When I reviewed the original Hammond Collection Velociraptor, I was pretty forgiving of it, but truth be told, it has not aged well in my eyes. While I don’t regret purchasing it, I ultimately disliked it enough not to bother with the subsequent Hammond Collection JP3 raptors that featured all the faults of their predecessor. I am now of the opinion that the original Hammond Collection Velociraptor ranks among the very worst of the Hammond Collection.
So, I thought I was done with Hammond Collection raptors, but then Mattel went and rebuilt them, making them better, stronger, faster (do the young people get that reference?). The poster-dino for the Jurassic World franchise was next in line after the JP3 pair. Blue the Velociraptor, who must have at least a couple dozen toys to her name. Mattel made some much-needed improvements with this one, ditching the snowshoes for more proportional feet, bulking out the arms, legs, and torso, and refining smaller details like the teeth. Despite how many toys there are of Blue I didn’t have one, so I decided to get this one and reward Mattel for improving upon their raptor designs.
Blue measures about 9” (22 cm) long and stands about 3” (7.62 cm) tall at the hips. Blue measures about 12.8’ (3.9 meters) long in the films which puts the figure at 1/18 in scale, as is intended.
Blue boasts 14 points of articulation. Her head has an articulated jaw and is articulated at its base as well as at the base of the neck. The arms are articulated at the shoulders and elbows like past HC figures. They have ball joints that allow them to swivel and rotate every which way. The legs are articulated with ball joints at the knees and base of the toes. The legs can rotate around and pivot out at the hips. The tail can rotate at its base and is made of rubber with a bendable wire running through most of its length. The range of motion here is excellent, as my photographs will hopefully illustrate. It would have been nice if wrist articulation was included but its absence isn’t a big deal. On my copy the jaw opens so wide that it pops forward a bit, creating an underbite when closed. It’s easy enough to push it back in but it did scare me at first. Aside from that the jaw closes nice and flush though.
Details on the head include nicely defined brow ridges and smaller teeth than past raptors. The tooth rows are still singular pieces of uniform length without much individual definition though. The recently released HC Delta has better teeth than this one, with each one individually sculpted, further improving on the HC raptor design. The eyes, which were painted on in past raptors, are now glass inserts. As has been mentioned in other HC toy reviews they look dark and dead in low light conditions and are not what I would consider an improvement.
On the body you get nicely defined musculature and fine scale detail. The body is bulkier than the original HC raptor, which was far too thin. Muscle definition is most appreciated in the arms, thighs, and calves. Skin folds run down the back of the neck and both above and below the tail. The feet represent the biggest improvement overall and the figure is decently stable despite their smaller size. The figure is not as stable as past releases, but I consider it a welcome tradeoff. You can still get her to stand in a variety of poses and on one foot, it just takes great precision.
Blue is painted dark gray with a lighter gray underside. Her blue racing stripes have thin white edges which I wish the Dilophosaurus also had. The stripes run through the thigh however, when in past Blue toys they’ve gone over it. This means that when you rotate the legs it breaks the stripe, which looks ridiculous. This is my only real negative criticism about the toy, it represents a real blunder on Mattel’s part. Thin gray stripes can be seen on the torso, thighs, and upper arms. Save for the tiny dewclaws the rest of the claws are painted shiny black. The teeth are white, and the inside of the mouth is pink. On my copy a bit of blue paint actually ended up on the teeth! A minor quality control issue.
The Hammond Collection Blue is an excellent figure and the only real issues I have with it are the vacant glass eyes and poorly placed racing stripes. I would say that it’s probably the best you could hope for from Mattel but the just released Delta is even better still! Although I am happy to see Mattel improve in quality, I wish they would have better brainstormed these figures earlier in their production for the sake of consistency. As is, these vastly different figures don’t display well together, and it makes me yearn for better sculpts of past raptors that we probably won’t get. Mattel clearly could have done better from the start but hey, better late than never.
Unfortunately, the shelf life of this figure was rather short and although I try to review these toys while they’re in production, I dropped the ball on this one. Dinosaur toy releases (especially from Mattel) are so frequent these days that it is difficult to keep up with them. I don’t think Blue is available at retail price anymore, having now been replaced on shelves by the Pyroraptor and Delta. Hopefully if you’re reading this you already have this figure, it is definitely the Blue figure to get above all others.
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