I have a soft spot for the UKRD figures of the 90s, as they were among the first dinosaur toys I collected as a kid, and I’ve reviewed quite a few of them for this blog. I’ve now reached the Stegosaurus from 1992 and thought it would just be an “also ran” kind of review, as the figure itself is one of the less interesting ones. But then I was made aware of something pretty mind-blowing, recently discovered by Dinotoyblog forum member DinoToyCollector and reported on their website: UKRD was never a company!
DinoToyCollector got suspicious since there is no available company history for UKRD other than the figures being stamped “made in China”, and was puzzled by some UKRD figures also sometimes being labelled as Dor Mei, a Hong Kong toy company founded in 1978. “UKRD” turned out to be an abbreviation of “UK Registered Design”, proved by typing the sequence of numbers on the bellies of the dinosaurs into the official register service site and seeing them turn up there.
So “UKRD” is simply a design protection marking, with Dor Mei listed as the owner of the design. Further company history shows that the copyrights for the designs were transferred to Toy Major Trading in 1993, and Dor Mei itself was dissolved in 1994. Be sure to read DinoToyCollector’s detailed write up for even more history, and while this solves the mystery of “UKRD”, I’ll return to a related mystery later in this review. So on to the figure itself…
As I hinted earlier, I find this one of the less interesting “UKRD” figures; while many of the others seem to have been based on John Sibbick’s paintings for the 1985 Encyclopaedia of Dinosaurs, this one seems to just be a generic, retro Stegosaurus. That’s particularly unfortunate in this case, because unlike many of Sibbick’s other dinosaurs from that book, the Stegosaurus would almost hold up today. While the tail in the painting is arched downwards, that doesn’t necessarily imply it’s supposed to be dragging, and wouldn’t be outside the range of movement. But the rest of that restoration looks quite modern.
The figure, on the other hand, looks almost cartoonish, with a silly, dumbfounded expression and almost front-facing eyes. The limbs are bent so that the body, let alone the tail, look like it is almost dragged across the ground. While the back-plate arrangement was suggested to have been alternating since the mid-20th century and confirmed by later finds, the figure shows two parallel rows, and oddly, the row stops by the start of the tail, only to continue abruptly with two plates near the “thagomiser” spikes at the end of the tail.
The proportions are all over the place and the skin looks incredibly saggy and wrinkly, with no indication of the small ossicles known from the skin of the neck, instead we get big, randomly placed blobs on the flanks. The colouration is rather striking, light orange on most of the body, with darker orange along the upper parts and plates. The eyes are yellow (with the paint bleeding out all over the place), and overall all this orange and yellow gives it an almost glowing, golden appearance, which seems somewhat unnatural for such a large animal. On the more basic side, it’s about 13.5 cm long.
An interesting aspect about these “UKRD” dinosaurs is that not only did they come in various size classes, with the overall same design, there were also less well-known skeleton equivalents of the mid-sized figures in similar poses (sometimes packaged together, I believe), with both regular and glow-in-the dark versions. These skeletons seem to not have been based on actual skeletal diagrams or photos as reference, but just sculpted from imagination, with little resemblance to the known anatomy, and the Stegosaurus skeleton is no exception.
Though in a similar pose to the “live” version and matching proportionally overall, the tail of the skeleton is much longer for some reason (overall, the figure is about 1 cm longer). While it’s almost pointless to talk about accuracy, as the individual bones are completely unrecognisable as belonging to Stegosaurus, one could imagine that the plates and thagomiser alone would be enough to make it easily identifiable, but here the sculpt fails miserably: the plates are mere rectangular nubs, and the thagomiser spikes are entirely absent! I have no idea what led to this design choice, and it should be clear to any layperson that these features are very prominent in the skeletal anatomy itself, not just soft tissue structures.
I don’t think I have much more good to say about these figures, so I’ll move on to the other mysterious issue mentioned earlier. Though almost impossible for me to photograph, the skeleton is labelled below with the regular “made in China”, year, and genus name, but in addition to “c 1992” (like the related “UKRD” figures), it also says “TM & C” and “1997 U.C.S. & Amblin” on one leg, with no hint of “UKRD”. So we learned earlier that the copyright of these figures was transferred to Toy Major Trading in 1993, but I was very puzzled what Amblin had to do with anything, as I only know it as Steven Spielberg’s production company.
Luckily, UKRD expert Duna over at the Dinotoyblog forum explained that the skeletons were apparently re-released as tie-ins to the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World in 1997, hence the presence of that year and “Amblin” on the figure. It was almost as mind-blowing to me as the “UKRD is not a company” revelation that these absolutely awful skeletons were once officially associated with the Jurassic Park franchise! Hopefully I’ve presented these events accurately, and I hope this review will help spread the word about the true nature of “UKRD”.
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