Riders were king. They had a full cartoon series, gorgeous painted fifth-panel window box packaging, action figure "pilots," and little clear bead eyes that were just plain superior to anything else on the market. If you got one of these, you were pretty lucky as a kid - the line laster for a couple of years before it died during an Ice Age expansion. Many really good dinosaurs were already made - certainly, many of the ones kids of that era would know - so it more or less ran its course.
Tyco knew they had a good thing going, so they got the license for The Smithsonian Institution and slapped it on dino-only (and electronics-free) rereleases of these animals around 1990. Those did well, but kids were savvy enough to understand what was happening and treasured the original toys if they had them. It also raised their quality - after all, we dumb kids saw a museum slapped on the box and said "wow, these must be the very best!" A few years later, Kenner put out Jurassic Park stuff and I skipped a lot of it because I still carried a torch for Dino-Riders, even the ones I didn't have.
The deinonychus - popularized through books and if you saw it, a TV special hosted by Christopher Reeve called Dinosaur! from 1985 - was more or less the I>Jurassic Park movie's Velociraptor. The TV special and the film both had work done by Phil Tippet, so that's probably not a massive coincidence.
These things were hard plastic, without any flexibility in sight. The fact that the tail didn't snap off from years of play, time buried in boxes, or a trip to the dump that is Goodwill is remarkable. Similarly, the open mouth isn't rubbery either so it stands a monument to Tyco's product development that made it almost four decades with only minor scuffs on the bottom of his feet and a worn-out mechanism. The skin texture and general look of the beast is from before Jurassic Park completely redesigned the public's idea of what a dinosaur should look like - which, thanks to the confirmation of feathers on fossils, is now also something of an archaic idea. The open mouth and wide eyes are similar to what kids had in decades prior, but with some really nice paint. The clawed feet have a creamy color, there are painted white teeth, the scales have stripes. It's pretty ornate for 1987, and certainly raised the bar for dinosaur toys to come. And this one is incomplete - the original release had a saddle and a 3-inch figure as well as a sprue filled with necklaces, blasters, and a ladder. You got a lot in the box, not to mention the stunningly cool paintings on the boxes that certainly felt like the top of the American toy packaging art mountain. They simply did not get better than this line.
These things were hard plastic, without any flexibility in sight. The fact that the tail didn't snap off from years of play, time buried in boxes, or a trip to the dump that is Goodwill is remarkable. Similarly, the open mouth isn't rubbery either so it stands a monument to Tyco's product development that made it almost four decades with only minor scuffs on the bottom of his feet and a worn-out mechanism. The skin texture and general look of the beast is from before Jurassic Park completely redesigned the public's idea of what a dinosaur should look like - which, thanks to the confirmation of feathers on fossils, is now also something of an archaic idea. The open mouth and wide eyes are similar to what kids had in decades prior, but with some really nice paint. The clawed feet have a creamy color, there are painted white teeth, the scales have stripes. It's pretty ornate for 1987, and certainly raised the bar for dinosaur toys to come. And this one is incomplete - the original release had a saddle and a 3-inch figure as well as a sprue filled with necklaces, blasters, and a ladder. You got a lot in the box, not to mention the stunningly cool paintings on the boxes that certainly felt like the top of the American toy packaging art mountain. They simply did not get better than this line.
I wish I could have a complete one, or a reissue, but aside from trademark-keeping keshi figures IP holder Mattel hasn't done much with this brand. It's a pity - I assume Mattel Creations could make a pretty penny doing straight-up reissues of these guys. He stands amazingly well, with big feet and a good center of gravity. The little arms are jointed, giving kids just enough stability to play with the sci-fi gear and not have it fall over. These days we get raptor toys that sometimes just flop over, but that's how we older fans look at everything - nothing is as good as it was in the old days.
If you want one of these guys without the gear, they're mercifully quite cheap on eBay - $12 or so before shipping - with complete samples being closer to $100, and boxed samples just plain not being available for anything remotely resembling a good price. Kids who got these loved them, and I doubt many were bought by parents that, for some reason or another, a child never got their hands on. If you've got the money, this is a line worthy of collecting and it makes me a little sad it never came back in a big way. Imaginext and Creative Beast's own Beasts of the Mesozoic were clearly inspired by it (for totally opposing levels of realism) and I wouldn't be surprised if something like this, marketing to children with realistic dinosaurs and goofy action add-ons, could kick the action toy industry out of its complacency. These things were as much action toys as they were realistic models, allowing kids to drop the gear as they got older to have a nice dinosaur on a shelf.
If by some miracle you stumble on these at a thrift store, buy them. If you don't want them, someone you know (or don't know) will be glad you rescued them.
16bit.com is best not viewed in Apple's Safari browser, we don't know why. All material on this site copyright their respective copyright holders. All materials appear hear for informative and entertainment purposes. 16bit.com is not to be held responsible for anything, ever. Photos taken by the 16bit.com staff. Site design, graphics, writing, and whatnot credited on the credits page. Be cool-- don't steal. We know where you live and we'll break your friggin' legs.
RSS 
