While the merchandise accompanying the release of the various Jurassic Park films ranged between everything from watches to bed-sheets, the most exciting items for me were of course the dinosaur figures. So I was happy to find this cool little Velociraptor figure with a big The Lost World logo on the packaging at a Copenhagen dinosaur exhibition back in 1998, only to find when I opened it that it was… A rubber pencil eraser?!
English isn’t my first language, so I may have overlooked the huge letters spelling “SITE B ERASERS” on the package, but still, I was in disbelief that such a well-sculpted and detailed figure should be destroyed and go to waste just to erase my homework calculation mistakes or whatever. So I never used it for that, only as a toy, which is why it’s in pretty good shape today, only with some paint flaking off here and there.
I can’t find much info about this eraser other than it was made by Impact Inc, which appears to specialise in school utensils, and there was also a Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops in the series, but not much beyond that. It appears that dinosaur erasers were also released alongside the original Jurassic Park film, as well as some of the later instalments, so there’s apparently an obscure tradition there. But in all those cases, I’m appalled by the purpose of these surprisingly well-made figures!
The Velociraptor is about 7 cm long and 5 cm tall at the head, and while recognisable as a The Lost World Velociraptor by its shape and colouration, it has undeniably “cutesy”, perhaps juvenile, proportions, that made me think it was supposed to depict a baby. With its more rounded, shorter head than the design seen in the films, it is also similar to the electronic Kenner Velociraptor released with the first film, which, for whatever reason, differed from almost all other designs, and was orange, unlike the animals in the film or the other Kenner toy, but foreshadowing the ones in The Lost World.
Accuracy-wise, there of course isn’t much point in nitpicking, and while differing in proportions from the film Velociraptors, it is recognisable as a Jurassic Park design by its “evil”-looking eyes prevalent in the Stan Winston Studios theropods, with their dark, sunken eye-sockets, and angry brows. Unfortunately, the later Jurassic World films don’t seem to have much consistency, and just look like random designs thrown together, whereas there was a certain unity between the original designs, perhaps owing to Crash McCreery doing the concept art for them all for the three first films.
One of those recognisable features is the skin-texture, where MCreery seems to have been inspired by the palaeoartists John Gurche and Mark Hallett, who contributed guiding concept art for the original film. The sculpting is even better than many other actual toy figures, and the pose is dynamic, with the only downside being that the gap between the forwards curved tail and the body is “filled”, I guess because it wasn’t feasible to leave a hole in the figure, which of course doesn’t look natural. But considering it wasn’t meant as a toy, that’s understandable.
The colouration is also much better than many other actual toys, with the eyes, teeth, and even claws having individual colours. The base colour of the rubber seems to be creamy white, with orange painted over much of the upper side, black stripes and spots throughout, as well as black claws, nostrils, and circles around the yellow eyes. This last feature, combined with the somewhat “rounder” features, always reminded me of the gremlins from the Gremlins films, especially the more reptilian design of the second one. The kind of diabolical, “hand rubbing” pose, of course added to that. The inside of the mouth is pink, another detail often omitted in small figures.
So in the end, I’m quite happy I preserved it and never used it as an eraser, and I’ve placed it on a shelf as if it was an actual collectible figure. It stands pretty well, though the legs are a bit softer than I remember they used to be, and it can easily tip over. I wonder if there are many left out there, if they weren’t all pointlessly ground to rubbery dust by schoolchildren. The sculpt is so good that I wonder whether it was adapted from a sculpt meant for an actual toy that existed in harder plastic, but I can’t find any confirmation for this, so it probably wasn’t.
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