"No Comment...Again"
In the A Journey Into the Unknown post from a month ago, I showed you a bunch of iconic fake Madballs. Rip offs that are almost as ubiquitous as their predecessors. Today, we go into the dark bowers of Madballs domain, the slimy underbelly of Orb. These are rip offs that aren't part of any series, have no morals, usually no manufacturing markings and can even be knock offs of knock offs. Welcome to the dark side of Madball collecting.
First up is one of my favorite fakes ever! Let's call him Dracenstein (that's right I'll be naming these anonymous creeps!). He's made from Sadball inflatable rubber and painted in only 3 colors, but he's sculpted really well! I also like the Frankenstein/Dracula combo. Fangs and stitches go together really well...who woulda thought!? He's also got some cool touches like the one bug eye and the volcano-esque warts under his chin. Dracenstein is simple enough that he's not a mess to look at (Slobulus) with lovingly crafted details to make him interesting.
Ohhhhh man. Here we go. This guy is a jerk. He's a rip off of a rip off (a combo of Weird Balls Wart Hog and Worm Skull), and he's made out of a really crappy material. Not Madball foam and not Sadball rubber, Wart-worm is made of a hollow, semi-rigid plastic that makes him really unfun to play with...not that I play with these..oh whatever. Like you can't throw him at your brother's head or step on him at all without causing permanent dents or chipping. The paint comes right off this dude. Like Slobulus, he's got too much goin on. The elements they stole from both Weird Balls are cool on their own but its hard for me to tell what I'm looking at now that they're all crammed onto one tiny football.
Up next we have two MORE imitations of imitations. We'll name them Allergic Reaction and Ghost Mummy.
Allergic Reaction is most definitely a poor attempt at a Shrink Head Weird Ball but molded in the same semi-rigid plastic as Wart-worm. He's really bad. Just poorly designed, no flourishes and an odd choice of colors. I prefer Shrink Head, but when Josh finds this guy for you in a flea market bin for a dollar you can't go wrong!
Ghost Mummy is where things get weird. The dude on the left is Fantasma from the La Pelota Del Terror Argentinian line. Ghost Mummy is the same exact sculpt but inflated more, made from a different rubber and painted better. He's pretty neat, but I prefer the crappier Argentinian dude. He's funnier.
Now what really makes things weird is Purple People Eater. Though he's barely painted (and what's there is sloppy) he's a really cool mold! However....
These dudes look kinda similar. Which is making me question which dudes came first. The Pelota Del Terror guys or this unknown purple freak. He's rendered better and with more care but painted poorly and, as far as I can tell, not part of a series. They both have the same mouth, nose and eyebrows! Yeah they don't look too similar in the above pic but the paint and color of the rubber may be throwing you off. Check this out..
Broncudo has a weird worm on his head in the same spot that Purple People Eater has that hitchhiking gecko. They also have those "worms" breaking out of their skulls right in front of their ears. The stitches are in different places but they're there. It almost looks like someone got hold of Purple People Eater and imitated him in a rush OR someone got a hold of Broncudo and saw his glorious gross potential and took the time to make him better. Either way I'm confused.
Get ready for really bizarre now. John McEnblow is pretty gross with his pink skin, huge irregular teeth and bulging eye. What really puts him over the top is the disgusting bundle of bloody tendons falling out of his eye socket! Ew! They're all red and shiny. It grosses me out. He gets his name cus I think he's supposed to be some sort of athlete. The headband is giving me that impression. Yeah, he's got a headband, that's cool. But it's not as cool as this...
BAM! Just give ol' Johnny a squeeze and out pops his balloon tongue! What?! Yeah it's odd. He's a little smaller than a Madball so maybe the manufacturers thought they had to jazz him up a bit...with a balloon tongue. Again, no markings so I guess I'll just have to dream of more of these, cus this guy rules. 
Last but not least are two dudes from an unknown series. I scored these idiots over at Monster Collectibles. Unlike the rest of this motley crew they actually have names! On the left is Vampire Vinny and on the right is Freaky Fred. I personally think they got the names mixed cus the dude on the right totally looks like a nosferatu! Both these guys are really cool, filled with gross details and painted really well with lots of colors. Vampire Vinny's puffy eyes really disturb me as does Freaky Fred's big warty nose. While Freaky Fred looks like a gross old Dracula, Vampire Vinny doesn't look like anything I've ever seen before. Maybe a mutant human/insect hybrid? Look at those jacked teeth!
Both of them have their names and "Emson" stamped on their hinders but Google searches have yielded little information about the makers. It makes me sad because they seem to be part of team whose other members I want to own and put on a shelf!
In conclusion, cool and suck but overall cool. There's a lot of these mystery monsters out there and some are poorly made while others have the love and horror of an actual Madball put into them but all are great examples of the 80's gross out phenomena. Even the really really bad ones tend to be funny. So, happy hunting, and let me know if you have any info on these dorks or spy any others!
We used to have Worm-Wart as kids. I can't really remember much about it, but we loved fist-sized footballs. I'm sure we wore the paint off of his face; I remember it being fairly free of color. Anyway, he was better than a magnolia pinecone for actual football action.
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