1993 Dino-Hunters Tyrannosaurus Rex
I’ve wanted to do a joke for April Fools for several years now, but I’m not really keen on derailing my blog with irrelevant content from figure profiles. The best way I’ve concluded to do a joke without derailing the blog, is to profile something fairly absurd that fits with the theme here, and I don’t know of anything more comical and off-color than this plastic dinosaur. This tyrannosaurus is an odd piece, in that it feels like an accessory, but to whom? It barely counts as a figure on it’s own, but you can’t say it really belongs to anything besides the set collectively.
The 1993 Dino-Hunters set was a curious item. In the late years of ARAH, Hasbro began experimenting with packaging a multitude of older sculpts and vehicles into themed sets as store-exclusives. Only this one saw release, but a second set was planned for ‘95, which would have featured the Mudbuster and Locust with an arctic theme. This was a pretty good format, as it afforded some fun and curious repaints of toys that had been off store shelves for several years.
The truth about this piece, is that it’s a fairly terrible toy. I get that this was supposed to be a budget friendly gift set, but this is probably one of the lamest toy dinosaurs I’ve ever handled. The sculpt is weak and wimpy looking, while the paint applications also look rather lousy. It’s posed in this really silly way that makes it look like it’s having a heart-attack. It feels similar to the simple sculpts you’d see on the small animals like Timber or Max, but upscaled a ton. To someone unfamiliar, you’d never guess such a shabby dinosaur was a GI Joe toy.
What’s a Dino-Hunters tyrannosaurus worth? I hate to say it, but I have almost no clue. It seems like almost everything from the set trends towards $100+, and given that you almost never see a loose set or dinosaur for sale, I’d figure well more than $100, at the very least. Boxed Dino-Hunter sets pop up more often and sell for at least more than $600. Given that, if you’re in the market for one of these and feel compelled to own the complete set, it’s probably cheaper to pay $600 to $700 on a sealed set than buy anything here, especially the dinosaur individually. As for me? I can only photograph one of these because it’s from my brother’s childhood collection. If not for that, I wouldn’t pay those kinds of prices for what anything in this set provides, let alone this goofy tyrannosaurus.
I think this dinosaur mold was also used elsewhere. I don’t recall if it was Hasbro or it another company got ahold of it. I view this thing as worse than Deep Six’s dolphin and not something I’d ever track down.
Dino Hunters, like everything else that perceived as “rare”, have gone nuts. It’s dumb to see guys paying $200+ for complete figures and $30+ for just one gun.
Ha! I love it (the post, not the dinosaur).
I’ve had the dinosaur on my want list for over 20 years in the “figures” category, but that’s mostly as a joke–I’ve never been sure how to classify him (her?) either. When I was intensively searching flea markets for Joes back in the late 90s/early 00s, I sometimes went through bins of plastic dinosaurs thinking he could’ve easily been thrown in with a kid’s other toys. But I didn’t really care enough to do that frequently, so I never found one.
Hahaha, good idea for an April Fool’s review!
This is definitely one of those times Hasbro was following the trends. The dinosaur idea is pretty awful, and the figure(?) made it even worse. The pricing on things nowadays is so ridiculous that 600 dollars on the Dino Hunter set doesn’t even surprise me.
These are the most detailed and best shots I’ve seen of this dinosaur, so this “joke post” counts for something!
I’m kind of enamored with the Dino Hunters set for two reasons. 1: The colors are weird and great, 2: I want to swap a DH Low-Light head onto either the 91 version or its repaint just to have a blonde Low-Light in my preferred getup for him.
Prices on this set have been absurd since at least 2017, though.
And you’re totally right, this is a pretty crappy dinosaur toy. As a pack-in, it’s not the worst thing ever, but I imagine absolutely anything from Jurassic Park would leave it in the dust. As its own toy, well– I think you could find better stuff in the cheap bins of rubber animals at Walmart or in the toy aisle at the dollar store.
“I want to swap a DH Low-Light head onto either the 91 version or its repaint just to have a blonde Low-Light in my preferred getup for him.”
Ha! Great idea!
That Tyrannosaurus mold goes back waaaaaay before 1993. I’ve seen it identified as originating from ubiquitous cheapo toy purveyors Imperial, circa 1985, but it’s entirely possible that they themselves simply copied an older, existing toy.