Thursday Threesome: Three Childhood Toys That Made Me Who I Am Today

After a friend posted about some old toys on Twitter, I confessed my big three toys. These aren't the toys that I had the most of, or even the toys that I loved the most. These are the toys that had the biggest creative impact on my life. For every silly character or weird idea that I come up with, you could probably trace it back to one, or all, of these.

Madballs
There's something that I really enjoy about mashing two things together. Madballs were baseball and football sized balls with awesome, sculpted, gross-out style creature faces. The character and detail in these lured me in from the start.

My favorite was always the eyeball, and my holy grail toy was the action figure version with a body made up of blood vessels. I've tried to make characters that are just eyeballs ever since, but nothing as cool as Oculus Orbus. 

M.U.S.C.L.E
What I loved the most about M.U.S.C.L.E was the variety. There were like 6 million different little pink men and I wanted to have every single one of them. I also wanted to make my own characters in that universe. It was a universe with no rules beyond a common size. There were luchadors, robots, guys made out of the parts of a screw, wart covered hands, with faces on the fingers, and so much more.

I've sold off about 400 of mine over the years, but I still have a decent sized bag filed with all of my favorites. Enough to keep me inspired when I hit a creative low point.

Battle Beasts

Whoever thought of putting armor on animals and sticking weapons in the their hands… I owe them one. There is no toy that I adore more than Battle Beasts. It's another mash-up and what I love and learned the most about this one is building a template. They are all very similar in size and shape. On paper, it's like building an avatar. THe head goes here. The weapon is the same thickness and mostly the same color. Etc.



Another thing about battle beasts that I've loved are the factions. The balance of fire, water, and wood hit some sort of creative nerve that I didn't even know existed. This love continued through Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, Skylanders and so much more. There's something about the simplicity and variety of the elements that does it for me.

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Those are my top three. Now I feel like I need to go make something after just writing about them. Mashing up the three just doesn't work. Pink animal balls armed with weapons? Hmmmmmm. It sounds terrible, but might have worked 25 years ago.