Stuart K. Hayashi
It seems that a mystery that nagged at me since childhood might be solved. Many collectors of Godzilla toys are familiar with the Hong Kong company Imperial. It made the Godzilla action figure
with the red lips. The action figure has a strange silver blotch on its chest because the people at Imperial copied that feature from the Godzilla action figure
that Bandai made in Japan years earlier. Imperial
also made King Kong.
Pertinent here is that Imperial
made a googly-eyed Tyrannosaurus with unique features: it has thin-but-wide plates going down its chest. It has osteoderms (little spikes) running down its back similar to a crocodile’s. And it is yellow. It was made in 1985. While many toy collectors know of this toy, they seem not to know that this toy’s design features — the chest plates and dorsal spikes — are based on another toy company’s design.
I learned of this because of my cousin. Years ago, he gave me many toys of Godzilla and Ultraman monsters made by Bullmark, not Bandai. Likewise, he gave me some thick paperback books, full of thick pages, profiling Ultraman. He gave me yet another book from the same publishing house that was about dinosaurs. And the book heavily featured a sculpture that closely resembled the 1985 Imperial toy, with the dorsal spikes and chest plates. But this sculpture had much more realistic eyes and was overall fancier. It also was not yellow. This book was published in 1981. I cannot read the kanji, and neither could my cousin. I always wondered if this sculpture was some model kit released in Japan in 1981 or earlier.
It seems I now have some answers. As you can see above, I took photos of the pages of the Japanese book. I then ran a Google image search.
It appears that the sculpture was photographed by Top Trumps in 1979 for its card game called
Prehistoric Monsters. And the sculpture has an earlier appearance still. It is in the 1977 book
Purnell’s Book of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Mammals. This is
profiled on the blog
Love in the Time of Chasmosaurus. One of the commenters says, “Since these models were featured in the London museum, I theorize that they were sculpted by a British paleontologist named Arthur Hayward — he had sculpted dinos for Ray Harryhausen [for
One Million Years B.C. starring Raquel Welch].”
Important design features of Imperial’s Godzilla toy were copied from Bandai’s. Likewise, it seems Imperial copied the design of its 1985 Tyrannosaurus from a sculpture that Arthur Hayward made at least as early as 1977.
