TOYS ARE US : Mega Gross Minis

I'll never not be ambivalent to brag about how cool a lotta the stuff was when I was growing up - movies, television, and, of course, toys. (This is not a millennial thing, this is a characteristic of every post-Depression generation.) And I'd say (and you'd say, and pretty much everyone does say) that there was a noticeable spike in gross out playthings in the 1990s and they were all a direct footprint left by Madballs, Garbage Pail Kids, Fangoria, Ghostbusting culture, and all the other putrid pioneers of the previous decade; slime sells, and the corporate realization of that fact was perfectly aligned with my youth. 

I was never a fan of the messy stuff - I was too lazy to participate in the "cleanup" portion. What I did find attractive during this trend were the blatantly morbid moods that they infused into mainstream make-believe; snot and bugs aside, there was a lotta death and decay as a general theme and everyone was cool with it (us kids especially). Not that we had a preoccupation with dying, but like Heavy Metal and Halloween these kindsa toys were my age group's tangible connection to the Horror genre. And so we ended up with a lotta skulls and corpses and body parts, and I know I personally didn't care about the context: it all just looked so cool to me. That's why, for me, the most attractive thing to come out of this craze was Topps Wacky Packages. 

Predating Garbage Pail Kids by nearly 20 years, Wacky Packs reared their ugly, smelly, slimy head again for a minute in the mid 80s and again in 1991 (as I fondly recalled in detail here) and they awoke in me a lustful appreciation for the beauty of commercial art - and green barf and brown stink clouds. And it's because of this adoration that I had an immediate attraction to Zuru's Mega Gross Minis.

Distributed in plastic spheres at $10 a shot, Mega Gross Minis contains "5 barf worthy surprises that will have you feeling green." Though within the one I purchased there were 3 "parody minis" accompanied by a tiny magnifying glass and a condiment packet full of green slime (presumably to drizzle directly onto your prizes), so I'm feeling like the tool and the topping come standard and we really only get the 3 toys.

Wacky Packs have done similar things -- releasing little three-dimensional rubber reproductions of their two-dimensional artwork -- and they're just delightful. These Gross Minis are sorta the real deal though: articulate but durable sculptures that seamlessly resemble the products they're parodying. My very subjective complaint is that the modern products (and their respective labels) are often as accurately boring as they are in real life - though a few accents of vomit make them much more alive and colorful.

I don't know that I'd keep up with these, mostly because I don't have the space or the stamina to amass even more tiny plastic pieces of shit. I do really want that "Snotverse" sneaker that seems to be the leader of the pack, and of course there are chase variants like glow-in-the-dark versions and "stinky scented" surprises that stimulate my collecting gland a bit, but a $10 addiction seems risky right now. Though Zuru has already announced a "Series 2" that seems to double down on the yuck, which gleefully leads me to believe that current generations are just as down with the sickness as I was and continue to be.

- Paul