I saw this catalogue online and thought, yes! I adored those Pyro dinosaurs as a kid in the Sixties, although i thought mine were Revell when I think back. Those illustrations look damn familiar and for some reason I can see a set of Polish stamps too when I look at them. Did you have these models?
When I first started car booting I found a boxed model rifle going for a song and snapped it up. Turned out it was the Silesian rifle shown here, second from the bottom. An amazing model.
Do you like Pyro models?
Alas, I never had any Pyro kits, and not sure if they were available in NZ. If they were, they were not common. Those antique firearms kits look great, they were also released by Life-Like, and at least some of them by other brands as well. I would love to see those re-issued.
ReplyDeleteYeah! Pyro Dinosaur kits were a big part of my childhood Golden Age! I had the Ankylosaurus, Tyrannosaurus (although it looked more like an Allosaur!) Stegosaurus, Corithosaur and Triceratops.
ReplyDeleteI remember them being cast in that swirling metallic rainbow effect you used to see when the injection moulding machines were changing colour pellets!
A decade or so later Airfix released some dinosaur models that were so prehistoric in their design and execution that they would have fitted in perfectly with their Pyro predecessors!
BTW Woodsie, I suspect you think "Polish Stamps" when looking at Pyro Dinosaurs because they were heavily influenced by the reconstruction art of Zdenek Burian and Rudolph Zallinger.
ReplyDeleteThose Iron Curtain boys were the tops!
(I'm being flippant, Zallinger may have been born in Russia, but he was raised in Seattle and did all his work in the US!)
I'm thinking of stamps like this one Looey http://www.paleophilatelie.eu/images/details/stamps/official/poland/1965/poland_1965_3.jpg
DeleteWhich I had as a kid. I found a set in Oxfam a year ago, which I will have to blog.
Yes had several Pyro dinosaurs, which doubled as space monsters when playing with space toys!
ReplyDeleteIt looks like at least two different sculptors did the dinosaurs, some like the Ankylosaurus had good surface detail, others like the Tyrannosaurus Rex had just smooth surfaces.
I had the Pyro Bucaneer pistol in the mid 70s. I remember one of the model shops in town stocked some of the Pyro gun and rifle kits. Couldn't afford the rifles, but I remember getting the pistol and around the same time another company - L&S - made some model pistol kits with moving parts that were much more detailed and I had a couple of those too.
ReplyDeletePyro seems to have been popular. They certainly had a fabulous range of models. I like the fact they call dinosaurs pre-historic monsters. You don't hear that much now.
ReplyDeleteDid the original releases of the dinos all have bases? Of the 5 I had, only steg and bronto had a base (with, for some reason, a caveman) to sit on. My cory, dimetrodon and triceratops all came baseless, despite triceratops having a raised leg - looking like if should be stood on something.
ReplyDeleteI had ALL the Pyro dinosaurs, and was a bit obsessed with them, in fact. Had the original series in the smaller oblong boxes, and bought them again when they were reboxed in those crisp white rectangular boxes. (Still have some of the box-tops which I saved for the artwork, I think.) Painted the models pretty well, too, with Testors Pla, and a lowly brush! Miss those beauties still today.
ReplyDeleteMy pyro dinos had plastic bases.
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