Looking back on my childhood, it’s a wonder I've turned out as normal as I have. Long before I was old enough to buy a ticket to see a horror film at the cinema, the genre had already slashed its way into my life. Every corner of my 90s upbringing was saturated with the macabre—whether it was monsters hiding at the bottom of my cereal boxes, the undead trying to kill a child in my Saturday morning cartoons, or Kenner action figures based on James Cameron’s Aliens in my toybox.
There’s a phrase that many of us are probably familiar with: “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. Whilst this is no doubt just some marketing bollocks, probably cooked up by the Kellogg’s company, when I was a child the phrase actually rang true. It wasn't because of nutritional value, or the benefits of fibre in my diet, or because it gave me enough energy to play until dinner time. It was because my box of Frosties held a treasure, a small monster manufactured by Matchbox.
Back then (fuck, I sound old!), you didn’t get a cardboard cut-out puzzle on the back of the box, or a QR code for some crap app. You got a proper, physical toy. On that most glorious day, new cereal pack day, I’d thrust my arm elbow-deep into the Frosties, and rummage around until I found my—hopefully new—Monster In My Pocket figure. A small, soft rubbery plastic monster figure (the name was fairly on the nose!).
And if I got the dreaded duplicate, or if the wait to open a new pack of Frosties in a couple of weeks time was simply too much to bear, I could spend my pocket money on Monster In My Pocket blind bags at my local paper shop, or my local Woolworths. Crouched, packets spread in front of me, trying to feel the shape of the monster through the packaging, desperately hoping I wasn’t about to buy another duplicate. It was my introduction to the addictive thrill of collecting the macabre. A gateway drug made of soft plastic and potential diabetes.
On a Saturday morning, when I was sufficiently sugar fuelled and celebrating the acquisition of a new monster, or sulking about getting a duplicate, it was time to watch some cartoons. And one of my “must-watch” cartoons was Mighty Max.
Looking back, the entire premise of Mighty Max was a little unhinged for a children's franchise. Max was just a regular kid, but he had a baseball cap that could open interdimensional portals, and wherever he ended up having stepped through one, he always found himself hunted by ancient, bloodthirsty undead and cosmic horrors, all of which wanted to disembowel him.
The cartoon was brilliant, but let's be honest, like many cartoons it existed purely to sell toys, and that oh-so-clever marketing strategy may have worked on me a little bit. They too were brilliant. They were plastic skulls, monster heads, and grotesque bugs that were small enough to—almost—fit in your pocket. You’d open them up and be presented with mini-dungeon playsets of nightmare fuel, complete with monsters and a tiny little Max choking hazard.
I had quite a few of the “pocket-sized” playsets, but the crown jewel of my collection, however, was the large Trapped in Skull Mountain mega-playset. From the outside, it was a giant, menacing red mountain shaped like a screaming skull. When it was opened, it revealed a multi-level fortress of doom, complete with bridges made of bone, prison cells, hidden trapdoors, and a working lift made out of a ribcage. It was basically a body horror playset, and it was glorious.
Whilst it’s debatable as to whether Mighty Max was in reality all that child-friendly, it was at least created as a children’s franchise. One of the most curious aspects of being a child in the 90s though, looking back on it, has to be the amount of toys sold to children that were based on films that had a gore budget and an 18 certificate.
On the same toy-shop aisle that you’d find the soft and cuddly—but annoyingly vocal—Furbies, and the fuzzy-haired—but bizarrely nude—Trolls, you’d also find toys based on graphically violent films, and parents would buy these for their children without batting an eye. My own toybox was a bloodbath of adult cinematic properties, containing as it did a large chunk of both Kenner’s Aliens and Terminator 2 toy lines.
And these weren’t toys in the same way as the Monster In My Pocket range. They weren’t just a single, static piece of moulded rubbery plastic; they were the premium action figures of the day (admittedly poor by today’s standards, but still!). They were poseable and featured action gimmicks enabling you to re-enact scenes from the films (which, in hindsight, we shouldn’t have even seen, so how on earth were we able to re-enact them?!).
"Re-enacting scenes" generally meant many of them could be brutally disassembled or “blown up”. I spent hours triggering spring-loaded chest plates on Terminators revealing the damaged endoskeleton underneath, firing Chestbursters from a Killer Crab Alien towards a flamethrower wielding Ripley, and covering a T-800 endoskeleton with flesh in the Kenner Terminator 2 Bio-Flesh Regenerator Playset before cutting and tearing parts of its flesh off.
Looking back, the 90s didn't just tolerate horror; it packaged it up into colourful plastic and sold it to little weirdos like me. I was marinated in the macabre from breakfast until bedtime. And honestly? I wouldn't have had it any other way.
No comments:
Post a Comment