More Mini Mock-Madball Madness!!

"No Comment"

Well, dudes and dudettes, I've been managing to upkeep this blog more than I actually thought possible. Today, we have some tiny terrors that I know some of you nerds out there are obsessed with. See, these guys seem to be in higher demand because they overlap crazed collector criteria. They appeal to the maniacal Madball enthusiasts as well as the little rubber toy aficionados. I've heard horror stories about people trying to track these down, but I've managed to amass quite a collection without even going out of my way to do so. Ebay lots that I've won, often come with a few of these crammed in the box as an added bonus...or an added bogus!

Most of these little grotesqueries are minute renditions of larger dudes and seem to be some sort of pencil top eraser or eraser material. These two for example are tiny takes on the classic devil Sadball, and the horrible Horn Head. The problem with these two, is that the material doesn't work well this small. There are crease lines and the details aren't too crisp.

See how small this dude is? Regardless of the loss of clarity, both of these are pretty neat. They would be perfect if you were a really small person...like miniature, and Madballs were too large for you to hold in your freakishly tiny hands. Then again, I guess you'd have other things to worry about besides your toy collection. Like cats, and tarantulas and being so small that you cease to exist on a molecular level. Now I'm sad.

Not anymore! Look at these idiots! Another Madball rip off (Argh) and two more Sadball rip offs (Blood Bulge and Broken Brain). Though, I think at the point you rip off a rip off you become something else entirely...like a rip-rip off. The rubber these three are made of is a little bit sturdier than the previous dorks so they look a little better. They also appear to have been painted at some point?! That's pretty cool. I actually prefer mini Blood Bulge to the adult version, because that design was pretty sparse in the first place. Cramming all those features on a 1" ball makes it look cooler.

Oh god, these triplets. I got them in a lot and I like them but they are uuuuuggggly. Almost too ugly? like the first guy is kind of hard to make out...i guess he's a fang toothed dude with a pig nose? Hogrible will be his name. The second dude is the real problem. I know this isn't the greatest picture but even holding him in my hand in the light I couldn't make out what the hell is going on with his face. At first. My hypothesis (as a Madball academic) is that he's a dude with half a skull and a mouth full of worms? Maggot Mouth it is, until someone else looks at it and tells me what's up. The last one is the most simple but also the easiest to see. He's just a generic monster type. His name is Gener-ick! from now on. The triplets here suffer from the same eraser material syndrome as our first two freaks. But those two, the eraser rubber hardened over time, these three have a porous softness to them that makes me think they may crumble in time...ah crap I'm sad again.


Not any...no I'm still sad. This guy doesn't cheer me up. He looks like a yellow tiger stripped turd (Tiger Turd). Like if Madballs were made the same way as Kopi Luwak but with tigers. He doesn't even have the excuse that he was made out of crappy (get it?) rubber. He's made of rigid hallow plastic. He could be well rendered if some lazy so and so had decided to spend a few extra cents. He had a key ring attached to him at some point but I don't think he suffered much damage from that. I think he was just poorly painted and designed. LAME!

In conclusion, These are fun if and when you can find them. They usually have a lot of rubs in them but are a neat addition to any Mad/Sadball collection. Check above for a family portrait that depicts their relative size.

Un-bead-lievable!

"No Comment"

Madballs. Their existence prompted so many forgeries by so many no name companies trying to make a quick buck, that it boggles the mind. To this day I still uncover monster balls that I had never seen before. They inspired a staggering plethora of mimicry, making the gross-face-ball collector sigh in frustration. And while the copies similar in shape and size are plenty enough, there's the smaller bouncy balls to contend with too. And as I recently discovered. The microscopic!

A member of the Littlerubberguys forum posted that she had a bunch of these Sadball beads for sale and I hopped on it. Each one is about half and inch in diameter and has a hole on one side and a peg on the other so you can string them together as a necklace when you go to your next debutante (mad)ball.
There are eight different characters here, some varying slightly and most recognizable from other sets and series. It's not the character design here that's impressive, it's the sheer tininess! These are the smallest Madball ripoffs I've ever encountered!
Ok, so our first friend is a very surprised pink ape that I'm dubbing Gore-illa. I really like this design (especially the fangs) and I've never seen this design before! I'm really shocked that there aren't more gorilla themed sadballs. Secondovly, is a screwy vampire-ish guy. He's not really that special but an ok monster. Bug eyes, gnarly teeth..the usual. We can call him...Nosferatooth. His neighbor is a generic Argh rip off, so he doesn't get named. Be more original if you want a name, nerd! Argh forgeries are always fun though so I can't completely hate on him. The detail is there at least, which is impressive for dudes this small. They're all highly rendered.
This dental duo are variations on the Skull Face theme. The blue dude being more of an outright copy than the yellow. Bone Brain, as I'll call him, has more of a lip that Skull Face and one eye in a large socket and an empty smaller hole on the left. He's even got a vestigial nose. Still, not the most impressive alterations but a nod for trying.
Our last trio starts off with a pair of Dust Brain copies. Like the Skull Face ones, the first is an exact (though tiny) duplicate, while the other has subtle changes. Band Ache (ooh I like that one) is a little more rotten and has less bandages. His teeth are less perfect as well, making him look like a putrid mummy rather than a dry one. Last but not least, is this fake Horn Head. He looks extra familiar because he's not only a Horn Head rip off but a copy of this dude we covered a few weeks ago.
He's got those same bulgy eyes, a nose that grows out of his palette, gap teeth, and that odd sunshine design on his forehead. Unlike, his big brother he's got ears and an actual horn, but neither are cyclopses.

In conclusion...get these! They're fun, cheap, really well sculpted with more detail than they ought to have. You can try here at Sherrie's store Kinikumart. I'm not sure if they're still up but she's really nice so inquire!

King Kong Played Ping Pong...

"Once More...No Comment"

Hey boils and ghouls! I know I said I was gonna post about Bizarre Balls next but I think I'll save that for my first post of the new year. Especially since I already had the photos of these turds ready to go.

These are a type of fake Madball I've never seen before. They're about the size of a table tennis ball, hollow and poorly painted. I don't think they're a set, since they have no manufacturer stamped on them and the colors of the plastic vary. There are three distinct sculpts, one of which we're already familiar with. Let's look.
First up is a melty Slobulus-style ball in two colors . She's got a bunch of gross stuff, like missing teeth, bandages, a wandering eye and stitches. It's too bad the paint jobs on these are sooooo bad, because no paint at all would probably be less distracting from the cool design. That eye really bothers me. In a cool way. It's disturbing to think of how it got that high and crooked.
Next up is my personal favorite. He's an angry looking dude that's biting a snake that wraps around his head and goes under his eye and out again!! Ewwwww! The under-the-eye thing may be the grossest thing I've come across in the monster head wrangling business. His paint job is the best out of all of them (he's still go an unexplained patch of black on his nose) and it makes me wonder if the hard plastic they're made out of just doesn't hold paint very well. In honor of my friend Josh (who's obsessed with G.I. Joes), I'll name this guys Snake-Eye (or Veyeper Pilot, or Serpentorn)!
Next up is a small red version of the Sadball, Blood Bulge. You should recognize him! You guys have met before...thousands of times! Ok, maybe once before on this blog...
As you can see there is no difference between the two other than size. The gross mouth muck is still there and the odd triangle nose complete with his three hair mustache! The paint really didn't hold to this dude but the sculpt is good despite being unoriginal.

In conclusion, these are neat little monster heads and cool designs. They're also pretty durable (excluding the paint). I'd recommend them but I've hardly ever come across any. The one's I've gotten were from a trades on Little Rubber Guys and with Justin from Weirdo Toys.

__________________________________________________________________

UPDATE!

So, I won a few more of these guys as parts of lots in a recent Ebay bonanza (December and January have been good months for Madball hunting!).
This first guy is probably my favorite out of all of these ping pong guys. A ton of detail but not muddy like Slobulus and well sculpted. He's a bumpy skull with a pig nose and a disgusting centipede crawling on his face. The teeth are very reminiscent of Skull Face but other than that he's a pretty new spin on the skull ball idea. Not to mention that he's got a bat on his butt! Maybe he's some sort of gross skull head taxi that takes night creatures to their seedy destinations.

Next we have the standard Argh rip off. He's well scuplted for how small he is but nothing new. Yawn. However, both these guys have stamps on their rears! A "PG" in a circle and...gasp...names! Turns out our vermin infested friend is named Trog (this name delights me), while our Argh wannabe is named Boo. Boo-oring is more like it. You're friend is way cooler than you, Boo.

All searches for "PG Toys" are fruitless. Unless, family friendly toys are your idea of a good time. Anyway, I'm into these guys despite Boo's lack of motivation to be innovative. Trog rules the day!

Merry Christmas To Mike, and To Mike a Good Night!

Hey dudes, this is just a preview of some stuff I recently found myself while shopping for other people. It all arrived 2 days before christmas! Those Bizarre Balls were an excellent score, and will probably be my next post. The water squirting Oculus was a sweet gift from a person who follows this blog in Australia! And that little suction cup Swine Sucker was an ebay purchase. Sorry to keep this short, but I'm gonna go watch Gremlins for the 4th time this season, hope your holidays are gross and yucky!!

Small Round and Out Of Control!

"Still...No Comment"

Ok buds, this week we have another mystery set I scored on eBay...and they're tiny! As much as I love the full sized rip offs, the tiny bouncy balls are probably my favorite because everything is cooler in miniature.

The seller had a bunch of these and said that anyone who purchased them would get a random six, so I'm not sure if this is a full set or not. When they arrived I was surprised at how detailed they are for being 1" in diameter.
Here's our lineup, and it's a pretty handsome group, if you ask me. First off, there's the fake Dust Brain, but with bulging eyes and a really pristine grin. I like his Christmas colors! He's followed buy a mutated gorilla of some sort with a gnarly overbite. The twisted flesh around his eye and the jagged irregular teeth really get me. The next two friends look a little familiar.
They're almost exact replicas of these tiny Japanese dudes I wrote about a while ago! The only difference is the color, size and lack of pencil hole at the bottom. Buck Tooth Terrance and Yellin' Meemie make me wonder if this entire set is just a redux of those pencil toppers.
Bringing up the rear, are these amazingly monstrous twins. This guy looks dangerous, like a Critter. I really like his bug eyes, which seem to be a signature of this set, and his fangy mouth. I'm not really sure what the symbol is on his head but it does look like something that would be on a M.U.S.C.L.E. figure, furthering my Japanese theory.

Anyway, I wish I could tell you where I got these and forward you the link to the eBay store, but it was so long ago that my history has erased it. Since they're nameless and have no manufacturing info, this post is especially useless. Oh well, sighhhhh. If you can find 'em, get 'em, cus they're neat.

The Land Of the Retching Sun

"ホラーボール 悪魔の目玉"

Oh man! Japan loves Madballs. There are tons of Madball inspired vinyl collectibles but they're usually wayyyy outside my price range and have bodies and stuff. Not monster headed balls, strictly speaking. The triple feature I've got lined up for today, however, are straight up ugly faced balls without extraneous arms and legs.

The first two sets of dudes were purchased when Gom-Taro (an online toy store) was having a 70% off going out of business sale. Given the usual price of Japanese toys, I pounced on this opportunity.
We'll start with Takara's Horror Balls. Well, actually, as far as I can tell the second set are called Horror Balls too, but that's because I can't read a lick of Japanese. But these first dudes are pretty crazy pencil top "erasers", though I haven't attempted to use them as such.

The packaging is neat! It's got lots of splats and drips and even a cool looking bat. Unfortunately, it also has that little racist caricature (which is Takara's mascot). Siggghhhhhh.....These dudes are numbered and the highest I've seen is 18, but it seems like there's really only three sculpts in different color variations. The back of the package has a cool coupon that I wish I could cash in at Shop Rite. "Yeah, I'll take some kale, some soy milk and a disgusting Japanese Madball rip off." It shows you how to use them too, which is absurd. I don't think anyone would mistake these for anything other than toys that go on the ends of pencils. Like, you can't unclog a drain with them or ride one down the street. Anyway, let's check them out up close.
I don't know what any of their names are so we're gonna call this dude, Metric Menace. I should say that these three Horror Balls are academically themed, which is funny. "School can be gross kids! You don't just need to play with your vomit inducing grotesqueries at home anymore!" Metric Menace is a geometry themed vampire, made up of rulers and triangles and whatnot. I guess just plain old stitches and wonky eyes were too lowbrow for Takara.Up next is Pencil Pusher. He's the grossest of the bunch with a swollen eye, crooked teeth and blue barf! His academic theme is....pencil's. I like his little eraser nose, it's cute but not too cute. All of them also have some sort of clear plastic right eye and a tiny nub or button on the top of their heads. If I could read kanji or hiragana, I'd probably be able to explain what the hell both are for. Alas, I can't, so....maybe it's a lazer eye? When in doubt, go for lazer eye.
Our last dude is a sloppy mess...in two ways. First off, I can't make out what the hell is goin on with his face. I think he's supposed to be scarred where his left eye would have been, but its hard to say. I also had a hard time figuring out what his theme was. Turns out it's text books (Book Worm!). Kinda obvies but a little dumb. B, his paint is terrible. These things came out in the 80's and mine were still sealed when I got them and his silver paint was still tacky! Whatever, I still think these are awesome, android-esque school related Madball knock offs and well worth the money I paid for them. I've seen Book Worm on Ebay for $50 which I'd say is toooo much. So try to find a Japanese online toy store that's having a going out of business sale. Yeesh. Our second batch are more traditional pencil top eraser ugly balls that arrived in unmarked plastic bags. These are a tiny bit smaller than the first set but the same size as the Eraser Bouncing Bad Bad Balls. I'm really like these dudes. Their psychadellic coloring and snaggle teeth are really awesome. I think the first is some sort of old man vampire (Old Manpire) and the second is a Screemin Meemie-esque insane face. That third dude, though, he's my favorite. He's a drunk deformed gorilla (Gore-illa!)!
Next up are two of the same dudes in different colors. I can see some Aargh influence there with the drooping eye but he's got those beever teeth! Buck Tooth Terrance looks pretty gross in flesh colored but the translucent blue with red teeth and yellow eyes make him look downright Lovecraftian!

I would totally recommend these to buy but I have no idea where you'd get them now. Sorry.
Last but certainly not least is this horrible beauty of a keychain from Psycho Wheels (which I think is a Japanese motorcylce fetish accesory store). The sculptor signed the back as (and is noted as such on the Psycho Wheels website) Sketch but I can't seem to find any other info on him, though he has designed 3 or 4 other keychains for them. This one is a Rat Fink/Madballs mash up and what a doosey it is. Stitched shut and bulging eyes combined with Big Daddy Roth style jagged teeth and floppy tongue! These highly detailed monstrosities come in 6 different colors and one will only set you back about $30. Oh god, I'm obsessed. However, it is a really cool design and made of a hard durable plastic.

In conclusion, if you like Madballs and you like Japanese toys and you have some extra money to spend all these little dudes are awesome!

Friday the Squirteenth

"Scary 18 Ft. Squirt!"

Most of the ugly faces that grace monster balls are the creation of toy designers who are, no doubt, inspired by creatures in popular culture. It's rare that an existing creep finds its way into the monster ball pantheon, but that's not to say that it doesn't happen. Monster Balls were Madball sized rubber ball representations of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Wolfman, but those are almost monster archetypes like a zombie, ghoul or a demon. Entertech, purveyors of fine water-based entertainment, stepped up to the plate in the late 80's to give us what we all wanted for so long; likenesses of Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees in ball form! What? Was I the ONLY one asking for that?

I'll admit, their addition as children's toys is a bit weird. I mean, as a nerdy kid that was obsessed with horror movies way too young, I was excited that dudes from my generation were being immortalized and somewhat, legitimized as pop culture icons, however, unlike the Wolfman, or Dracula these dudes were BRUTAL murderers and both almost exclusively KILLED CHILDREN (well teens)! Even their appearances are way more nightmare-inducing than Karloff as Imhotep! Well, it must have been easy to disassociate the toys with the actual murderous movies because these weren't the only toys. Jason had a Nintendo video game and Freddy had a board game! Still? Children's ball toys?!

I was hesitant to include these guys in my collection, or on this blog, because they're not traditional Madball type balls. However, the new Euro Madballs are exactly the same make and model so the decision was made for me by the priests of Madballology.

Both Freddy and Jason come packaged with a nameless victim whose only crime was being manufactured in a world where Jason needed to be packaged separately from Freddy. They're about 1.5" in diameter and really are good and holding and squirting water.

Before I start, I want to thank the designers of Spitballs for including a tiny square part on the bottom of these that allows them to stand up straight without outside help. It's really hard to keep most of these jerks upright in order to take photos but these guys were easy. First world problems. Cry for me.

Jason's up first and I'm so pumped on him. Hold up. They somehow managed to make a mentally challenged rotting zombie cute! Look at his round little head! Awwww does mister man wanna murder me with a weed whacker? Yesh you do! This is obviously Jason via part VII: The New Blood as you can tell with his axe wound (upper right) and boat propeller wound (lower right) and the packaging (the small photo on the right is from VII). This is by far my favorite Jason incarnation, cus he's the gnarliest. He looks like a creepy jacked up zombie that's been killed 6 times. I guess that doesn't have anything to do with this toy but whatever. His victim buddy is kinda lackluster. His cartoony face is pretty neat but I'm not exactly sure what Jason did to him to make him a "victim". His eyes are squinty and pink to imply he got stabbed in them? Or maybe Jason just gave him pink eye when he was at that sleepover?

I may be biased in my saying that I like the Jason one's more because I like the Friday the 13th movies better but this Freddy ball actually is disturbing and weird. First off, they didn't try to make his face fit the ball shape, rather they make his face grow out of the ball! That fleshy color and those burns that look like veins make him look like someone with a peculiar testicular growth dressed his junk up with a hat! Look below! Awful!

I guess that IS a pretty good likeness of Robert Englund in the make up but still. I do like the tiny tiny teeth and the angry snarl but he still looks like a nad. His victim is WAY cooler than Jason's though. There's no misinterpreting what happened here, that dude got sleepy and then slashed! It's also cool that he looks like a Ken Doll head. We all know that Barbie lives on Elm Street and her parents burned Freddy alive.

So let's get back to the packaging and its boasting. "Scary 18ft squirt" huh? While this does sound like something accidentally viewed on Redtube, I tested it out and it's true! They really do shoot about 18 feet! You may say, "yeah but that's not scary". Well it is if you're my cat. They don't shoot that far for long but it is pretty cool. My absolute favorite parts of the packaging are the illustrations on the back of each. A) like you couldn't figure it out B) how cute! C) someone got paid for that, D) alliteration, E) rhyming!
In conclusion, these are really cool. I remember these from when I was a kid and tracking them down was worth it. They don't go for very much on the internet if you can find them and they come up fairly often. They're surprisingly well detailed and entertainingly stylized (that Freddy one is soooo weird). If you're into 80's monster movies OR Madballs these are for you!

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.