For my fifth and final Hero Mashers review, I’ll be looking at two very familiar faces from the JP franchise: Dilophosaurus and Pteranodon.
The Dilophosaurus is made up of twelve pieces. Once assembled, the carnivore measures about 24 cm long. Cyan blue is the main colour with dark blue markings, swamp green for the twin crests and claws, yellow eyes, white teeth, and a pink mouth. A JW logo is printed on one side of the body.
The Dilophosaurus boasts a hinged lower jaw and universal joints at the neck, shoulders, hips, knees, and both sections of tail. As you can see, it is decked out in the distance JP-style neck frill that has no basis in reality whatsoever. The markings on it do look kind of cool though. Fortunately, you can always remove the frill pieces if they’re not your cup of tea. And it makes the toy much less front-heavy.
While unmistakeable as a Dilophosaurus, this toy is like all other HM figures: very cartoonish with oversized feet. It is worth noting, however, that the sculptor put four digits on each hand—although it’s very possible that the fourth one was vestigial and hidden under skin.
The packaging describes the secondary beast as a “Pterodactyl,” but I’m just going to go right ahead and ignore that tiresome misnomer. This is clearly intended to be Pteranodon. There are eight pieces, giving this set the most pieces out of all the Deluxes.
The main colour is light grey with bright green markings, dark blue claws, orange eyes, white teeth, and a pink mouth. I guess with those teeth, one could also conceive of this as a Ludodactylus. The lower jaw is hinged and the wingspan is a good 28 cm.
Unfortunately, even for a HM, this is a rather bad-looking beast. It would have been way nicer if the wings attached to the forearms instead of the upper arms. There’s really no way to make them look better. A smaller, skinnier body would also probably help, and there actually is a grey Velociraptor kit available.
As with all the Hero Mashers sets I’ve reviewed over the last few months, this one is clearly intended for young dinosaur fans first and foremost. It’s definitely got the fun-to-fiddle-with factor going for it, and the Dilophosaurus is decent enough, but the Pteranodon is admittedly ugly and ungainly. I reckon I’ll eventually either pass all these on to the next generation or donate them to a school or a daycare centre.
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As goofy as these things may look, I can’t help thinking how great they would be for making little stop-motion films with. I would have loved an articulated dino toy like this when I was a kid just for that reason. At any rate, I’m sure whichever budding little mad scientist you pass these on to will have a lot of fun with them.
Yeah, I’ve tried to view the HMs from the perspective of my much younger self when reviewing them. I’ve also seen a number of online testimonials from parents whose children love these toys.