Bells and Whistles

"To Avoid The Shar Matter & Point"

The success and endurance of the monster shaped ball is not a difficult thing to wrap your head around. Kids like to throw stuff. Kids like monsters. COMBINE THEM! YES! Young Mike is happy (and subsequently old Mike)! Things get weird when you try to throw a bunch of other useless crap in there. While Rude Ralph IS amazing, it's to his detriment that you can't throw him BUT his eye and noises are pretty cool. It's also pretty cool that Squirt Devils shoot water, but Head Poppers were too fragile to be knocked about. What I'm getting at is, you can add some stuff to the monster-faced ball equation, but you're taking a risk when you do.

Which brings us to these dudes. Simply named "Monster Ball" (note: singular), whoever made these decided to make them light up. It turns out this actually worked. Too bad for the nameless bootleggers that everything else about Monster Ball sucks. These dudes are crappy. They're made from semi sticky rubber, they're poorly painted and about half didn't work. More importantly, they were rip off designs OF ALREADY EXISTING RIP OFFS! (We'll compare later.)

The only way I've seen these dum-dums for sale was by the box-load on Ebay. I've been tempted for a while but knew I didn't really need them AT ALL, much less a box of 12. I made myself feel ok about this by having my brother buy them for me after doing an illustration for his band, Barfly. Conscience at ease.
As it turns out, the acid trip of a package is one of the more entertaining things about Monster Ball. The whole sha-bang reminds me of fireworks packaging. "Monster Ball" is totally just a font with some curvy stuff goin on and some drips added for grossness. The real mystery is the pattern IN the letters. It almost looks like calendar pages shrunk down and run through some filters. It adds mystery to the whole thing if you start asking "what calendar"? It could be a hunky fireman calendar, a Kuddly Kittens one, The Far Side or even the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar.

You may also notice the star light shooting out of fake Aargh's nose. That is NOT how they light up. It's more of an inner glow than a lazer light show. This version of the dude also has no pupil. This is hard for me to understand because the actual toy DOES have a pupil which means someone took it out for the package. "Screw those dudes, they don't get to see his full eye until they buy the box!" say the mystery manufacturers.

Ok, get ready. Take a deep breath. Release. Now read the cautionary text. "To avoid the shar matter & point". WHAT?! I tried really hard to come up with something funny and clever that those words are supposed to mean, but I have nothing. I can't fathom what I'm supposed to be careful about or how I'm supposed to avoid shar matter. Is that like...no. I can't do it. I can't even laugh it off. I am a bit scared of these things now. Like in the middle of the night they'll explode sending soft rubber flying through my torso. The package also reads "safe" though.

Which brings us to our last and most alluring mystery of the packaging. There is NO info at ALL about who the hell made these buggers. No copyright, no date, no nothing. No fine print anywhere and I even pulled the box apart. There's not even anything stamped on the balls themselves! Maybe they're not copyrighted because they're STOLEN molds?!
This first goofball is a rip off of a nameless guy I've seen before but who I don't really know anything about. You can see him here in the bottom left of this bin. As with all of these they're sculpted ok but not nearly as good as the guys that inspired them.
This guy I know a little more about because I actually own the dude he's based off of. In the Weirdo Toys blog about Sadballs they dubbed him Blood Bulge.
Now I would think the similarity could be an accident cus hes a skull-ish monster with pointy teeth but he does have one eye bigger than the other and his incisors painted differently than the rest of his teeth.
LOOK AT THAT. Same three lines under the skull nose!
That brings us to our last dude. He's a rip off of Lace Face who's a knock off of the Madball Argh who's the most imitated of all those original dudes. Look at his family history!
In fact, I don't know why I'm angry that ANY of these dudes are imitations of imitations. Maybe it's the laziness that disappoints me? You couldn't even make your own crappy sculpts?!
Anyway, the lighting is their ONLY cool feature. Up above you can see how they light up. NOT like a Terminator eye, more like an E.T. glow. I thing this part is kinda cool. The lights inside flicker too. However, it doesn't make up for the lack of trying in other departments.

In conclusion, AVOID AT ALL COSTS, unless you're an anal retentive collector like me.