Monster In My Pocket

Monster In My Pocket was a toy series Matchbox introduced in 1990 that I avidly collected when I was a kid. I had tons of them. They are little rubber figurines of monsters from movies and mythology. You couldn't really do a lot with them, as they weren't pose-able, except collect them, trade them, admire them, and learn about monsters. Oh, and carry them around in your pocket to play with at boring places like restaurants. Despite the fact that they didn't do anything special, these toys were still incredibly fun to collect and play with.

From left: Spring-Heeled Jack, The Witch, Ghoul, and Invisible Man

I mostly collected series 1, of which there were 48 figurines, each available in multiple colors. I still have four of them, but the rest I may have sold in a garage sale (regrettably so, as they are no longer manufactured).

The series 1 monsters I still have, with "battle damage" - Hobgoblin, Spring-Heeled Jack, and Winged Panther

Each monster came with information about it in the packaging, as well as a point value between 5 and 25  on the figurine. The point value stood for the rarity of the figurine as well as the power or scariness of the monster - something I never knew when I was a child.

The monster mountain - contains all of series 1

Looking at a collector's website (and thank goodness for those or I wouldn't remember a lot of these figures), I had at least 33 of the monsters from series 1. Hydra was the crown jewel of my collection, and I also really liked Karnak, Ghost, and Skeleton. I think Gremlin was one that I always wanted but never had. It has a very cool pose.

Gremlin

For some reason, I didn't get any monsters from series 2 or 3, but when series 4 was released, I got a few of those. I didn't like the change in the size or coloring of the monsters - they were much larger, and multi-colored, so they didn't blend well with prior series. They also had trouble standing a lot of the time.

The Jersey Devil has been through Hell. I found him in the garden in front of my house. He never could stand up.

The obscurity of some of the monsters is startling, and the monsters get more obscure as the series go on. Matchbox plumbed the depths of monster movies, folklore, and religion for scary creatures - and this got the company in trouble when they released four Hindu gods as monsters - Kali, Ganesha, Hanuman, and Yama were all depicted as monsters rather than gods that people still worshiped. The fact that people still worship these gods was the key to the offensiveness - the series are filled with Egyptian gods that are totally radical. I can't believe I never got Anubis - I would have loved having that after seeing Stargate.

Anubis, from series 3

Seeing these toys again in such detail has made me want to track them down and buy them. If you'll excuse me, I have some bidding to do. To see how deep the folklore goes, you can try looking up some of the monsters. Here's what Wikipedia says about Spring-Heeled Jack. Yikes!