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.
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.
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 full set of figures found in the Monsters book and box set. Eclectic does not begin to describe it.
(Editor note: This is the final of the three Monster Toy Blog-relevant book/toy sets. Unlike the Magical Creatures and Mythical Beasts sets, I never covered this one on the FaunaFigures blog, but I’ll use the same general format) Here I am with the last Groovy Tubes set from Innovative Kids that focused on monsters, myths and fantasy (there was a Knights one…not sure if that would fit but I don’t have it).
Bahamut is one of those legendary individuals from the lore of Dungeons and Dragons, a massive platinum dragon that rules as king of the good dragons. And also happens to share a name with a giant fish from Arabic mythology that holds the world on its back, but that’s all they share (hence, not including ‘folklore’ or ‘mythology’ in the classifications).
The griffin is a monster that most is commonly depicted with the body of a lion and the head, wings, and sometimes front claws of an eagle. (Variations do exist, however, with simply winged lions often being considered griffins, or other kinds of birds being combined with other kinds of cats.) The griffin is one of the most widespread and oldest mythical creatures.
The original Boglins were grotesque hand puppets made of very soft flexible rubber. Anatomically they were basically huge faces with legless bodies and tiny arms, that you could manipulate into grotesque facial expressions. I definitely had and one as a kid in the late 80s when they were first released, and remember the soft rubber getting all sticky and gunked up with grime, which shows it was popular and got a lot of play, but probably also explains why it got thrown out at some point!
Howdy from wonderful windy Wyoming, and welcome to the Monster Toy Blog! Today we will be reviewing a Reaper Miniatures ettin.
But before we take a look at our giant, a little history about the creature. The word ettin is derived from the Middle English words eten and/or etend, which came from the Old English word eoten.
