robotic dinosaurs are boring

[Blade-of-the-Moon]

I would have loved to see those Disney ones in person as well. It's a shame most museums can't afford the quality they need.

I don't think Billings owns the T-REX Cafe dinos to my knowledge they were purchased separately from a Dinamation sale. They really aren't keeping them up well based on some of the recent videos I've seen.

I really detest the Dinosaur Quest type shows, I've been to several and I'm usually disappointed. Most are rundown, broken or not even plugged in. The teeth they use are usually the same even.  I actually have a few of those Asian suppliers contact me to try and sell me something every few months. They tried selling me a T-Rex a couple years back, started at 20,000 and I kept saying I couldn't do it, they eventually went down to 5k, even then I couldn't justify it. 

[Pachyrhinosaurus]

Yeah the Landry's animatronics definitely aren't kept as well as they used to be. The elephants at my nearest Rainforest Cafe are now limited to blinking their eyes and a slight fluttering of the ears. I think they used to have employees dedicated to keeping them up, but I'm sure that's been outsourced by now.

[Blade-of-the-Moon]

Yeah the Landry's animatronics definitely aren't kept as well as they used to be. The elephants at my nearest Rainforest Cafe are now limited to blinking their eyes and a slight fluttering of the ears. I think they used to have employees dedicated to keeping them up, but I'm sure that's been outsourced by now.

I'm not sure the company is doing very well to be honest. I know the only TREX Cafe left is at Disney Springs now and the closed a few Rainforest Cafes if I'm not mistaken.

There is a knockoff version I visited in Myrtle Beach, SC : https://dinolandcafe.com/
Cheap Asian animatronics and overpriced food, huge lines though.

[Maritimer]

Working weekends at the local Public Aquarium since 1988 has allowed me to see ... a few different robo-dino exhibitions. We had Dinamation's "Sea Monsters" (Basilosaurus, Dunkleosteus, Kronosaurus, Elasmosaurus, Archeteuthis), "Dinosaurs" (several different displays, all of which included Tyrannosaurus and Dimetrodon) and "Prehistoric Mammals" (mammoths, saber-cats, Doedecurus, Megatherium, Indricotherium and others), and a visit or two from their Japanese equivalent, Kokoro, which I thought were somewhat better models, and which our Exhibits Manager set up as though they were invading the modern world; the Tyrannosaurus was ripping the belly out of a Chrysler, and the juvenile Apatosaurus was swiping a bunch of grapes from the open lunchbox of a napping construction worker. None of those exhibits had more than a dozen models, and other than the Dimetrodon, Pteranodon, Dilophosaurus and Pachycephalosaurus, they were mostly about half of lifesize.

I've also seen the "Jurassic Quest" exhibition, and yeah ... I mean, sure, they've got a _lot_ of models, and many of them are full sized, but the models aren't great - they seem to be a bit rushed in production, in order to make so many - their movements are a bit stilted, and the sheer number of them somehow detracts from the impact each one _could_ have.

I did, however, have the opportunity to attend the original "Jurassic World" exhibition, featuring models from Australia's Creature Workshop - and they were a world of difference. Movements were broader, sweeping - and much faster than any of the others. Top marks, for me, went to their Tyrannosaurus, which strode out of the jungle on our left, and moved across her exhibit space to headbutt a gas jeep, before swinging her head out over the audience to scream her annoyance with the sound of incoming helicopters. (The tyrannosaur's body was on a track, just the other side of a busted-up electric fence ... coordinated leg movements and footfalls were unnecessary, and the full-body movement was effective enough to have some of the adults in the group cowering!) Top marks to the Aussies for this one!

~B.

[EmperorDinobot]

I have been wanting to talk about this for a while.

When I was 6, I added dinosaurs to my list of obsessions. By then it was Batman and Dinosaurs. Yes, I too was obsessed about dinosaurs, but not strictly because of Jurassic Park, though it helped.

I moved from the USA to my birthplace of Caracas, Venezuela when I was 5. I saw JP the year after, but had been collecting magazines, toys, etc for some time. Dinosaur related media was literally everywhere. After completing kindergarten, my mum enrolled my socially awkward self into art classes with a bunch of brats, and another one nearby (ha right) for dinosaurs and reptiles at the National Science Museum, where I got made fun of endlessly by the other kids for actually knowing a thing or two about dinosaurs since I had read everything (been reading since I was 4). That same summer, the museum was going to host a whole expo on robotic dinosaurs made by a Chinese enterprise. It was so big it made it onto several news organizations. Anyways, after a particularly difficult day (I lived in kind of my own world, and the kids I was with, along with the teachers particularly from the art class just didn't get me), we were promised a tour of the thing. The day came and went, and nobody went to see the dinos. I was really REALLY disappointed because I really wanted to see them. We were given a stupid excuse such as the dinos not being ready, or the kids distracting the workers, etc. I waited with my mom, even after all the kids had left from the dinosaur camp, and we waited for hours. The museum was going to close, and my mom was already very annoyed, but I was like "soon someone's gonna get us to see the dinosaurs". It bothered me too how the other kids just didn't seem to care, because they didn't. They were thrown into that "camp" by parents who wanted to get rid of them. I just wanted more dinos in my life, and it was obvious by then that I was the only one who cared. So it was time to go home, and I started crying my eyes out and telling mom that I was tired of breaking promises, that I hated the kids from the art stuff and that the kids and teachers there hated me too. A teenaged volunteer overheard us, and she was trying to calm me down. I used to be a pretty freckled kid with ginger hair, and that was kind of a rare thing, so it was easier to woo women in back then. She looked around and told us to come outside to the courtyard to see the dinos, and lo and behild, upon seeing that gigantic Diplodocus replica, my day was made. Naturally I thought it was small, and felt it should have been life sized (we were told it was going to be life sized, so that was a bit of a letdown too), but I had likely been the only kid in the city to see an actual preview. We got booted out as soon as someone saw us, questioned my mom if she had taken a camera with her or something, which made her angrier already. It sucked because I ended up being yelled at, but it was all I could talk about, and at least I wasn't complaining about the art stuff, or the mean kids at the museum, since I had been complaining about not wanting to go after the first week.

Later that month, the expo was finished, and it was no Jurassic Park, but going on an actual dinosaur tour was pretty cool for me. Ironically, the Diplodocus had to be taken down because it was glitchy and not working at all, and you could see where it was supposed to be. They put a fossil dig thing instead. My parents had their usual little fight and stuff, which put a damper on the whole thing, but eh...
1.5 years later they were doing a pre-release of The Lost World at a theatre outside of town, along with an expo of giant bugs and dinosaurs, all included in the ticket price. The line was gigantic, the whole thing was badly organized, and I had almost killed my dad of exhaustion and agoraphobia. I was pretty tired too. The first line was like 2 hours just to see some stupid giant bugs. But I guess it was better than my parents fighting in a public place. Weird how that's what I associate with the whole thing. Even 12 years later when we went to see the WWD show when I was 18 my parents were fighting.

Ok, well that took a dark turn. But anyways, I get why people still go to these things. It's to take their kids, who will love it without a doubt. They haven't aged well though. You'd think they have more impressive and accurate dinosaurs by now, but it's always the same stuff. It's also a pretty unmasked cash grab. They're charging too much for those tickets for what they're actually worth. Here they use abandoned Toys R Us buildings to do it. They're branded as Dino Quest or something.

[Blade-of-the-Moon]

Dino Quest is rolling into my town next month for their now annual cash grab, that's exactly what it is.

We've seen some robotic dinosaurs like I think Troody the Troodon? It was a project that was supposed to be a fully automated walking animatronic dinosaur. 

They made that "Big Dog" robot that would easily make a dinosaur from it that could walk around.

I think Kokoro? Designed one for a museum that recognizes the color red and can follow it with it's eyes and movements.

None of these are mass produced concepts though, it's like they have given up being innovative.