 Ankylosaurus
a.k.a. Debbie in DINO Brites
D.I.N.O. Mites Figures
Item No.: #10
Manufacturer: Panosh Place
Includes: n/a
Action Feature: n/a
Retail: cheap
Availability: ca. 1987
Other: Mean, green, and available in different colors
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The D.I.N.O. Mites line managed to give us all a fun, quick burst of dinosaur toys on the cheap and faded away into relative obscurity shortly thereafter. At just 1 3/4-inches long the Ankylosaurus wasn't particularly big, and as you can see the sculpt was nothing special either. He's green, you can see some mold lines, and the face is pretty iffy. While those who grew up in the 1980s have fond memories of their toys, and while many say it was the best toy decade, rose-colored glasses help.
Officially he's only known as #10, but it's pretty obvious which dinosaur it really is. The glow-in-the-dark painted spines on his sides break up the green a bit, and set it apart from other small cheap plastic dinosaurs of his age. (You could buy sacks of them like army men for a couple of dollars.) This was a step above the super-cheap molds, but it was still pretty cheap. I'm sure a lot of you would say "I can do better than that," and I have no doubt you could.
I wouldn't say this one is my favorite, but he does have some really good sculpted detail on his shell and around his eyes. The legs are a little plain, and I'm sure he could have benefitted from a few more hours under the knife, but it's not like 1980s molding techniques yielded particularly detailed sculpts. (See: everything Kenner ever released.) For a distinctive kind of dinosaur or mini figure collector, this is a fantastic item cast in fairly stiff plastic. There's no articulation, there's little paint, it is what it is. I still like these a lot, and continue to hunt down new ones when they (rarely) come up for sale. There are far fewer Dino-Mites on eBay than most other popular collectible lines, but those have one thing going for them: people care about them. People just forgot about these, or never saw them in the first place. (This is a crying shame, I'd love a revival of a similar dinosaur toy line.)
--Adam Pawlus
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