Jurassic Park III CamoXtreme: Night Velociraptor

Year of release: 2002

Description: this dark Raptor figure stands in a dramatic pose when boxed, showing all its primal predator prowess, with its body straight upwards, its legs wide apart and its ferocious claws ready for battle action, while its head faces upward and looks to the right, jaws wide open (they can't be closed though). The tail is bent in a sort of 'S' shaped fashion. This sculpt has proto-feathers on the back of its head, following the design change of the JP III Raptors. Accordingly, it has two nasal ridges on each side of its head. A dino damage wound is located on the upper base of the tail, revealing some of its tail bones and dark red muscle tissue. Inside the wound a button is found: when pressed this produces an aggravated shriek. On its back this creature has a small lever, activating the slashing claws. This also produces a snarling sound.

The predominant colour of this critter is very dark grey, almost black in fact. It covers the figure's entire body. It is adorned with grey stripes on both arms and legs. It also has a grey stripe running from the snout all the way to the tip of the tail, which also covers the lever on its back, while it's split in two around the feathers on the back of the head. Along this main back stripe, a thinner red stripe follows its entire trajectory on either side. Additional grey spots are applied around the nasal ridges, while smaller red stripes are located on the facial ridges and the top of the proto-feathers. The animal has black claws on both its fingers and toes. It has rather large feet. The inside of the mouth is pink, with beige teeth. On its right upper leg it has a black white logo. This Raptor has green eyes, and around these three circles in black, red and grey are found.

Analysis: CamoXtreme delivers another superb paint job on this Night Raptor figure! It's fairly minimalistic, mostly simple dark colouring with some colour details to spice things up, but it works very well, making for one sexy nocturnal predator. Its dark and gritty paint job is more believable to work under lightless conditions than in the case of the Chaos Effect Raptor Alpha figure, which used a similar starting point that worked out completely different (though still sublime). The little paint details, like the rings around the eyes and the small stripes and spots on the head, make for effective decoration while not hindering the creature's ability to stalk unsuspecting prey in the dark. It's also good to see the claws are painted, while it's not unlikely they could have gotten away with remaining unpainted in this case. The only thing that hinders hunting at night times is the white JP III logo on the leg, but a black logo would of course be hard to spot.

Apart from the stupendously neat paint job this otherwise still isn’t a great Raptor figure. It’s quite 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 posed another way, while its mouth can’t be closed. This severely limits playability. The attack option is as good as it was before, though the way the neck is posed too close to the lever is a bit inconvenient. Interestingly enough, the sounds have switched places: the attack shriek is now activated by the wound button and the snarl accompanies the slashing claws. Why this was done is anyone's guess, but it doesn't matter all that much.

Repaint: yes. This figure was originally featured in the JP III toy line. It would be repainted again for JP Dinosaurs 2/3 and JP 2009.

Overall rating: 8/10. This figure once again proves that sometimes all you need is a great paint job to make for an attractive figure, even though there's little else of interest in the set. Despite its many shortcomings, this Raptor got a very successful extreme makeover making it much cooler than its predecessor (or any of its repaints to follow). The CamoXtreme Night Raptor is definitely harder to find than the other CamoXtreme electronic dinosaurs but you can still find them irregularly on eBay, though prices vary quite a lot. Unfortunately this figure was apparently not imported in the Benelux like most other CamoXtreme figures, making it also much harder to find there. For some reason they can be found in surprising numbers in the UK though, so it seems they were mostly dumped there instead.