Retro Toy Week! Smaug? No, Singe, from Dragon's Lair!

Even though I was mesmerized by it as a kid, I never played the classic laserdisc videogame Dragon's Lair. It was fifty cents a play, twice what a game had run before then, and it was pretty obviously a quarter-eating bastard of a game. It looked great, though...

I know I watched the Dragon's Lair cartoon as well, although I mainly remember thinking the animation quality there didn't hold a candle to that of the game. And then, a mere eighteen years later, we got action figures! Nothing like striking while the iron is hot, although I couldn't even speculate how this would've turned out in 1983...

Smaug's Singe is a bit of an odd duck: he was a deluxe boxed figure, released alongside the carded figures for Dirk the Daring, Princess Daphne, and the witch Mordoc. Singe is bigger...but not as big as he should be. The human characters should probably be G.I. Joe sized in comparison, or even smaller. Which is why Singe isn't usually on display here, although I used him briefly in a homemade strip about a million years ago...

Technically, these figures were for Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair, which you can probably find at a Gamestop or something for the old Xbox or PS2, if you are so inclined.

Anyway, back to Smaug--you would not believe how many times I screwed that up on this one. While his arms and legs aren't overly poseable, and I wish he had some kind of wrist joints; his neck and tail are both soft rubber over some kind of armature: the tail has a sort of kink-joint that can be bend there or here, but I'm pretty easy on them. His backfins and weird head-whiskers are soft rubber as well, and hey! Singe's jaw opens! Which I hadn't remembered until just now, well after I'd taken all the pictures.

Oh, and Singe came with some extra accessories as well: a sword, for the sold-separately Dirk figure, and a key for around his neck. And a lump of treasure and an ugly jewel, that I've apparently lost. It happens.

The producing company for Singe and the rest of the figures was called Anjon, and I don't know anything else about them, except that they somewhat optimistically labeled these as "Series 1." I'm hard pressed to tell you what the hell they expected to put in series 2, but I haven't seen the game all the way through. Maybe they planned on releasing Dirk and Daphne's brood of terrible, yet matching children. (They all looked like scaled-down versions of their mom or dad; it would've been funny to have at least one boy dressed as Daphne and a girl dressed as Dirk...)

Shop Singe around a bit, and you might be able to get a good deal. He's not the bestest dragon ever, but not the worst either; and depending on your tastes and display, Singe might work out for you.