Jurassic Park III Dr. Alan Grant & Velociraptor

Year of release: 2001

Accessories:

-Grabbing hook weapon (for lack of a better name)

-Velociraptor figure

Description: This Alan Grant figure sports a white shirt with a red bandana, as well as green pants, a brown utility belt, black shoes and black gloves. The weapon has a slightly shiny greyish brown colour, giving it a metallic look. The Velociraptor is reddish brown, with black stripes on his sides, a big red stripe on his back and some grey on his belly, as well as a black JP III logo on his left leg.

Analysis: The paint job of Grant himself is fifty-fifty. Though his white shirt is pretty bland and little detailed, his green pants make up for it somewhat: they have two tears over them (as does the figure’s skin under the holes in his pants), making it appear Grant has had a near miss with some ferocious creature, maybe a Velociraptor. The pants also sport some darker green tones, giving them more realistic detail.

The weapon is rather lame: it looks pretty unrealistic and doesn’t really work. The figure can hold the weapon (the position of his arms seems to be made to support it), but when he does he can barely stand, since one of his legs is positioned in a forward move, making it feel rather clumsy. Also, when the weapon has the dinosaur clutched between its grabbing arms, it can hardly hold him, because there is no way to keep the arms closed.

The dinosaur is of a less poor quality. This Raptor stands in a stalking posture with his mouth open, like he’s planning to jump on something (like Grant). The dinosaur can clutch Grant’s arm between his jaws, if you want him to of course. Though the paint job is nothing special, not bad but not particularly good either, some credit goes to the person who decided to also paint his claws, instead of giving them the same colour as his limbs. One can claim this Raptor is supposed to be a juvenile, but he doesn’t really look like a young Raptor, more like a miniature version of a regular Raptor, like most of the dinosaurs that came with the JP III figures.

Playability: Not very high. As stated, the weapon doesn’t really work. The dinosaur doesn’t stand in a neutral position and has no moveable body parts. It would be good for dioramas maybe. Grant himself offers some slight playability, but not much.

Realism: The Grant figure doesn’t much resemble his counterpart from the movie (in essence, Sam Neill). Grant wore different clothes in the movie, and his most distinctive feature, his cowboy hat, is missing on this figure (and in fact, all the JP III Grant figures). His facial features won’t remind people of Sam Neill either, though like Sam this figure does appear to have a pimple next to his nose…

The Velociraptor is recognizable as such, but not very similar to the Raptors in the movie. Its face has a certain frog-like quality to it. Interestingly enough, compared to the Grant figure it’s about the size real life Velociraptors would have been in relation to human beings, unlike the Raptors in the movie, which were bigger than Velociraptors actually were. Of course we can only speculate about dinosaur colours, but this Raptor isn’t coloured too differently form the Raptors in the third movie.

Repaint: No. However, this figure would be repainted for JP: Dinosaurs 2, along with the weapon (for the Triceratops with Dinosaur Wrangler set). It would again be repainted for JP 2009 in desert colours, along with the Raptor and the capture claw (which would also be featured in the JP 2009 Forest Hunter General VS. T-Rex set). The Raptor would be repainted nine times, for the JP III CamoXtreme, JP Dinosaurs 2, JP Dinosaurs 3 and JP 2009 lines.

Overall rating: 4/10. Not a particularly interesting set, but if you can get it cheap (which is not unlikely, since it’s a common toy) you might want it, though mostly for the dinosaur figure and the paint job of the pants.