Z is for Zoorassic Park!

Hey - if it's good enough for the Regents' it's good enough for Small Scale World and I'm short on zeds! After last year's almost endless (-seeming) dinosaur posts, this year has been a bit thin on pre-historic nature, but the odd bit has come in (or been left over from last year) and they all got shoved in this folder, so: time's come to clear it!

Boley are a strange company, some of their stuff is very good, with a nice range of HO armour and big-rigs for model railways in the past, then there was the rather poor-quality rack-toys we looked at a while ago (last year's RTM or earlier?), and then there's this, which manages to be all kinds of awful, yet has a set of five dinosaurs which are rather good, by which I mean they hold themselves up to comparison with other rack-toy dino's!

If you can ignore the fact that the rabbit is as big as the cat OR the donkey, the farm animals are OK as sculpts, just not scale-compatible, while the four wild animals are really low-hanging fruit, the lion and tiger are reasonable sculpts, but as a group . . . three big-cats from two continents and a baby giraffe - he doesn't stand a chance!

But the dinosaurs are ok, nicely in scale, two-colour decoration with that sort of 'contour' over-spraying and reasonable poses, worth buying the bag if you see it, and collect dinosaurs? And remembering my own childhood - most kids don't care about the anomalies too much, it's just more animals for the animal tub/tin/box/drawer!

I love the "over 17 pieces" . . . well . . . that'll be 18 then?!!!! Boley currently have slightly better looking stuff in tub-buckets.

Having seen them (from Wilko?) on Moonbase, then shelfied them in The Works, I first shelfied them again as a set of four in Poundworld Plus . . .

. . . then gave in to the temptation of another Dimetrodon (however crude!) and bought the other assortment, silly 'cos they were only a pound for 8 in The Works but I needed some vape-juice and only had my card on me and I always feel guilty using a card for little things of less than two quid (one of the reasons all news stories about the imminent demise of cash are column-filling bollocks!), so topped-up with crap fourth or fifth-generation piracies of old US Dinosaurs - and a load of bar-snacks!

Fluorescent primaries are a bitch to photograph, so here are two contrasting shots which between them give you some idea of the level of 'detail' on these mouldings and the true colour of my t-shirt!

Picked these up in a charity shop the other day, there were two each of 24 for a 48-count and I think we may have looked at some before . . . blind-bags or kid's-comic giveaways? Anyway - they are very small, as well painted as the Boley's above; in the same style, but only one colour over a cream base-material with the eyes spotted-in.

Last time we looked at these 'minis' (they are mostly 40/50mm)I said I'd do a comparison of all of them, and that need's only grown with the addition of these, but I still haven't got round to it; it's a low priority, but I'll see if I can't heave them out and get it done in the autumn.

Four - later - Palaeolithic (?) mammals are also included in the mix, the small size of the set (scale is too strong a word) leaves three of these pretty perfect for Airfix Tarzan and hunters - Lost World stylie! But the mammoth is a tad too small. Does anyone know what set/maker they are or from?

They only have a very small 'CHINA' mark, no numbers (common with these modern chinasaur sets), and the sabre-toothed cat and mammoth enjoy a second colour for their teeth, the big, black Rex'alike also has a second colour with red behind his black-dot eyes, while the Dimetrodon is a full two-colours (yeay!).

A stop-press from Brian Berke came-in last week with these, they seem to be better quality versions of the Wilko erasers we looked-at a while ago, lacking the flash of the UK issue, also of different species and priced cheaper at a dollar than our pound! Brian pointed out that his 'Berserker' now has his own 'Timpo' dinosaurs, and thanks go to Brian for the Boley shots too.