A Ball To Arms!!

"Wild Bizarre Bounce!"

First things first. I should apologize for my current photo set up. I broke the bulb in the lamp I usually use so I have to use Jeanne's super high powered Gremlin thwarting light. It works but it casts some crazy shadows. I'll get a new bulb and pics for the next post should be better.

You can see what I have to work with here, and why it's so hard to get a picture without hair in it. That's Vinegar and luckily he has no interest in Madballs other than when I'm photographing them. Enough talk about stuff that isn't balls. Jeez!
This week, we have an awesome Xmas score from eBay. I found these Bizarre Balls while present hunting and managed to grab an entire set for $2! I had never even seen these dudes before the auction so...yay!

They arrived in a box with the manufacturer's logo on it, making me think an ex-employee was ditching some basement surplus. You can see a pic in this post.
Look at that 90's graphic design! Holy crap the colors! Swirls and explosions and that notebook print thing...it's like the opening credits to Saved By the Bell or a Trapper Keeper on acid!

I do love the mascot/logo of the Cool Products Corp. A little ice cube with shades? Yup. It's cool figuratively and literally.

Looking at the back you can tell Cool Products took this stuff seriously. Not only are there multiple characters, but they've all got names and drawings. They even tried to branch out from the other guys by adding new types of monsters and putting twists on the standards (eyeball, smiling guy). Not only that but they went all out and added......gasp....arms!

I usually like my balls to be just balls (ha!), but this is a pretty cool innovation on what, at the time, was a toy line that seemed to be dead. They're also smaller than a Madball (1.5" in diameter) and made of bouncing ball rubber. Good job Cool Products!
First up is Eye Gore. I want to take a second to appreciate how awesome that name is. It's a double pun, playing off both eye sore and Igor while adding a gruesome twist.

Soooo.....this guy is pretty neat. He's a standard eyeball bouncy ball, with lots of details in the blood vessels and a little highlight painted on his iris, but all the good stuff is in his arms. They got a surprising amount of detail in essentially two dimensional appendages. Much like the Oculus Orbus head popper, Eye Gore's arms have no skin. Just muscle and tendons. Twisty muscles and tendons with gnarled up hands and the end! Sweet!
Mutiny here is my favorite of the bunch. This was before Madballs had introduced Blech Beard, so this is a new monster face ball character. Not bad for a fourth rung rip off line. His face is really neat with lots of details like stitches, an earring, an eyepatch and cracked teeth. Those teeth are really cool. I love the way that color green pops on the red. This guys arms may win the neatest prize. One's a muscly hook arm and the other one is a skeleton arm! Ahhhhhhh! So good.
Snorrreeeee....I could do without this guy. He's supposed to be a punk or extreme sports dude or some such malarky. Well, his name's Punky, so I guess they were goin for punk. There's nothing really gross about him or monstrous aside for his beartrap green teeth. Not even stitches...even the lamest of fake Madballs have stitches. He's actually lacking on detail altogether. Meh, I'd've chosen another monster design instead of this garbage. I hope the designer of this dude reads this and cries.
Yaaaaayyyyy!!!! That's what this guy looks like he's yelling! I'm into him! he's not a monster in the normal sense but he's beat up and kinda sculpted the way Garbage Pail Kids are drawn. Swollen shut eye, a bunch of stitches, missing teeth and a giant crazy grin. That's what I like to see! His arms are kinda boring but I suppose the gloves really push the boxer thing and set him aside from a guy that just got beat up. And being from Philadelphia, I have to give Rocky some extra points for the name.
Cool, stylish, simple....classic. Frank, isn't breaking new ground but he's really well designed and sculpted. He's full of wrinkles, covered in stitches and I love those jack-o-lantern teeth. His arms are kinda lame, though. I wonder if they ran out of "arm budget" after they drew up Eye Gore and Mutiny. They have the coolest ones. It is kinda fun to make them high five each other...wait, what? No, I didn't do that. HIGH FIVE FRANKENSTEIN!!
Ok, now we're getting weird. This is just strange. I think he's supposed to be a riff on Screamin' Meemie but they just went all teeth. Like, so much teeth that they had to put dude's eyes on the back of the ball! His teeth aren't even cracked or fangs or discolored. Just huge! Oh, and he's giving us the peace/victory sign with both hands. Maybe he's Nixon inspired? I can't really say what the heck is goin on with Smiley but I think I like him. I wouldn't vote for him though.
Check out this dude's butt. The 90's for sure. Cool Products were classy. They put their stamp on each of these dudes unlike Super Bouncing Weird Balls (bane of my toy collecting existence) or Foul Balls who any of the nameless imitations that couldn't be bothered. It's nice to see someone take pride in their work. It's the monster face ball factories that power America! Well, China, and Taiwan I guess....sighhhhh.

This was right before the internet was invented so there's no website for the Cool Products Corp. and Google searches yield nothing. I hope they're somewhere still making cool products and putting as much love into them as they did these bouncy bruisers.

In conclusion...these are great! If you can get your hands on them, go for it. They hold up pretty well, they're full of detail, painted well and are an original spin on an old idea.

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.

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.

Bounce Ball Mania!!

"Spook your friends with assorted monster balls."

Madballs in miniature! I love monster faced bouncy balls. They're usually sturdier than Madballs and actually usable as a bouncy ball. This weeks post is about three sets of the little buggers. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about the first two groups because they were bought from wholesalers or with no packaging. The first set are super small, at an inch in diameter. Most of these are really cool and the few clunkers are so weird they're worth having.

OK, I put my three favs first, which may ruin the rest for you but whatever. I'm always a big fan of eye ball toys, a glorious tradition hailing back to Oculus Orbus, and this one is no exception. It's pretty gross. It's bloodshot for one thing and the lid is pretty heavy, so it's a mutant or stoned. If you add the weird bubbly mebrane engulphing the rest of him, I would have to vote for mutant. I guess stoned mutant would work too.

The next dude is great! It's surprising to me that there aren't more pumpkin themed Sadballs. It seems like an obvious design. This one is a skull/pumpkin hybrid with gnarly teeth and heavy red bags under his eyes. He's also grinning...soooo he may be stoned too.

Now this one is the best of the bunch! I love gorgons too! The original Madball design of Snake Bait is the pinacle of gorgon Madballology, but this little lady is no slacker. She looks like a little gramma with her babushka and puffy wrinkled face, but there's snakes under there! Well, that and her fangs and pointy tongue. She's even got a few snakes on the back of her head. Which is oddley the only detail ANY of these have on the reverse side. She doesn't look high but she also looks like she may be using magic to make whatever it is those other dudes are using.

This fourth guy is the grossest of the bunch! Like a bounce ball Freddy Krueger, with a cracked nose that has grub crawling out of it! I imagine he was injured in a magic meth fire the gorgon started. This is a level of gross that usually doesn't make it onto Madballs. It almost looks like real mutilation, not cartoon stitches.

His buddy is a shrunken head that looks like a mini version of Shrunk Punk (oh what could have been...sighhhh). The mouth stitched shut and the bone through the nose are pretty cool. I'm also a big fan of his different crazy eyes!

Big Blue (yeah I started naming them to help) is next on the list and is where things get kinda odd. He's not too odd himself (he's a crazy blue monster/demon with a weird tongue) but he's the gateway to the next two nerds. Design-wise anyway. We're in generic "monster" territory now, but with no referance material these guys came out wrong.
Ohhhh man. Mellow Yellow and TicTac Teeth. It looked like they were goin for a skull or something with Mellow, but WHAT THE HELL IS ON HIS FACE?! Is that a sentient beard?! Is it a bat that he tried to eat? Maybe a gray squid? I'm really at a loss here. There's nothing to indicate what that is on an otherwise "regular" skull design. Maybe the sculptor dropped him while he was working on him and didn't have time to fix him so he just painted the mess-up gray? Is it supposed to be barf? GAH!?

I guess Tic Tac Teeth is a goblin but I don't know why he's got a clown nose. If you're invited to a costume party and you're a goblin, do you even bother with a fake nose? Or do you lie and tell ladies you're really hot under your super kick-ass orc costume? His facial muscles don't make any sense either but that may be me asking too much.

In conclusion, get these dudes! They're cheap, they bounce and they look cool! While the paint jobs are actually quite good for something this small, every once in a while they're off. So be wary. You can buy em here!

I picked up the next six idiots at Toy Joy, one of the best toy stores in the world. Actually, I got four of them and my friend Alexis sent me the other two. They look more like mutants or aliens than monsters but I guess that's a fine line.

These "Super" bouncy balls, measuring at about 2" in diamter and bouncing like nobody's business! Their paint jobs and bright colors are really cool and add to the mutant angle. It looks like the rubber was just swirled and then they painted on top of that, so no two are exactly the same but the general colors are consistent.
We'll start with my favorites again. Monster Cat has a pretty cool color scheme going on and makes me think of a monster from some low budget 80's schlock staring Linnea Quigley.

Then there's this skull demon from hell! I feel like he's laughing at my suffering. Parts of his "brain" are exposed and some other cool detailed bits.

My absolute favorite is this C.H.U.D. looking thing. I really like the purple/black combo and his disgusting yellow eyes. His tiny pointy teeth look dangerous and he's got a rugous skin texture that seems reminiscent of muscle tissue.

OK, now these two are a bit strange. Corncob Teeth is the yellow dude that just kinda seems to be thinking about eating you. The furrowed brow, the half smile and the contemplative eyes...I also don't think he's got enough room in his mouth for you AND his teeth.

Camo Croc has a similar problem but at least his teeth aren't discolored and blunt. He's cooler than Corncob Teeth but still just kinda "meh".

Our last dude is a bit of a curve-ball because he's a representation of a Grim Reaper. All the other dudes are generic but stylistic monsters, and then this nerd comes along and is actually recognizable as a cultural icon. A lumpy and asymmetrical one at that!

Overall, COOL!
These last dudes aren't really a collectible set, they're just some gross bouncy eyes in about four different color combinations. My favorite feature is that the eye part glows in the dark! They're made by a British toy company called Tobar that makes a TON of different stuff but these seem to be their only foray into monster ball territory. These guys remind me of our stoned mutant eyeball from that first set but about the size and style of the second group.

These guys are awesome. Well sculpted, gross, glow in the dark and detailed. My only complaint is that the paint on the pupil chips really easily. I noticed that its actually bubbled on the top and bottom center of just about every one. You win some you lose some.

SO! Three time conclusion! Get all of these. They bounce and are super weird/disgusting. They will freak out your sister and piss off your dad! AND they're all cheap and readily available. GO!

UPDATE!!

I just found this ad for those little dudes while doing a time killing monster ball google search.