Toy Island Monsters

Toy Island Monsters

I don’t normally have much to do with toys made in the 1990s but the Toy Island Monsters are an exception for me. Produced in 1993, these 8″ figures look a lot like Mego figures or perhaps like Mego Knock-Offs.

Toy Island was formed in 1992 and a lot of their early output was unlicensed action figures with voice chips, the kind of stuff you’d find in dollar and discount stores. By the mid-1990s, they had licenses like Robocop and Rambo.

The Talking Monsters debuted in 1993 and the wave consisted of The Vampire (who says “I want to bit you”), The Howler who.. howls and the Zombie who says “Help me”. I never got why the Zombie says that. To my knowledge these didn’t get much distribution, if you can find them, it’s in England. England is the holy kingdom of weird knock-off action figures like this, especially monsters.

The Monsters appeared again in the 1994 Toy Island Catalog, so they were available for at least two years. They are quite hard to find MOC probably because not a lot of people paid attention to this kind of stuff at the time.

By 1995, the Monsters are no longer featured in the catalog but are shown in Toy Island gallery pages showing past work. I guess if you wanted to order a custom run at this point, they’d have made them.

Toy Island also made these cool Monster games which include a Skull, a Jaws like Shark and a Swamp Monster! I’d love to get my hands on the Swamp monster one. These seem to have been offered in 1992, I may keep my eyes open for these.

In the 200os, Toy Island would get the Universal Monsters license and produce a fun series of action figures. More on that later.

Issue 4 of Toy-Ventures magazine is now shipping, it’s full of cool toys from the 60s, 70s and 80s, get it while it’s hot!