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Spoooooky Games

While Monster Toys often get the shaft in department store catalogs for being too seasonal , the one place where that doesn’t seem to happen is the games section which always have a few monster items in for good measure. Take this 1971 spread for instance, we’ve got the classic Green Ghost game , something […]

Hand Puppet Horrors!

The Remco Monsters at Home series is a weird little footnote in Monster toy lore, basically the company took the heads and hands of their 9″ Universal Monster dolls and made these charming little hand puppets complete with a plastic environment.What’s weird is, it all sort of makes sense, Dracula has a coffin, the Mummy […]

Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces

In 1975, Kenner produced a doll that was the brain child of special effects artist/director/writer Alan Ormsby who directed the film “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” and authored the classic scolastic book Movie Monsters which probably spawned a legion of Monster kids by itself. Hugo was a great concept, a puppet version of Lon […]

1974 Collegeville Costume Catalog

When it came to Halloween costumes, the two biggest names in the 70’s were Ben Cooper and Collegeville. If one didn’t have a specific license, the other surely did. In the mid seventies, Ben Cooper had a lock on some prosperous licenses namely The Universal Monsters and Superheroes from DC and Marvel houses. This left […]

Prehistoric RC

My pal George at the Mego Forum turned me onto these cool toys from 1973, these two dinoaurs seem to be exclusive to Sears. What a no brainer, light up remote controlled dinosaurs. Like probably every boy (and likely a bunch of girls), I went through a dinosaur phase in my life and these would […]

Atari Wars

I am a veteran of the video game wars, fought mostly on my schoolyard. I, being of the clan of Atari, waged daily combat against those who had sworn allegiance to George Plimpton and quoted from the Book of Mattel. Mostly about how much superior the Intellivision system really was. I can remember HATING kids […]

Holy Tooth Decay Batman!

I’m abundantly aware of how hacky and shameful that blog title is but it’s unavoidable, I assure you. As much as I begged for a Batman and Steve Austin electric toothbrush as a child (because commercials told me I needed one) it was the one luxury my parents refused to provide me with. Somehow, I […]

Monster Rap

One of the bigger explosions in the seventies was the rise of the homemade craft kit, which no doubt was brought about by the hippie movement of the 60’s.. Children across America were making macrame (guilty!), rug hooking (guilty!) and happily making Christmas tree Candles (My father must have worried about me). One of the […]

Copter Envy

Although I never had Vertibird or any of the licensed Remco CSF Copters, I lived vicariously through the kids who did. Does anybody remember a version of this you could play in an arcade? It was in a big dome and you had to hunt a UFO, this was pre Space Invaders obviously. I sometimes […]

Great Hera! Look at those Box Cars!

The mid to late seventies saw what would become a regular event in our lifetime, an explosion on superhero merchandising. Some of it cool and logical like the Mego Superheros and some of it well, just plain strange. Take for example the 1977 Tyco Superhero boxcars, an odd marriage of Comic Books and the Rail […]