Dor Mei animals

A lot of nostalgia in those old dinosaurs! I feel like they (or some very like them) were everywhere at one point. Very cool!

In the 1970's and 1980's, many dinosaur toys were represented with bright colors and big toothy mouths. The desire to be "accurate" seems to have overcome the "toothy" style at the beginning of the 1990's, even if it was present before (think of Starlux).

Not only that, I noticed that the species of dinosaurs represented as toys and in books took a drastic turn at the release of the Jurassic Park movie, in 1993. Before that movie was released, we could see many toys and illustrations representing Iguanodons, Megalosauruses, Diplodocuses, Corythosauruses, Ceratosauruses and Polacanthuses (even if they lacked accuracy). After Jurassic Park, all of these species vanished from books and toys. They were replaced by the now everpresent Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus Rex (it was always present in books and as toys, but never in those numbers) and Parasaurolophuses (again, already present since 1978 but never in those numbers). Ok, we do see now new species like Carnotaurus, Cryolophosaurus or Saltosaurus. But it seems now that we definitely lost Iguanodons in the toy world and Megalosauruses seem to have never existed...

It is really interesting but it worth mentioning that in this hobby, after the unavoidable T-rex, the other two most popular dinosaurs are Stegosaurus and Triceratops. I really enjoy how these things change even if it sometimes really takes a long time.

Roger wrote:

It is really interesting but it worth mentioning that in this hobby, after the unavoidable T-rex, the other two most popular dinosaurs are Stegosaurus and Triceratops. I really enjoy how these things change even if it sometimes really takes a long time.

Right. Stegosaurus and Triceratops always were popular. I think it is because they were the first of their respective groups to have been discovered (I mean, the first Stegosauridae and the first Ceratopsid). Tuojiangosaurus, for example, is a stegosauridae that was discovered only very recently, which means we don't see it very often in books or among toys. But then again... Carnotaurus was descovered recently enough, but every toy company is making models of it, now. Do you think it is because carnivores tend to be more popular in the public than herbivores?

Bowhead Whale wrote:

Roger wrote:

It is really interesting but it worth mentioning that in this hobby, after the unavoidable T-rex, the other two most popular dinosaurs are Stegosaurus and Triceratops. I really enjoy how these things change even if it sometimes really takes a long time.

Right. Stegosaurus and Triceratops always were popular. I think it is because they were the first of their respective groups to have been discovered (I mean, the first Stegosauridae and the first Ceratopsid). Tuojiangosaurus, for example, is a stegosauridae that was discovered only very recently, which means we don't see it very often in books or among toys. But then again... Carnotaurus was descovered recently enough, but every toy company is making models of it, now. Do you think it is because carnivores tend to be more popular in the public than herbivores?

Surely carnivores are more popular because they act as monsters in media. It is not possible to think that a herbivore dinosaur could play the same impact in some popular dino movies as a T-rex does. Though, many factors contribute to the popularity of an animal. Amargasaurus is also relatively popular and being a herbivore, I think it is because of its unusual look. T-rexes represent usually more than half of the sales of any prehistoric line of animal figures. Brands even use to release T-rex like species because they will sell well. If it is a T-rex prey or competitor, it is also a factor for sales. Thus, it is a little around the same.

Roger wrote:

Bowhead Whale wrote:

Roger wrote:

It is really interesting but it worth mentioning that in this hobby, after the unavoidable T-rex, the other two most popular dinosaurs are Stegosaurus and Triceratops. I really enjoy how these things change even if it sometimes really takes a long time.

Right. Stegosaurus and Triceratops always were popular. I think it is because they were the first of their respective groups to have been discovered (I mean, the first Stegosauridae and the first Ceratopsid). Tuojiangosaurus, for example, is a stegosauridae that was discovered only very recently, which means we don't see it very often in books or among toys. But then again... Carnotaurus was descovered recently enough, but every toy company is making models of it, now. Do you think it is because carnivores tend to be more popular in the public than herbivores?

Surely carnivores are more popular because they act as monsters in media. It is not possible to think that a herbivore dinosaur could play the same impact in some popular dino movies as a T-rex does. Though, many factors contribute to the popularity of an animal. Amargasaurus is also relatively popular and being a herbivore, I think it is because of its unusual look. T-rexes represent usually more than half of the sales of any prehistoric line of animal figures. Brands even use to release T-rex like species because they will sell well. If it is a T-rex prey or competitor, it is also a factor for sales. Thus, it is a little around the same.

So, my personal tastes really aren't in the wave; I'm relatively indifferent in front of T-Rex pictures or figures (unless they are vintage) and I tend to prefer the animals we don't see often. For example, my favorite Starlux Prehistory figures are the Cephalaspis, Drepanaspis and Eusthenopteron. Animals not often seen either in books nor as toys...

There is something else I would like to point out.
When I check the books in libraries or book stores, I see many, many paleaonthology books FOR CHILDREN. In those books, they talk about the "big pointy teeth of the ferocious T-Rex" and the "fierce looks of the Triceratops" and obvious things like that. And always about Dinosaurs, hardly ever about other prehistoric animals. For instance, very little there is said there about the first amphibians or even the famous trilobites. This is sad, because in my youth (I have old childhood books to prove it), prehistoric fishes and prehistoric amphibians were often mentionned and, at the age of 8, I was already familiar with them (like Diadectes or Mastodonsaurus). Today, very little is said about them in paleaonthology childrens books.
When I try to check for paleaonthology books FOR GROWN-UPS, I hardly ever find anything. Anything at all! I would love to put my hands on books about fossils of plants or fossils of fishes! But no, nothing. Not for the adults. Just for kids. And since kids don't seem to be interested in the kinds of plants dinosaurs saw every day, well, I stay hungry. And see children books about the big pointy teeth of the T-Rex and the fierce looks of the Triceratops. And I get frustrated and bored.

What is going on exactly? Did prehistoric amphibians, fishes and plants disappeared from kids books because they were not mentionned in the film Jurassic Park? Because it seems those fossils disappeared from books somewhere in the first half of the 1990's...

I was just a kid in the 90's and not even a kid that was into dinosaurs, but I think your observations are really interesting and I do suspect that once dinosaurs entered the mainstream pop culture, the widely available media around them changed to match the target demographic. And while Jurassic Park was way too scary for me personally to watch, it still had loads of toys directed to kids. And even more than that, The Land Before Time was a big hit in the 90's as well with such classic scientific heresies as "three horns" and "long necks." The main characters in those were of course the ones you're talking about seeing in the books - T-rex, triceratops, "brontosaurus" at the time, stegosaurus . . . but was that because Jurassic Park came out a year before and already tilted things heavily in the favor of those "flagship species"? Having grown up in the 90's and thinking of the cast of The Land Before Time as kind of the "core" cast of dinosaurs, it's interesting to hear that prior to that, it was different.

Sue was also discovered in 1990, which may have fed into the T-Rex popularity spike.

(It feels to me like the over abundance of tiger, giraffe, lion, hippo, elephant now. Someone decided these were the most marketable animals because they are charismatic megafauna, and then that's what everybody did.)

Jill wrote:

I was just a kid in the 90's and not even a kid that was into dinosaurs, but I think your observations are really interesting and I do suspect that once dinosaurs entered the mainstream pop culture, the widely available media around them changed to match the target demographic. And while Jurassic Park was way too scary for me personally to watch, it still had loads of toys directed to kids. And even more than that, The Land Before Time was a big hit in the 90's as well with such classic scientific heresies as "three horns" and "long necks." The main characters in those were of course the ones you're talking about seeing in the books - T-rex, triceratops, "brontosaurus" at the time, stegosaurus . . . but was that because Jurassic Park came out a year before and already tilted things heavily in the favor of those "flagship species"? Having grown up in the 90's and thinking of the cast of The Land Before Time as kind of the "core" cast of dinosaurs, it's interesting to hear that prior to that, it was different.

Sue was also discovered in 1990, which may have fed into the T-Rex popularity spike.

(It feels to me like the over abundance of tiger, giraffe, lion, hippo, elephant now. Someone decided these were the most marketable animals because they are charismatic megafauna, and then that's what everybody did.)

Well, as Roger pointed earlier, Stegosaurus and Triceratops were always popular. In my childhood, their popularity was just the same as today, just like the popularity of lions, tigers, african elephants and giraffes was also the same as in the 1980's. But Iguanodon (even if it was not accurate, represented as Alice Woodward drew them back in 1896), Edmontosaurus (called "Anatosaurus" at the time) and Diplocaulus (an amphibian) completely disappeared from books and toys world in the 1990's. And books don't mention animals like Moshops or Compsognathus anymore. And that makes me, well, sad.

There's also a lot less dinosaur content on tv than there used to be. I miss them!

It's as if it's not a fashionable topic with the tv channels any more - of course I can't speak for things like National Geographic or The Discovery Channel, they might be out there if you can afford subscription tv, but I miss seeing dinosaur stuff on the main UK free-to-air channels.
Because when I was growing up in the 80s, when we had just FOUR tv channels, I remember seeing lots of programmes about dinosaurs. Some focusing on the dig sites and showing the fossils being recovered, cleaned, and reconstructing what the animals would've looked like. Others told the story of their evolution and variety more like a nature programme, where you learnt a lot of new types and how they lived. Along with regular looks into the various theories about their extinction. There were even programmes on the history of palaeontology itself, looking at early ideas through to modern speculation.
I know there were a lot, because I was really into them and wanted to see them all, even allowed to stay up late to watch the ones which were on from 9-10pm!

There was a brief period when Walking With Dinosaurs pulled them back into being primetime content for a bit, but then the attention seemed to fizzle out, and now we only get the occasional programme every few years, usually with a known wildlife presenter face to front it and help draw people to watch, like David Attenborough, Chris Packham, or my more obscure favourite who specialised in the fossil record and particularly trilobites, Richard Fortey.

It seems the only regular dinosaurs-on-tv are the Jurassic Park/World films these days, they're shown a lot, and would be the ideal starting point for kids to get really into dinosaurs IF we had that backup of scientific documentaries to explain the reality and go more in-depth.

But maybe kids don't care about tv broadcasts any more. If they don't look at tv listings and choose to watch programmes when they're shown, why bother scheduling them! Maybe there's a million good and up-to-date dinosaur documentaries on all that streaming and social media video stuff I'm too old to understand the point of. Perhaps this is the modern equivalent of the grandparents grumbling 'why don't you read a book about them!' when a previous generation of children started enjoying dinosaur tv programmes

There are a lot of good documentaries on TV here in North America. I watch a lot of them myself. I don't know much about documentaries for children because I don't watch them. The only dino documentary show for kids that I know a bit of is an animated show called Dinosaur Train. But once again, the earliest era it talks about is Trias period and the most recent is Cretacious period. In other words, only the eras where dinosaurs roamed, nothing about the first amphibians or fishes. Not a bad show, of course, but still a little limited in my opinion.

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Anyway, my Dor Mei 1986 Ankylosaurus arrived last Monday. It is already on TAW.

Very cool, the 14 inches model is much nicer than the smaller one. As you probably know, there is also this color version.

I think my grandfather had that tortoise, he used to put the shell of his late pet tortoise on it.
Also I hope that everyone here knows that Dor Mei toys contain lead, not only in the paint but the plastic itself, I also only learned about that last year.

Roger wrote:

Very cool, the 14 inches model is much nicer than the smaller one. As you probably know, there is also this color version.

I know, but I will contempt myself with only one color version, due to the size...

You know what I think? I think the 1986 large Dor Mei Ankylosaurus looks similar to the blue and smaller Soma Glow-in-the-Dark Ankylosaurus. Consider it: they both have a long, hornless head with a tortoise beack, the neck turned to one side; they both have horizontal wrinkles on the belly; they both have circles around each top spike of the body shell; and they both have two spikes at the tip of the tail, spikes that are pointing at a 45 degrees each. And I am thinking: COULD THE SCULPTOR OF THE DOR MEI ANKYLOSAURUS AND THE SCULPTOR OF THE SOMA GLOW_IN_THE_DARK ANKYLOSAURUS BE JUST ONE PERSON?

Burgerenby wrote:

I think my grandfather had that tortoise, he used to put the shell of his late pet tortoise on it.
Also I hope that everyone here knows that Dor Mei toys contain lead, not only in the paint but the plastic itself, I also only learned about that last year.

I know they contain lead, just like Imperial toys. But don't worry: I long passed the age of putting my toys in my mouth...

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Since I never received my Styracosaurus from Mexico, I had to buy another one on Ebay. This one, from Virginia, USA, came to my home safely. It is already on TAW.

I thought of you when I saw this listing...
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pipsxlch wrote:

I thought of you when I saw this listing...
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I still do not have the triceratops, indeed...

I'd be willing to get it for you, but their shipping to me is likely to be expensive.

pipsxlch wrote:

I'd be willing to get it for you, but their shipping to me is likely to be expensive.

And I still cannot find anything that fits your wish list for me to trade for them.