Spinosaurus (Monster In My Pocket by Matchbox, Series 6)

Buy on

Buy on

After four series the Monster in my Pocket line began to run out of actual monsters to make, and began to take inspiration from the real world instead. Series five was a line of ‘Super Creepies’, essentially an array of extant bugs and other creepy crawlies, and series six turned its attention to dinosaurs in 1993 – that’s the line we’re all interested in here. Later series focussed on ‘Space Aliens’ (series seven), and the line subsequently ‘jumped the shark’ when they departed from the ‘Monster in the Pocket’ brand to launch ‘Monster Wrestlers In My Pocket’ and ‘Monster Sports Stars in my Pocket’ series, both only available as free toys with cereals.

One dinosaur did appear in the line prior to the dedicated Dinosaurs Series, and we’ve previously reviewed that series one T. rex here. Series Two included a Loch Ness Monster, so we’ve also reviewed that as a plesiosaur here. But we haven’t given series six very much attention yet, just one reviewed to date, so here’s one more, the Spinosaurus.

The later series, including this one, were made of a much harder material than the original few series. The ‘squishy’ nature of the line was one of its original marketing points, but I suspect they changed the material so they could apply paint without it coming off. The dinosaurs have a little bit of paint application, for example, the Spinosaurus has a painted sail, which stands out from the base green colour, and a black mouth. Stock images show at least one colour variant of this figure with orange skin and a green sail.

In keeping with their monstrous remit, Monster in my Pocket adopted a gruesome, ugly, inaccurate style for their dinosaurs. This might have attracted younger children but makes them uninteresting for people who like dinosaurs. That may be why this series has barely featured on the DinoToyBlog.

Our understanding of Spinosaurus has changed drastically in the past thirty years, so even accurate figures of it for the time would be wildly inaccurate by today’s standard. So, it’s easier to list all the accuracies rather than critique the anatomy. It has a sail, so that’s good. And that’s about it – apart from that it’s just a generic cartoon theropod! It’s in an awkward almost vertical upright stance, and its arms are in an unusual martial arts palm-punch pose, a little bit reminiscent of the Series One T. rex.

It has an unusual rocky golem-like skin texture, and on the underside of its tail is embossed “NBR 150 B”. This means it is number 150 in the Monster in my Pocket line. Maybe the “B” is a colour variant? It is also embossed on its right thigh, on a little raised circle: “150”. This is its points value. Each monsteron my Pocket model has a different value, which is related to a top-trumps kind of game you can play with the figures. It is just a coincidence that the points value matches the figure number in the Spinosaurus. The points values general inflated as the series’ went on. Figures in the first series were worth 5 to 25 points, so this 150 point dinosaur would wipe the floor with any of them.

The toys in later Monster in my Pocket series were larger than the early series. This one is 6cm tall, 5cm long, and 3cm wide. From nose to tail it would be about 10cm if stretched out, so that converts to an approximate scale of about 1:150, if we can read any meaning into that at all.

This weird toy is nothing to shout home about, but it might tickle the nostalgia button for some of our middle-aged readers. It is relatively easy and cheap to get hold of on ebay.com, as is most of the Series Six dinosaur line. That said, a handful of dinosaur Monster in my Pocket toys were released in a later dinosaur series (Series Eight), and they are much rarer. I’m lucky to have one of those so I’ll take a detailed look at that in the future.