Jurassic Park III: Alpha Velociraptor

Year of release: 2001

Description: this colourful Raptor figure stands in a dramatic pose when it’s still in box, showing all its primal predator prowess, with its body straight upwards, its legs wide apart and its ferocious claws ready for battle action. The lower part of the body is predominantly grey with brown stripes, while the upper part of its body is mostly brown. This creature has a large red stripe running across its back, with two bluish purple stripes running on each side of this red stripe from the neck to the base of the tail: here a dino damage wound is located, showing some of its tail bones. On its back this creature has a small red lever, activating the dino attack action, namely slashing claws. The animal has red hands with black claws on both its fingers and toes. It has rather large feet. Unlike previous Raptor figures this sculpt has some red feathers on the back of its head, following the design change of the JP III Raptors. It also has two red nasal ridges on each side of its head. Its mouth is opened, showing its tongue and some lovely teeth: the mouth can’t be closed. On its right leg it has a black JP III logo, which is hardly noticeable because of the brown paint. This Raptor has bright orange eyes.

Analysis: this isn’t a great Raptor figure. It’s disproportional: both its feet and head are too big. It stands in an awkward pose with its legs wide apart, making it look rather fat. The head is turned to the right and can’t be turned another way, while its mouth can’t be closed. This severely limits playability. The paint job is way too colourful: even though the JP III Raptors had more colour than the Raptors in the previous movies, it wasn’t this extreme. The Raptor might be good for dioramas, but not much else.

The sounds are pretty good, and the attack screech is easily recognizable as a Raptor sound. The dino damage sound is a bit odd though: it’s a sort of rasping noise, not something one would normally associate with a Raptor. But still pretty cool. The attack action is similar to the one of the Dilophosaurus from this toy line: by pulling the lever the arms slash back and forth. It works pretty good, but it’s nothing special. Again, the dino damage wound cannot be covered somehow, so this dinosaur carries an open wound all the time, like all the larger dinosaurs of this toy line. It’s a real shame.

Playability: like stated above, the odd stance of this figure hinders playability. Though its limbs are poseable, its head and mouth unfortunately aren’t. Also, its tail is positioned in a bent pose, and not in a more neutral way. Also, because of the electronics you can’t play too rough with it if you want to keep it in working order. And beware the nasal ridges; they’re quite fragile and break off easily.

Realism: the colours are similar to those of the male alpha Raptor seen in JP III, but only slightly. Because of the disproportional body parts and the inconvenient position of this figure, it doesn’t resemble the JP III Raptors that much. Also, it doesn’t resemble the other Raptors of the JP III toy line a lot either, mostly because they all have different paintjob. Put them all together and you have a very colourful bunch of overgrown turkeys. This Raptor is also way too big compared to the human figures of this toy line, especially considering the Velociraptors are already oversized in the JP franchise. This figure doesn’t look much like a paleontologically correct Raptor either.

Repaint: no. This figure would be repainted four times, for the Camo-Xtreme, JP Dinosaurs 2 and 3 and JP 2009 toy lines though, in even funkier colours.

Overall rating: 5/10. It’s not a great figure and could have been better. None of the JP III Raptors are really good though. It’s not rare, so you can find it easily and probably cheap too, if you want one.