Welcome back to the clubhouse boils n’ ghouls! Halloween may be over, but… wait… you say you’ve never been to this part of the clubhouse before? That’s okay… we just cracked open the door to this moldy old wing. Welcome to GROSS OUT, our new ongoing chronicle of that long-ago age of darkness, depravity and delight known as the 1980s.. and the odd, inappropriate, repulsive and just plain awesome toys that lurked therein.
These aren’t just the usual suspects – classic offenders like Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids – either. We’re delving deeper… way deeper. We’re dissecting the forgotten knockoffs, wannabes, and also-rans… the type of crap that lurked in grocery store bargain toy aisles, pharmacy candy counters and swap meet junk bin; toys that now lay nameless and feral in filthy storage boxes, in shadowy basements where the sane fear to tread… or, if you’re lucky, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it eBay listing.
For our debut installment, I’m going to cheat a little, and take you all back to 1990. I know, I know… right out of the gate, we’re screwing up and fudging the decade, but bear with me. Pull up that trash can, and nestle in. Cozy up. This will all make sense, eventually. Well, as much sense as any of this can.
As some of you no doubt remember, the dawn of the ‘90s was a strange time indeed, and not always for the better. Hair metal was giving way to grunge, electro was giving way to gangsta rap, and hard-R horror was giving way to, well, Freddy’s Dead. To say that the party was winding down would be an understatement. Jason Voorhees had been MIA since he went down in Manhattan back in ‘89, with no clear return in sight. The MPAA was busy perpetrating a massacre on Leatherface, and zombies returned minus blood in the all too safe-and-sane Night of the Living Dead remake, a movie that had no right to be free of carnage.
Slobulus and Adam Bomb had been left in the trenches of the Double Decade, to be replaced by… nothing, really. All the stuff we had taken for granted only a couple short years ago – rampant gore, morbid humor, and neon thrills – had up and vanished, run out of town by the finally-fed-up parents of the nation, weary of years upon years of untamed insanity (read: fun) aimed at their hapless children. Not to mention the fact that some of those children – too many – had traded in their status as excitable, grue-happy kids for newly-minted memberships as bored, cynical hipster adolescents. The splatter days, and our sense of entitlement to them, were done.
I remember those days with a sting in my heart. There was nowhere to turn. No place to hang our hat. The world was suddenly… lame. Imagine my excitement then, when this Splatterhouse ad started showing up on the back of my comics (see left inset).
Hallelujah in the highest, brothers and sisters, was what my heart sang when it laid eyes on this image. It was like everything I had ever loved, but had taken away, was back. Problem was, I couldn’t play it. I had no TurboGrafx-16. As it turns out, I would never have a TurboGrafx-16. I managed to rent one, once… but Splatterhouse was nowhere to be found.
So I sat and I stared at the Splatterhouse ad in the back of my comics. Fixated on it. Dreamed of playing it, how cool it had to be, thought of all the awesome ‘80s horror and fun it was keeping alive just by existing… from the hero that looked like Jason to the outsized, flesh-rending, corpse-dwelling worms, to the sack-headed, skinless, chainsaw-handed nightmare flailing about the woods, it was like salvation, so close, yet so far away. A mirage in a desert. Everything about the ad was tantalizingly awesome. Hell, even the logo was awesome. But one image held me entranced above all others. This thing… this thing was off-the-charts (see center image – below). A huge, rotting, gnarled, semi-liquefied head rising from the putrid ground… I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was literally one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. It almost hurt to look at it, it was so painfully rad. It made my teeth ache, that I couldn’t play this game.
What I didn’t know at the time was that, appropriately enough, the design for this ultimate beast was copped from two of the ‘80s most awesome splatter icons, melded together into one, end-all-be-all abomination. Cropsy, from 1981’s The Burning (left) and the Rotten Apple Head from the mega-classic Evil Dead II (right).
That anyone even dared to combine such powers is beyond imagining. This arcane knowledge escaped me at the time (as I was years away from seeing either of those masterpieces), but it was almost like I knew just by looking that an entire video store horror section was somehow contained within this raging beast. I sullenly daydreamed about the monstrosity, and the ghost of a game that I could not escape into, until one day, it happened.
I was wandering around my local Walgreens with my mom, as I was wont to do at that age, when I stumbled onto a random trinket. What I did not know that day, what I could not have known that day, was that I was going to come face-to-face with, nay, possess one of the most powerful items in all of history. Said trinket, was that item. Quivering members of the clubhouse, that day I set my eyes upon the ODDBALLS.
Rubber pencil-toppers, blister-carded, two to a pack… but oh, so very much more than that. These were Madballs knockoffs – glorious in and of itself – but in the early ‘90s! Such a thing was unheard of! The Madballs and their various ill-begotten vulgar spawn had been a thing of the past for years… to find one in the neutered ‘90s. It was like finding a GoreZone stuffed into a bible. But what’s more… the design (they were both the same) wasn’t just any mutated head… it was the head. The head from Splatterhouse!!! The slimy, beautiful bastard that had haunted me those past weeks was now in physical form, right in front of me. I had to have it. Trembling, I handed it off to my mom when she checked out, and away I went with the ultimate power.
Let’s really take a step back here and take all this in. A Madballs knockoff, that looked just like a creature from Splatterhouse, which was an amalgam of not only the killer from The Burning, but a huge rancid monster from Evil Dead II. I’m surprised my own head didn’t go Scanners right then and there… it still might. Opening that package was like getting the Quickening.
However, the fact remains that I was seven years old. I played with the things. Lost one. Clung to the other like it was the last bastion of hope in a harsh, uncaring wasteland, then proceeded to lose that one too. So it goes. Years went by and I finally played Splatterhouse. It was as awesome as I knew it would be, and needed it to be as a little kid. The Burning and Evil Dead II are two of my favorite films. In fact, all of the above sit proudly on my shelf, but I would never again have another Oddball.
As those years became decades, the digital age and it’s wonders (i.e. the internet) finally gave me the chance to see my beloved pencil-topper once again, if not own it for myself. It would appear that there are a few variations, and that he even had some friends. Mine was reddish monochrome (see above), and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. This is my fabled Oddball… or close enough.
Not quite the ghoul from the fabled Splatterhouse, but damn close. I can sure as hell see why I made the association as a little kid. Actually, this here green one captures the vibe a little better, even if it’s the wrong color. And as you can see, his pals were pretty gnarly too (particularly the razor-toothed guy… would have loved him back then). But my Splatter-head is still the king.
So here’s to you Oddballs, and the sheer power you commanded. A perfect storm of splat-mosphere in a time bereft of any. You felt like the last lifeboat from the Titanic, and I’m glad I was able to climb aboard. Stay tuned for more expeditions into the realm of putrescent playthings of the past, and lost toy box turmoil from the irresponsible, irrepressible ‘80. Be let us know what you think, if you still can, after growing up with this trash…
