A Fossil T-Rex for the Adventure Team

I've been so involved with the Minions lately, that I haven't had much time for my old friends the GI Joe Adventure Team. But today, while picking up a bag of cat food at Petco, I spotted this great T-Rex fossil skull in the aquarium department, and had to have it. I love 1/6th "artifacts" for the Adventure Team to dig up and bring back to the Adventure Team headquarters for display, and this is a doozie.

I always thought that Hasbro missed a bet not making AT "Dinosaur Hunter" figure sets, each of which would include a fossil skull or skeleton accessory for a kid to dig out of the sandbox. This gives you a pretty good idea of what I had in mind, though a toy version would obviously be made of lighter and more durable materials.



The skull is made of hard resin (heavy!) and has an air hose on the back that I'll cut off (even the tag is still attached in this photo). The top of the skull is hinged (so it can open and close as it fills with air). Price was about $10, and money well spent. Actually, big as it is, it STILL isn't full scale for an adult T-Rex skull, but I figure it's close enough.

It looks pretty good in the greenish-gray paint it came with, but I'm at least going to use some acrylic paint to darken the eye sockets, nostrils, and other openings in the skull. I'll post some more photos when I get around to it.

DVD Extras for "Minions: Walking the Dinosaur"

I'm really pleased with how this installment of "Minions," titled "Walking the Dinosaur" turned out visually, so here are some "behind the scenes" shots of the set.

I made extensive use of printed papers sold in craft stores for scrapbooking in this set. The ground is simply overlapping sheets of a "stucco" print. There are also some small scraps of a "grass" print to break up the lines. The backdrop is a cut-and-paste job onto a sheet of foamcore, using pieces of two different sheets, a "cloudy sky" sheet, and a "pine forest" pattern. I covered most of the sky with overlapping sheets of the sky pattern, then filled in the horizon with hand-cut pieces from the "forest" sheets. I probably used about four sheets of each.

The "dirt" area is actually a sheet of scrap packing foam hit with brown spray paint. I didn't use foam-safe paint, so it melted the surface into an irregular texture, and bits of white foam are showing up through the foam. I wasn't sure how it would work, but seen from the side, the white actually breaks up the dark brown and makes it look more like a natural ground-cover.

The plants are all plastic, consisting of bits of aquarium plants (bought cheap at a thrift store), and some dollar-store mixed greenery that I took apart to make smaller plants. The rocks are just some driveway gravel I picked up right outside my office door. The brown "log" is actually a piece of driftwood, the only real plant mater in the shot.

The park bench is metal. I found it in a thrift store (in metal housewares, not in toys) for about two bucks. The shovel is a craft-store item. The chain was purchased by the foot at the hardware store. The dinosaur is a "Jurassic Park" T-Rex, possibly one of the nicest toy dinosaurs ever made. I currently own three of them, and I'm always keeping my eyes open for more.

I did do a slight bit of digital retouching in Paint Shop Pro, using the "clone" tool to hide the edges of the foam sheet, and the "smear" tool to break up the edges of my cut-out trees and make them look more realistic.

The whole thing only took me twenty minutes or so to set up using things I had on-hand. I pays to think ahead and stockpile basic backgrounds and props like these.

More Minions Extras

Okay, life and Minions have been keeping me busy enough that I haven't posted here in FOREVER. Here's a little Minions DVD extra from the current panel. If you haven't already seen the strip, I suggest you go check it out here before continuing.

This week's setup guest-stars three "Jurassic Park" T-Rexes. Actually, to be technical, two are "Jurassic Park," and the third is a lurid repaint from the "Mutations" line. While these are sub-scale for 12" figures, they're still plenty big enough to photograph well with them and look plenty scary.

My problem was how to get them posed the way I wanted. These are fantastic, very realistic, soft vinyl figures, but they have no articulation at all. They're rubbery statues. So how to get THREE of them standing up and snapping at my poor Minion's heels?

I tried various ways of interlocking their feet to create a kind of tripod. Didn't work. I tried propping them up with boxes, or holding their tails with spring clamps. Didn't work. Finally, I went out the back door of the office into my sun-porch and found a large, unused, flower pot. By folding the flexible tails on two of them and jamming them in, then hanging the third over the edge and propping up one foot with a box, I got more or less the look I wanted.




Otherwise, this is a very simple setup, and the first appearance of my new "catwalk" set-piece. It's supported on a couple of mailing tube covered with a stone-pattern self-adhesive contact paper. The chain came from the hardware store, along with all the goodies to build the catwalk. I think, actually, that the catwalk deserves its own post...

Dinosaurs: Still fun

I happened to catch a few minutes tonight of the movie Jurassic Park as it was running on Sci-Fi channel. I was surprised at how poorly it held up. The central characters were all so annoying and stupid you wanted the dinosaurs to eat them.

Of course, that didn't matter at the time, because -- it was all about the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, they don't hold up too well either. The once state-of-the-art CGI dinosaurs now look rather unconvincing, and their designs are already far behind the scientific curve (current evidence supports that most, if not all, of the dinosaurs portrayed would have had feathers).

Of course, any attempt to keep up with science is probably doomed anyway, which may be part of why Peter Jackson has gone strictly retro with his dinosaurs in the King Kong remake. These are strictly 1939 dinosaurs done with 21st century technology.

Old, new, accurate or not, one dinosaurs make great toys, and the Jursassic Park toy line is without a doubt exceptional. Collectors pay high-prices for them on eBay. Fortunately, I got most of my large collection at thrift stores, paying pennies on the dollar.

Another interesting thing about dinosaurs is that the same body plans often get played out at different sizes in different species. So, even though a Jurrassic Park dinosaur may be far from 1/6th scale (I'd say they're closer to 1/14th or so), they can always serve as 1/6th stand-ins for their larger cousins.

The king of Jurassic Park dinos is the bull T-Rex, and I'm lucky enough to have three of them now. I used one of them as a "juvenile allosaurous" in my "Scotty Travis, Dinosaur Hunter" photo-story a while back. Still one of my favorite shots.

Scientifically accurate? Not hardly. Fun? Sure!