The Lost World Series 1: Velociraptor

Year of release: 1997

Accessories:

-Three pieces of capture gear

Description: this Raptor sports a bright reddish brown colour for the most part, which is found on its flanks, head, arms and legs. Additionally, its underside is white, including the inner sides of its arms and legs. Its throat and the underside of its lower jaw however are light blue in colour. The upper part of the body (upper part of the head, most of the neck, its back and upper part of the tail) are black with additional black stripes running down over the reddish brown colouring. More black stripes can be found on its legs. Its claws are painted shiny dark brown and it has bright yellow eyes. A beige JP Site B logo can be found on its right upper leg, with the number .06 next to it.

This Raptor stands in a very neutral pose, except for its fingers which are bent in different positions to add some diversity. To accommodate the carding system used for the smaller TLWS1 dinosaur figures, this Raptor’s tail is bent downwards, so it fits in its packaging. The Raptor comes with a biting action: when pushing its legs together, the head moves forward and its jaws open, as if snapping at some unfortunate soul or prey.

The Raptor comes with three pieces of capture gear, which look more mechanic and elaborate than they actually are. The largest piece can be strapped on the Raptor’s back, with the long stick like piece being clamped in a hole in the first piece, and the third piece, which is like a muzzle, attached to the second piece, so it covers the Raptor’s snout (and more importantly, its ferocious jaws). All three pieces are painted in the same silvery metallic grey.

Analysis: this is a repaint of the classic JPS1 and JPS2 Velociraptor figures. The only differences between these figures are the paint job and the capture gear. This Raptor sports a more elaborate colouring, which is quite good except for the dull white underside. The biting action is also identical to that of the earlier figures and works just as good.

It’s surprising Kenner designed new capture gear for this figure, since they could have just used the gear that came with the JPS2 Raptor. Still, they felt it necessary to create new gear for this figure, unlike the Dilophosaurus of this toy line, which is also a repaint yet carries the same capture gear as the earlier model. These new restraints add some diversity to the realm of JP capture gear, but unfortunately are less practical than the original gear. It looks way more complex yet basically all it does is restrain the Raptor’s head: this is to accommodate a dinosaur-breaks-free-of-restraint-gear action which works via the same principle as the biting action, except now the Raptor also swings off its head restraint. Its legs and arms are still free though, so it could just run off with the stuff on never to be seen again, or what’s worse, use those ferocious claws to kill some people first. Also, the front part of the capture gear falls off easily since it isn’t very well attached. Clearly the designers didn’t give this gear much thought.

Playability: this Raptor stands in a neutral pose which adds to the range of playability options. It’s a good thing the arms are arranged in two different positions, so the creature’s stance doesn’t feel too artificial: this way additional possibilities are added. Though the creature’s tail is bent, this doesn’t really hurt the overall playability much. The new capture gear provides for a breaking-free action but it doesn’t work all that well.

Realism: this Raptor figure looks quite similar to its movie counterparts and is easily recognizable as a Velociraptor. Its colouring is somewhat different from the colours the TLW Raptors had, though they too sported stripes. It’s also slightly oversized compared to the human figures, though not by much. However, looking at it from a palaeontologist’s point of view, it’s definitely too big, since Raptors only stood about one metre tall. The capture gear this raptor carries was not featured in the movie, since they didn’t use such restraint gear on animals but put them in cages. No Raptor was captured in TLW by the way.

Repaint: as stated above, this is a repaint of the JPS1 and JPS2 Velociraptor, though the capture gear is new. This figure would be repainted again for JP Chaos Effect and JP Dinosaurs 1, with repainted versions of the capture gear from the JPS2 Raptor figure, so this is the only Raptor to carry this particular capture gear.

Interestingly enough, the TLWS1 toy line originally was to feature a repainted JPS1 Raptor with a very neat paint job, which was called a Deinonychus (a species of dinosaurs similar to Velociraptor but of a different family). However, late in the design process this figure was discarded in favour of this repaint which was labelled as just another Raptor. A paint job similar (but certainly not identical) to the one the unreleased Deinonychus featured was applied to the larger Electronic Velociraptor of this toy line.

Overall rating: 7/10. This Raptor is a good enough repaint and still a great figure to have, but unfortunately carries flawed capture gear. It’s easy and usually cheap to find, so if you don’t mind repaints or simply don’t own any of this sculpt’s versions, you might get one yourself.