If you were a young boy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, chances are you were quite familiar with the crown logo of Imperial Toys.
From the admittedly limited perspective as a six-year-old boy, Imperial was known for one thing and one thing only: rubber dinosaurs.
Imperial specialized in those solid rubber dinosaurs you’d find in convenience stores, pharmacies, and the metal floor bins of toy stores like Child World. They usually sold for less than three bucks. Those dinosaurs were tough bastards; you could throw them against the wall all day long and they wouldn’t get a scratch. The sculpts and paint applications were crude even by contemporary standards and there was nary a point of articulation to be found on them, but when I was a kid that hardly mattered. The rubbery “real feel” of the dinosaurs skin, coupled with their Godzilla-like indestructibility, made them the pre-eminent dinosaur toys of my youth.
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Toy Vault made its first impression on the action figure industry back in 1998, when it released a number of action figures based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. They got the license through the Tolkien Estate, as opposed to ToyBiz, who had the rights only to the movie figures. Unfortunately, Toy Vault’s figures were soon overshadowed by the movie trilogy and the merchandising juggernaut behind it.
I seem to have an uncanny knack for getting into fads just as they’re hitting their peak, and often about to begin a decline. Case in point: zombies. I’m not sure exactly when the current zombie craze began, but starting with 28 Days Later… in 2002 there’s been quite a run of zombie mania. There was the remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004 as well as Shaun of the Dead, followed by the return of the founder of the zombie film, George A. Romero, with Land of the Dead in 2005. The Resident Evil flicks in 2002 and 2004 also featured zombies, and zombies have been quite active in videogames of late, from the aforementioned Resident to the quirky Stubbs the Zombie and the recent megahit Dead Rising.