Spinosaurus (Inflatable Animals by Ravensden)

Review and photographs by DrWheelieMobile, edited by Suspsy

British manufacturer Ravensden is nowadays best known for making plush toys of various extant animals, as their website states, “for the zoo, aquarium, leisure and promotional markets.” However, there was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when one would be hard-pressed to enter any zoo or aquarium gift shop and not find a rack containing another of their product ranges: the aptly, if unoriginally, named Inflatable Animals line. When we were small, my sister and I managed to amass a fair collection of these animals, and while the majority of them, like Ravensden’s modern plushes, represented extant species, there were one or two dinosaurs snuck in here and there, and one of them will be the subject of this review.

Now, I need to make something abundantly clear before I continue – I do not have any, ahem, fondness for inflatable toys. Indeed, I have globophobia, an irrational fear of balloons, so the fact I have as many of these things as I do is pretty miraculous. Perhaps it’s because they are made with thick PVC plastic as opposed to the thinner latex of most party balloons, and as they are inflated with air rather than helium, they are less liable to blow away in the wind. At any rate, the youngest member of my inflatable collection was acquired around 2003, so it isn’t something I’m all that bothered for nowadays.

Flash forward to mid 2021, when, almost literally out of the blue, my family decided to build a swimming pool in our garden (their idea, not mine!). After construction was finished, we looked around in our basement, and it turned out that, safely folded away in a plastic storage box, a surprising number of our old inflatable collection had survived. So while our swimming pool has turned into a PVC zoo, let’s have a look at the infamous “spined lizard of Egypt.”

I do not know exactly how old this Spinosaurus is, aside from it being no younger than early 2000s. But according to Ibrahim et al 2014, this is decidedly not up to date. Everything about this toy screams “pre-Renaissance,” with all the tripodal stances, pronated hands, and gloriously generic head shapes one could ask for. Fully inflated, Spino is approximately 81 cm long from nose to tail, and 36 cm high at the top of the sail. He can stare almost eye to eye with Invicta’s Brachiosaurus.

There is no sign of the famous crocodile snout of post-2014 or even post-Jurassic Park III reconstructions. Instead, we’re treated to a squared-off oval that one could slap onto any pre-Renaissance theropod and nobody would notice. The mouth is open, courtesy of two pieces of clear plastic, with sharp yellow painted over the top. The eyes, nostrils, and ear openings are well camouflaged, for aside from the clear mouth, the entire toy is a riot of yellows, oranges, browns, and greys that are criss-crossing and splattering everywhere, giving a nice textured appearance. A tiny, non-inflatable dewlap hangs between the jaw and the neck.

Moving further along the body, the sail is an almost perfect semi-circle. Although there is only one plug, located at the base of the tail, the limbs and sail are separate components from the main body and take slightly longer to inflate. The sail has upright ridges all along its length, from the middle of the neck to the middle of the tail.

The limbs have three digits apiece, and the hands are pronated. (A choice that personally baffles me, not because of the obvious inaccuracy, but because pronated hands are far harder to achieve than non-pronated hands. Must make it ‘recognisable,’ I suppose). Although the fingers and toes are rounded off, the seams can be a little sharp if one is not too careful. Apart from a random splash of black on the middle finger, there are no discernable claws on the hands. Near the plug is the CE logo, the Ravensden logo, and a warning regarding use in water.

As mentioned earlier, the limbs and sail are separate chambers from the main body. Unfortunately, there is a tear located where the right arm meets the body – my younger self’s attempt at remedying this with sticky tape can be seen in some shots. Because of this, I needed to re-inflate Spino several times during the photo shoot. This fragility is, I believe, an important factor of why absolutely no information exists online for Ravensden’s Inflatable Animals, despite their apparent ubiquity at the turn of the Millennium. Every time I have tried searching for these toys online, I always come up empty. That said, the Ravensden Spinosaurus does bear a striking resemblance to a toy released in 1986 by The Frenry Co. Is it plagiarism? I honestly cannot say, as I do not have Frenry’s version, and mine, as mentioned, very clearly has not only Ravenden’s logo, but its address as well. It’s a mystery as elusive as any complete skeleton of the animal that inspired it.

So should you hunt for Ravensden’s inflatable Spinosaurus or any of its other animals? On one hand, I would say no – not counting the Frenry Spino, I have never seen this exact toy or any of my others on eBay or anywhere else, and I daresay, plagiarism aside, it may very well be the rarest dinosaur toy I have. On the other hand, my mother’s friend and her eight year old son came to visit recently, and he thoroughly enjoyed turning our swimming pool into a zoo! At any rate, I have a lot of fond memories playing with our collection of inflatable animals, and now we have a swimming pool in our garden, I’m sure, even with their leaks, that have many more memories waiting to be made.

The final shot includes two of Ravensden’s other animals: a generic (Carcharhinus?) shark and a tiger shark (I didn’t have any inflatable Onchopristis, or any Onchopristis at all, for that matter!).