Nerding Day: Jurassic Park's Bizarre 1990s Toylines (Patreon)

If there’s one thing kids loved in the '90s, it was growing up in a country that still had some semblance of a social contract in place. If there was a second thing they loved, it was dinosaurs. A lot of people ask me, Merritt, what were the '90s like? Well, it was basically like today except the dream job for kids was paleontologist instead of Tik Tok NPC streamer, everything was constantly covered in slime, and the average person could afford to buy a home.

Jurassic Park was more than a movie back then — it felt real, couched as it was in Crichtonian cutting edge sci-fi. We didn’t know that Michael Crichton was the kind of guy who believed that climate change was a liberal plot to undermine America at the time. We just wanted real-life dinosaurs, and Jurassic Park was as close as we were going to get.

Of course, you couldn't have a blockbuster movie in the '90s without toys — hell, even Terminator 2 got action figures — and Jurassic Park was no different.

I’ve talked at length about the kinds of toys that were popular in the '80s and '90s, before video games more or less drove them into near-extinction and later, resurrection as high-end collector’s items for adults with treatment-resistant depression staring down the barrel of a midlife crisis in an economy where they can’t afford the more traditional cope of a sports car. Kenner was behind a lot of the biggest properties back then, stuff like The Real Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Do you not remember that last one? Alan Rickman won a BAFTA for it!

They were able to churn this stuff out partly by reusing designs from their back catalogs, but it wasn’t like anyone could tell that Friar Tuck was actually just a Gamorrean guard with Mike McShane’s head. Right?

The point is, if Kevin Costner was in it, then Kenner probably made toys of it. Yes, there were Waterworld action figures. There was a Virtual Boy game! You can still go to see the stunt show at Universal Studios! Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular has outlived the Back to the Future ride, the Terminator 2 show, and Henry Kissinger. It will laugh at all of our funerals.

If Kenner had just popped out a few plastic dinosaurs with the Jurassic Park logo on them, they would have sold. But this was a company staffed exclusively by toy lunatics, men and women whose desire to innovate in the space of children’s entertainment went far beyond admirable and became something sick and terrifying. These were the people who made the infamous 1979 Alien action figure that gave countless children nightmares, the minds who conceived of the Terminator 2 “bio-flesh regenerator.” They weren’t going to half-ass this, unlike the Terminators produced by the bio-flesh regenerator.

The main star of the show here is the dinosaurs themselves, but let's not forget the human characters. Initial offerings included most of the main cast, with the notable exceptions of Henry Wu and Ray Arnold (due to racism), Lex Murphy (due to sexism), and Donald Gennaro (due to justifiable anti-lawyer bias). Each of the humans has their own gimmicks, which tend to divert considerably from their depiction in the film. Look, were they really going to have a Jeff Goldblum figure that lounges around shirtless or sensually explains chaos theory to a spoken-for paleontologist? They should have, but they probably wanted to use the leftover missile launcher molds from the old Police Academy line.

Let's take a look at Alan Grant. He comes with an "Aerial Net Trap," which makes sense. Kenner was really careful to portray the human figures as capturing and subduing the dinosaurs, rather than fucking murdering them, which fits with the themes of the movie. Dinosaurs aren't monsters, they're just animals. At Jurassic Park, we seek to understand and profit from them, not blast them into quivering chunks of meat.

Well, we'll come back to this whole "not harming dinosaurs" thing later, but for now, there's one other thing about Grant that's worth mentioning, and that's his other accessory. It's a nondescript gray plastic tube. Take your best guess as to what it's supposed to be. A tiny jail for pteranodon criminals? A dino DNA container?

Neither. It's a nuclear smart bomb.

Look: I know this was probably the result of some executive demanding that the designers shove in cool-sounding words to appeal to kids, and "nuclear smart bomb" definitely sounds better than "unidentifiable Police Academy accessory we discovered in the warehouse," but a nuclear fucking smart bomb?

First of all, what's his plan here? Become dinosaur Oppenheimer and condemn Isla Nublar to a holocaust of atomic fire? Second, where did he find nuclear arms? In the action figure version of Jurassic Park, did John Hammond buy black market nukes to deter the world's governments from interfering with his experiments? Is that why he's missing from the toy line? Is action figure John Hammond being imprisoned in the Hague playset, which is actually just a repaint of the Police Academy precinct?

Moving on, would you have guessed there was a Dennis Nedry figure? In the '90s, it was the closest you could get to a Newman toy, and Jerry Seinfeld would have loved this thing — no, it doesn’t come with a sexy teenage assistant — its special action is that Nedry’s arms rip off, a feature they call "dino-damage." As a writer, I feel that this is an incredible euphemism for "a wealthy maniac genetically resurrected dinosaurs and one or more of them tore your limbs out of their sockets."

The inclusion of Nedry over, say, Hammond is such a strange choice. I guess they figured they needed a human villain in the initial offerings, and the closest thing Jurassic Park has to one is a bumbling, greedy goon who gets killed by dinosaurs for his trouble. Sadly, the figure doesn't capture Wayne Knight's likeness at all, which is maybe why they took another run at him in the second series of figures. It's still not sexy enough, damn it!

By the time they got to this second release, Kenner's designers were already chafing at the constraints of the film. Much like John Hammond's scientists, at this point they lost interest in whether or not they should, and became solely preoccupied with what they could. There's still no BD Wong or Sam Jackson in series II — instead, Kenner released a set of "Evil Raiders," a group of original characters who seemingly exist to answer the question, "what if Jurassic Park starred a stable of professional wrestlers instead of the guys from The Fly and In the Mouth of Madness."

Plainly put, they kick ass. The greatest amongst them is undoubtedly “Doctor Snare,” a man who is dressed like a boss from a '80s Konami game set in the old west and whose hand position and facial expression lock him in an endless sarcastic pantomime of jacking off.

Don’t sleep on Skinner, though, who looks like a more racist Don Cherry abusing human growth hormone. He looks like Hulk Hogan died laying an egg. He looks like the star of something called Turkish Aquaman.

Sadly, SCRAP DAVIS™ was never actually released. Can you imagine? A cyborg in Jurassic Park? That would be absurd. There have to be limits. Rules.

Even these bad guys, who presumably have no compunctions about killing dinosaurs for fun and/or profit, are equipped with “non-lethal” weaponry like tranquilizer rifles and “hair trigger dino traps.” With the exception of Alan Grant’s nuclear capabilities, all of the humans in the Jurassic Park toy line are just trying to get these rambunctious critters back under control.

Except.

Remember how Dennis Nedry had a “dino-damage” feature? This was also the main selling point of most of the dinosaur toys themselves, somewhat blurring the meaning of the term — does it refer to damage inflicted by a dinosaur? On a dinosaur? Both? Kenner’s toy scientists were too busy developing “realistic dinosaur skin” to care.

Here I have to state that I’m extremely charmed by the note on the collector site JP Toys, “there is no such thing [as realistic dinosaur skin] of course, since we’ll never know for sure what dinosaur skin felt like.” Well, Kenner dared to dream.

The resulting dinosaurs were encased in a rubbery material rather than hard plastic, giving them the feel of an upmarket synthskin dildos. On an unrelated note, the Jurassic Park dinosaur skin was made out of a polyester fiber rather than the more common rubber of the time, so they’re totally safe for insertion for those with latex allergies.

Why go to all the trouble of making dinosaurs with “realistic” skin? To rip it off, naturally, revealing the meat and bone beneath! This is the apotheosis of the “battle damage” gimmick of the '80s. We’re bringing dinosaurs back to life to tear them apart again, for we have unlocked the secrets of life and have become as gods. Use your tranquilizer darts and capture nets to rip the flesh. Splinter the bone. Savor the meat.

And then there’s the Jungle Explorer, a riff on the Ford Explorer tour vehicle in the film. In a departure from the source material, the Jungle Explorer mounts a turret which can be manned by a human figure. Does it fire a weighted net? Knockout gas canisters? “Dinosaur capture glue” that looks suspiciously like realistic dinosaur cum? (There is no such thing of course, since we’ll never know for sure what dinosaur cum felt like.)

No. It fires “blood sampling missiles.”

I desperately wish I could speak with the person who wrote this copy. I know the truth — that it was likely penned in a late-night work session just before a deadline by someone who thought it sounded vaguely scientific and sufficiently non-violent for the line. Even the copy in Kenner’s catalog is noncommittal, stating “Fire the blood-sampling missile and ‘analyze’ a dinosaur's DNA!"

The Spanish text describes the feature as a missile with “paralyzing liquid,” which I suppose makes a little more sense. Whoever wrote the Italian translation, no doubt preoccupied with languorous copulation and chain smoking cigarettes, just gave up entirely and said “it shoots-a da missile.”

But I want the story behind the story. I have a dinosaur bone-deep need to sit the writer down and ask them, just what exactly is a blood-sampling missile? Is the idea that it would fly to its target, collect a blood sample, and return like some kind of Dracula drone? The commercial depicts it blasting open the skin of a dinosaur, freeing the blood from its fleshy prison. Are we meant to infer that the JP team then samples the blood from the jungle floor?

In the broadest possible sense, I suppose that all missiles are “blood sampling missiles.”

Kenner continued to produce Jurassic Park toys throughout the '90s. By the time the “Chaos Effect” figures came out in 1998, they’d left behind everything about the Jurassic Park franchise except the concept of dinosaurs existing. Here, they decided to just say fuck it and create their own dinosaur hybrids because they could, proving that they’d learned nothing from the film and sort of anticipating the plot of Jurassic World.

As for human characters, the Chaos Effect line only contained two: Ian Malcolm, who had become a dinosaur-fighting member of the X-Men, and Roland Tembo, reimagined as a fucking cyborg with a gatling missile launcher. Get into the Trike Dozer armed with grabbing claw, kids, we’re going to blow up some reanimated dinosaurs with Mr. Kobayashi from The Usual Suspects.

In this timeline, Tembo presumably suffered from fatal dino-damage at the hands of the t-rex in The Lost World. But don’t worry. We can rebuild him. We have the technology. Spared no expense. Ok, spared a little expense.

God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaur toys. Dinosaur toys inflict dino-damage on man. Cyborg Pete Postlethwaite inherits the earth.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mark Mahoney who comes with REAL DINO-DAMAGE and it's ALL PSYCHOLOGICAL. Wow! He REALLY cries!

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