#262 DINO RIDERS – DIMETRODON with SHADO (1989)

One more complete dinosaur from wave 2, this one falls into the intermediate-size category. Like the rest of the dinosaurs in this category, the Dimetrodon comes with a nice “jaws” action feature. By pushing the button on its tail, the jaws open.

These were the whole content of the box, except the figure accesories, which I did not photographed, but which can be seen in entry #212. The set included with Shado was the "Valorian Set 1"

 

There’s something remarkable about Dimetrodon’s armour: It’s the first one in this toy-line in which the armour was also intended to be played apart. This idea would be rescued in the “Ice Age” wave (3^th wave), where the armour of the creature was also part of an ice barricade, or ice station.

In this case, the upper part of the armour, that covers the sail of the Dimetrodon could be used as a bunker/barricade when not placed on the dinosaur. 

 These are a few more pictures I took by the end of last summer. In them you can observe the great pivoting seat in which Shado seats, it can be oriented in any direction and it can also be placed in different heights, thanks to two small blue pieces that act as hinges and axles. 

The armour of the Dimetrodon can be opened or closed. When opened reveals two powerful cannons

I never commented in detail the instruction sheets used in this toy-line. Depending on the size of the dinosaur and the number of pieces of the armour, the instruction sheets could have different sizes and could include 4 or 2 pages. In most cases, instructions are a 4-pages leaflet, just for very small dinosaurs like the Ankylosaurus are just two.

The border of these documents can be either light blue for Valorian dinosaurs, or purple for Rulons Dinosaurs. In some cases, grey borders can be found, or even dinosaurs in which the colour of the border has been mistaken.

This is the Spanish instructions sheet for the toy. 

 

In any case, the first page always depicts the contents of the box, naming each part accurately. The rest of the pages indicate how to put all pieces together to form the armour of the dinosaur. If the process is not very complicated, there is usually room in the fourth page for further explanations about how to use the figure accessories, in the case of the Dimetrodon it is explain how to fix the gun to the hand of Shado and how to use the ladder.

Since this entry is quite short, I’d like to show the comic book that was available with the dinosaurs and that introduces the story of the Dino-Riders and the most important characters and dinosaur species in the collection. The first comic is titled: "The adventure begins". Although in America there were two comics books released (this one for wave1, another one for wave 2), in Spain and other european countries, only this one was released (in each country in a different language). I am showing here the English/American version.

The comic was made before the collection was completely defined and there are some "inaccuracies" that we could mention at the end of this article.

Dino Riders Comic Book Cover

If you notice, the clothes used by Questar and Youngstar are different from the used in the figures. Most characters are placed in the wrong dinosaurs: for example Turret flies the Quetzalcoatlus, Gunnur the Diplodocus... these are surely minor details, but they give us the information that the comic was ready a time before the toy line was ready to be sold in toyshops. Serena also appears in the story, although its figure would be released one year later in the second wave.

The Spanish version of the comic had a figure catalogue in the last page, instead of the Dino Riders club information shown in this catalogue. Apart from that, it is interesting to mention that the Torosaur does not appear in this catalogue, although it was part of the first wave.

Spanish Comic - Last page figure catalogue

NOTE: Throughout this article I called the Dimetrodon a “dinosaur”, but this is wrong because it lived 40 million years before the dinosaurs, in the Permian Era (300-250 million years ago). A similar scale Dimetrodon was shown in entry #184.

FACTS and FIGURES:

• Name: DIMETRODON with SHADO
• Toy Line: Dino-Riders (Wave 2)
• Year: 1989
• Company: Tyco (U.S.A.)
• Scale of the dinosaur: 1:24
• Size of the figures: 2½’’ or 6,5 cm