Gigantisaur: The MOTU Heroic Dinosaur & Battle Station That Never Was

Imagine Skeletor and his badies as they’re facing off against a big ass dinosaur, and all of a sudden a surgically implanted gun station flips out of his chest cavity, and He Man is like, “surprise, motherfuckers!”

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.” Read more >