I love obscure facts about obscure toys.
Here are Lincoln International's monsters.
I read on the brilliant Plaid Stallions that the hands of the Werewolf, Mummy and the Fly were based on the fabulous hands of the Aurora Wolfman, pictured below.
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Slim Pickens down at the Arch today. Got a few old bits.
The Matchbox Adventure 2000 tracked tank is for Junior. I just need the insertable front end vehicle now. He's seen my own as well as my Corgi Lasertron and Magnetron vehicles and is head over heels with them! [looking for Magnetron, Rocketron and Scanetron for him now].
The Pixels pocket bagatelle game is for Junior as well, as he said he'd seen the film. The Rolls is for me to touch-up and the Imperial dinosaur is stock.
There were 6 Imperial Toys lizard/dinosaurs at a pound each. I had one pound in my pocket left so I bagged this, the oldest from 1978. The rest were 1980.
You can see the model number 7957. Its interesting to note that Imperial also released the Apollo Moon Exploring carded toys we featured many times early on on the blog. These carded sets were all numbered 304.
I wonder if all the Imperial dinosaur numbers began with 7?
I saw this knock-off Zeroid recently in a random search. It looks like a solid block of rubbery plastic in the way the Imperial Toys knockoffs were. This one's Japanese. No idea how big or small it is.
There's a Kaiju on the header and a name. Can anyone translate it?
With its Zeroid arms I love this little droid I saw online. Not sure about the cherry lips on top though. The chest TV is just fabulous, tho' I don't recognise the artwork. You?
Hi Woodsy.
I watched Grizzly last night on You Tube - on the TV! Not Grizzly Adams, although I did enjoy that series and regret not getting any of the toy figures, but Grizzly the wilderness 'horror' film of the 1970's.
As you can imagine its about a Grizzly bear running amok in an American National Park and eating the campers. There are some tense moments amongst the ranger chatter, especially as the beast approaches its prey and virtually no-one goes home without a bear hug.
It was panned at the time of its release as a brazen JAWS clone and to be fair there are many elements that the director has nicked from Speilberg: the der-der music during stalking, the flying severed arm and most starkly, the ending, which I've leave at that in case you watch it!
But I enjoyed GRIZZLY. I always wanted to be a National Park ranger in the UK. I studied nature conservation for 3 years including national park management but alas in the 80's all the jobs were in Cities and I ended up part of the urban conservation 'industry' and got based in a Leeds environmental charity, where I stayed for 20 years! I am a creature of habit if nothing else! I certainly never came across any Grizzly bears.
I also like GRIZZLY because it captures something I imagine has gone in the US, the atmospheric olde-worlde mountain restaurant where the walls are made of redwood logs and the big wood fire is always burning, casting a soft light onto healthy-looking hikers sipping brandy from huge bowled glasses. Aah.
It also reminds me of two other films I enjoyed; Prophecy about a mutated bear monster and the very similar Snowbeast repleat with chisel-jawed mountain men too. Grizzly was very successful financially and I bet it beat these two into a cocked hat.
GRIZZLY had one 'official' bit of merchandise as far as I can tell and its quite sought after by the looks of it: the GRIZZLY rubber bear by Imperial Toys [yes, they who brought us Apollo Moon Exploring!].
The Imperial bear seems to have been an example of the 'hey, quick, slap a header card on that old toy and get it in the shops and we'll make a few bucks!" school of marketing!
They already had a growling polar bear in stock and when GRIZZLY came out they painted it and shipped it out. I imagine the header card was the first thing to go and few will have survived unlike the tough rubber bear.
Having said that I found this pic online of three Imperial Grizzlies all with their 'official' card labels present and correct! Looking at it again I see that the word Grizzly, in its correct film font, is TM'd on the card. Could Imperial have actually got a licence for this toy?
Did you or do you have a Grizzly?
