Written by Adam McCombs
Name: Gigantisaur
Faction: Preternia/Heroic Warriors
Approximate US release date: never released
Gigantisaur, had it been produced, would have been by far the largest non-playset toy in Masters of the Universe, dwarfing even Tytus and Megator. Although it appeared in Mattel’s 1987 dealer catalog, it was never released in stores. There are a small number of unreleased MOTU prototypes that Mattel actually showed in catalogs – Eldor, He-Ro, Gyrattacker, Evil Robot and Gigantisaur. I’ve written about three of those so far, and I decided it was Gigantisaur’s time in the spotlight.
David Wolfram, the final designer for the toy, actually went over some of the history of Gigantisaur during a panel at Power-Con 2012:
Toward the end of the segment he talked about one of the toy’s action features and the fate of the prototype:
“It had a piano string, and when you pressed the button it would shoot up and stand up. It was very cool but by the time we made it to Toy Fair, people weren’t even going to the He-Man gallery anymore, it came so late. Unfortunately I threw away the prototype at some point… it was too big to keep around the office. It ended up being a much better toy and it did make the catalog in ’87.”
In my interview with Wolfram, he was kind enough to go over the design history of the toy with me in detail, and shared images of his concept art to boot!
Battle Ram: I’ve heard that [Gigantisaur] has something of a storied history. Were you the main designer on that? That one showed up in the 1987 Mattel Catalog, but of course was never released. Could you share some of the background on that?
David Wolfram: Yes, I was the designer on the many iterations. When it was first shown to me, there was a beautiful, but totally unrealistic painting by Ed Watts, and a white prototype model that was submitted by a well known outside toy invention company.
DW: My first boards (especially the side view) show the reality of what I had to work with. One of the big visual issues is that the feet had to be huge to extend past the center of gravity. Ed’s (a great guy by the way, who went way too soon, and not in a way I would want to go) drawing hinted at this voluminous interior, when in fact, because of the cockpit, could only hold one figure.
DW: There was also a figure that was supposed to hide in the tail section, but in the model it looked like the dinosaur was taking a dump! There were lots of meetings when marketing and management were forced to confront the reality of this turkey-like bastardization rather than the seductive drawing. I was given the go ahead to take some of the elements of the old model, and another provision was that it had to swallow a figure.
I did a lot of work with foam and clay to work out a better proportioned creature, and the engineer that I worked with, Ben Guerrero (Tony the sculptor’s brother) came up with the idea of marrying the tail with the part of the body with the rear legs to create a tripod which eliminated the need for gigantic feet to let it stand up. It not only stood up, it shot up, because Ben used a very strong spring. Of course, after all that it went to pre-Toy Fair, where the line was for all intents and purposes dead domestically.
In my interview with Martin Arriola, he also gave some background about Gigantisaur:
We did Turbosaurus [later, Gigantisaur] that never got made. Too impractical? Of course. Roger Sweet had a sketch done by Ed Watts. It showed He-Man on this dinosaur. He sold it with all these features at a price that was low. I said, do you know how big this is going to be?
I went to Dave Wolfram, and I said, “We gotta breadboard this stuff.” Sure enough, that dinosaur was probably three feet. I told marketing, if you want this to reflect what Sweet sold you in the B-sheet, this is how big it’s going to be. We hand painted it. One thing that Sweet sold to marketing is that it would swallow a He-Man figure. But you know how splayed out the he-man figures were. It would have been as big as Eternia.
Unfortunately we don’t have any packaging art for Gigantisaur, but there was a fair amount of information about the toy included in that 1987 catalog picture.
The first thing that stands out, other than his enormous size, is that unlike the other three dinosaurs that were released in the line (Tyrantisaurus, Bionatops and Turbodactyl) Gigantisaur apparently has no exposed circuitry or mechanical parts on his exterior, despite the fact that he has a gun that pops out of his chest:
One of his major features was his ability to swallow a figure. Given the width of the typical muscular MOTU action figure, this feature meant that Gigantisaur had to have a very thick neck:
Once figures were swallowed, they could be retrieved via a door on the side of the figure’s belly:
Aside from the articulated jaw, it would have had articulated legs as well:
As stated by Wolfram, a lever on the figure when activated would cause the figure to rear up on its hind legs:
As mentioned previously, no packaging artwork for Gigantisaur has ever surfaced, but Joe Manzo created a nice kind of mashup mockup of what the packaging might have looked like, roughly, had it been made.
Gigantisaur appears in Playthings Magazine’s coverage of 1987 Toy Fair. The image below was shared in the Vintage Toys MOTU Facebook group. A small image of Gigantisaur is shown.
The relevant text in the article reads:
The Masters of the Universe collection now includes Preternia, a new dimension to the fantasy world of He-Man that sends him back into time to a prehistoric Eternia, where dinosaurs roam the land and many new magical forces abound. There is He-Ro, the most powerful wizard in the universe, who leads the Powers of Grayskull warriors against the evil dinoreptilian kingdom. Eldor, his mentor and teacher, and Turbodactyl and Bionatops, his mighty dinosaur allies battle against the evil kingdom and the dreaded Tyrantisaurus Rex, which is able to release a wind-up creature from its chest called a “mecha-drone.” Tytus, Gigantisaur and Megator, each standing 16″ tall, are also inhabitants of the new fantasy land of Preternia.
Returning to the Futuristic world of Eternia, the Masters of the Universe collection introduces many new heroic warriors, including King Randor, Sorceress and Klamp Champ. who battle against new enemies like Snake Face, Sssqueeze, Nin-Jor, Scare Glow and Faker, the evil robotic imposter of He-Man. A host of new vehicles, accessories and playsets will also be available.
Gigantisaur doesn’t appear directly in any of the original 1980s MOTU media, other than a design by Errol McCarthy for a T-shirt featuring He-Ro and He-Man. The version of the dinosaur here is the earlier “Turbosaurus,” featuring sharp teeth and a smaller mouth and neck.
There is a similar-looking sauropod dinosaur in The Powers of Grayskull minicomic, but my guess is that it was just created by the artist to fill out the scene, along with the various other bio-mechanical creatures on the splash page:
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