Jurassic Park Chaos Effect: Tyrannonops

Year of release: 1998

Accessories:

-Three pieces of capture gear

Description: this carnivorous quadruped hybrid stands in a somewhat active mode, with its right hind leg and front left leg posed forward and its other legs positioned backward, as if walking. The rest of the figure’s body assumes a neutral posture. Tyrannonops comes with biting jaws: pulling the right hind leg back causes the upper jaw, equipped with four nasty looking dagger like fangs, to raise upwards, as if the monster is opening its maul, ready to close those jaws around an unfortunate creature’s body. An interesting detail: the creature’s purple tongue sticks out when the animal opens its mouth. Releasing the leg makes the jaws close with a snap.

Tyrannonops is adorned with an intricate and colourful paint job. The dominant colour is orange, which can be found over almost all of its body, especially on the limbs, around the throat, the midsection and the base of the tail, as well as behind the eyes. A darker, almost brown, shade of orange is located on its back, above the legs and on top of the midsection. The creature sports small beige spots surrounded by black stripes on its tail, and larger versions of this colour scheme around its waist and near the head. The monster’s lower jaw is beige, while the upper jaw is black with a purple spot on each side containing its beige eyes (no irises, unlike the Tyrannonops featured on the card). It’s got some small black spots on its back, the small claws on all four feet are also black, and a black JP CE logo is found on the upper right hind leg, along with what appears to be the number .66, though it’s a bit hard to tell (it might also be .06, .86 or .96).

The Tyrannonops comes with three pieces of capture gear, all painted metallic dark blue. There’s the typical handcuff, in this case large enough to fit around the monster’s muscled neck, as well as some leg shackles shaped like a cross to keep the beast from walking away. Thirdly, there’s a head piece which can go around the creature’s head, in an attempt to keep it from using those strong jaws. It doesn’t work though, since activating the biting action also makes the figure thrash the head piece of when it’s on.

Analysis: another older creature sculpt makes its way into the Chaos Effect toy line, also sporting a colourful makeover. In the case of the Raptor Alpha, the figure benefited from its new colour scheme. Tyrannonops has a less appealing and even somewhat ugly look to him, though this is of course a subjective comment. The combination of orange, black and beige, albeit on the original side, just isn’t my cup of tea.

Fortunately the designers didn’t mess with the biting action, labelled ‘saber strike fangs’ on the figure’s card. Pulling the leg back makes the Tyrannonops open its mouth stupendously wide and sticking its tongue out (it looks a bit silly, but it’s a neat little touch). The jaws snap back with force, tightly gripping anything unlucky enough to be in their path. Be careful though, doing this too often or too rough may cause paint wear (minor though, but paint wear nonetheless). It’s one of the more effective and powerful biting actions off the various toy lines, and always a blast to perform.

The capture gear, also repainted, does its job relatively well. Though the cuff isn’t very useful, the legs restraints secure the monster’s feet to a satisfactory extent. The same isn’t necessarily true for the head muzzle, since the creature has the ability to sling it off using its forceful jaws. But by its own accord the head piece sticks to the head well enough. Other than this, the capture gear doesn’t add much, as usual.

Playability: Tyrannonops comes with the usual range of poseable limbs as well as a moveable upper jaw. Though its legs are positioned in a walking mode this doesn’t hinder playability much. The creature is equipped with a strong and easily accessible biting action, capable of gripping human figures and smaller dinosaurs without problems. However, the tongue of the figure might get in the way when biting something. The three pieces of capture gear form a nice way to restrain the animal, but aren’t much use otherwise, though the head piece can be removed by activating the biting action, so there’s a dinosaur-breaks-free-of-restraints option involved to some extent.

Realism: being a repaint of the Lycaenops sculpt, this figure obviously shows too much Lycaenops features and no hint of Rex DNA whatsoever. Though the orange paint job echoes the colouring of the large Omega T-Rex of this toy line, it’s the only link to Tyrannosaurs one can spot here. It would have made more sense to call it a cross between a Lycaenops and some other four legged predator, maybe even a modern day animal like a tiger (hence the tiger like paint job). Given the fact the Tanaconda and Compstegnathus figures of this toy line also featured present day creatures’ DNA, it wouldn’t seem strange Tyrannonops underwent a similar genetic makeup. Now this creature just doesn’t live up to its name.

Repaint: yes. This figure is a repaint of the JPS2 Lycaenops, featuring repainted capture gear which originally came with that same sculpt. A second Lycaenops repaint, including the same capture gear, would be released in the first JP Dinosaurs line later on.

Overall rating: 7/10. The sculpt is good as ever, still featuring the powerful biting jaws it originally had, but the new paint job is nothing special and even a bit ugly. This is one of the more common CE figures and thus is easier to find than most of the other figures of this toy line. It shouldn’t prove too hard to find one at a decent price either.