Perhaps the most fearsome and powerful beast to inhabit the Jungle World of Eldrador is the jungle dragon itself. While it prefers to soar high above its lush green environment, it will swoop down on any intruder it sees, attacking with tooth, claw, and tail!
Schleich’s 2024 Eldrador jungle dragon measures about 11 cm high at the head and 17 cm long, but would be considerably longer were it not for the fact that its tail is curled to the left with the tip facing toward.
Biollante is a hybrid kaiju created by Dr. Genichiro Shiragami through the combination of DNA from his deceased daughter, a rose, and Godzilla. Initially looking more like a gigantic rose, Biollante eventually morphs into a monster that’s basically a plant version of Godzilla, resulting in one of the coolest kaiju in Toho’s roster.
Shimo, sometimes called the World Ender, the Blizzard Lizard, the Bringer of Ice Ages, and the Monster Whose Breath Makes the Ocean Into Stone, is a ginormous Kaiju, far larger than Godzilla himself, with ice-based powers capable of wreaking havoc on the planet. She is, however, a benevolent beast, and most of the devastation she caused over the millenia was due to her enslavement by the vile Skar King.
If you had to ask me what my favorite things are, I’d probably tell you dinosaurs, and other prehistoric animals first. Yet almost equally, I also adore werewolves, wolf men, and any flavor of lycanthrope. There’s many different cultural tales of men that could shapeshift into wolves or wolf like creatures (if not other animals), rather willingly or forced from a curse, spell, disease, etc.
Most monster toys are, naturally, inspired by or represent creatures from established fiction or folklore. But every now and again that relationship gets turned on its head. Take the bulette, for example, one of the rare cases where a random toy has inspired a fictional creature.
The birth of ‘Patchisaurs’
If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s you almost certainly encountered the ubiquitous range of simple plastic monster toys now known informally as patchisaurs.
First and foremost, thanks to Happy Hen Toys for this review sample.:)
The yeti (Abomanixhomo messneri) is a very large and elusive ape that dwells in the Himalayan mountain range. Adults are usually around 7-8 feet tall and 500 lbs in weight, but there are unconfirmed reports of 15 foot tall specimens that are capable of killing full grown yaks simply by seizing them by the horns and tearing their heads off.
One day, while feeling defeated in my search for new Mattel dinosaurs at Target, I decided to peruse the adult collectables section. Being a dinosaur and animal collector first and foremost, I rarely leave this section with anything but also being a sci-fi and horror nerd, I still like to see what they’ve got.
While I’ve never read any of the Lord of the Rings novels (and honestly have no real interest of ever changing that), I’m very fond of the film trilogy by Peter Jackson. My favourite out of the three is The Two Towers, and one reason is because of the character Treebeard.
The basilisk is famously known as the “king of serpents,” a venomous creature so lethal that simply looking into its cold eyes brings upon death. According to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, written in 79 AD, “When it hisses, all the other serpents fly from it: and it does not advance its body, like the others, by a succession of folds, but moves along upright and erect upon the middle.
The chupacabra (Spanish for “goat sucker”) is a cryptid whose origins can be traced back to1995, when in Puerto Rico livestock began turning up dead, drained of blood, and possessing puncture wounds. Eyewitnesses described a bipedal creature, with large red eyes, spines running down the back, hairless skin, and standing 3-4’ (0.9 to 1.2 m) tall.
The Kenner Aliens line really came into its own beginning with Series 2. Whereas the xenomorphs in the first wave were relatively conservative in design, the later ones were all over the place, and all in a good way. There was the Killer Crab Alien, the Mantis Alien, the Rhino Alien, and the Snake Alien among others.
