I thought I'd share the inspiration for my first installment of INKTOBER drawings - The Real Monsters toy line that I worked on during my time at Mattel. It was one of the very last lines I helped design before leaving and starting my own toy/collectible company with my best friend from college.
This was a really tortured toy line to work on, as most were, during my time in 'Boys Toys'. Mattel wasn't really burning up the male action toy isle during the early 90's, they kinda of lost their way. Shitty licenses, corporate politics, lack of overall vision and maintaining the status quo made for an incredibly torturous time for designers. I wanted to make really cool shit, but always felt that my hands were tied and I'd never get my shot at helping to create something like Masters of the Universe or cooler.
...but let's face it, I really didn't fit in anyway.
Now I'll give you the Reader's Digest version of how this toy line was developed. The journey begins (as most of them do), with the 'Good Ol' Boys Club'. Nine times out of ten, a toy idea or line will be bought or retained from a very small and special group of individuals on the 'outside'. This group is special because they have formed relationships over decades, with the corporate suits in all the major toy companies. Since it's 'common knowledge' that the designers that toy companies hire don't know a damn thing about toys or how to design them, they need to rely on that special pool of 'Good Ol' Boys' on the outside to save the day. I noticed first hand the same few names kept popping up when it came time to start on a new toy line, AND they happened to be best buddies with various 'suits' within the company. This toy line started out that way...
Originally it wasn't even based on Aaahh! Real Monsters, it was a simple novelty toy line with a monster feel. LAME as hell, uninspired and pretty much stupid as shit. Lots of magnets (which are a fucking nightmare when you're a company as big as Mattel and open to all sorts of lawsuits if some dipshit kid eats a pair of magnets and they get stuck in his friggin' colon), finger puppets, squirters, pull string and suction cup jumpers...ugh.
So I spent a few weeks with the pitch packet and redesigned the figures and tried to make them more fun...it was like polishing a turd, you just can't do it. THEN someone in Marketing had a great idea...let's take THIS line (that we have on retainer) and blend it into this new Nickelodeon property and it will be AMAZING!...and my friend will make more money now because it's attached to an animated cartoon on Nickelodeon! I designed a bunch of fun figures based on the characters from the Nickelodeon show, but alas...they were not meant to be. Instead we were only allotted 4 characters from the show, and they had to be designed to fit within an already specified blister card size.
Good times, and here they are:
Oblina was the best-how's THIS for packaging?! We can't stand her up straight on the blister, that will ruin everything...I have an idea, let's cram her into the blister diagonally, who cares if it looks odd. Kids don't care and won't notice, they also won't notice that we made her shorter as well so she can fit in this half-ass blister. Classic.
Then we had to round out the line with the 'Good Ol' Boy's Club' concepts, regardless if they fit the line aesthetically or not. The thought was, we'll just paint them in a pseudo color paint scheme to match the feel of the show...we'll make the kids think that these are actual characters in the show! It'll be awesome! We're fucking brilliant! Success!
...and here they are:
If you noticed, SPLUG is named CHOOMPS in the catalog
...and HALUGA is named GULPUM
...and KALUGA is named SUSH-EYE
...and KALUGA doesn't even appear in the catalog
...and I never got a ZOOMPS on a final printed blister card, only a test package.
ANYWAY, you can see that the last group of figures in no way fit the look and feel of Aaahh! Real Monsters, with the exception of GULPUM
Now I'll show you the toys that SHOULD have been. Here are a few of the MANY marker concepts I cranked out in the hopes of making a fun toy line for kids, they're really rough and based on really simple features...because when you make toys for MATTEL, they have to look good on T.V. and do really cool shit...
I honestly believe it had the makings of a really fun toy line and could have been pretty successful if given the chance. But it wasn't to be, and it really helped me make my decision to leave that much easier and start making the kind of action figures I always wanted as a kid.
Classic Universal Monsters, but that's a post for another time.
