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Diener is a company I cannot find any information about
whatsoever. The Dinosaur Collector reviews a lot of dinosaur figures from a lot of companies, but omits this one. However, he has managed to find an Eryops
and Edaphosaurus by Deiner, and includes them in his Early Permian Diorama. These two are fairly rare, and are not featured on this page.
As for company info on Deiner, I have Googled the heck
out of this and am coming up empty. So for me, Diener is shrouded in mystery. As far as I know, I am the only dinosaur collector who has a review
on these figures. I do know that they make other creatures besides dinosaurs, such as space aliens and modern day animals (which
I also have a few of).
I managed to collect the whole set of these as a kid (with several repeats, in fact).
They all came from McDonald's Happy Meals in the early 1980s (ca. 1981-82).
Diener dinos are small, multi-colored and rubber-like (not sure what they are
made out of. It's almost more like very flexible plastic). Some of them were nice light greys, browns, and "army" greens.
Others were atomic oranges and blues. I'm not sure why the drastic color differences occurred here; I would have preferred
the drabber, more realistic colors, myself. The brighter colors were more than likely eye-grabbers for kids.
These guys really aren't the best as far as accuracy goes. For instance, the
Triceratops has two horns instead of three. I am guessing that this is because the molds were all done in two pieces
and to make him have three horns might have just been too complicated for a party-favor type figure. In short, these are very
2-D critters.
That said, they really aren't the worst there are out there. They do attempt to represent
actual species of dinosaur, and of course, the Dimetrodon and Pteranodon are thrown in even thought they are not dinosaurs.
The name of the dinosaur is indicated somewhere on the figure, usually on the tail.
I have seen dinosaurs similar to this for sale at party favor stores, so these molds
must get around. Like I said, information on this company is non-existent, so it's hard to say.
I have found a few on Ebay. They don't seem to be in very high demand. Nor are they
very common. More common are the space aliens, also given out in McD's Happy Meals, which end up selling for pretty hefty
prices.
UPDATE 3/1/06...
Thanks to a fan of my site, I now have a Diener link. It appears that they still make these figures. Many thanks to Rstinkor for the heads-up on this!
As you can see in the picture above, these dinos came in a wide array of colors. There
seem to be two shades of green; a light green and a darker "army" green. Other colors were: light grey, brown, orange, and
blue.
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