Trash Bag Bunch

Something shorter this week - the Trash Bag Bunch.

These toys carried on the "monsters and mutants" themes of toys in the '90s, as well as having a slightly ecological message like Captain Planet and The Planeteers. They came in two varieties - Disposors and Trashors. The Trashors were the bad guys, mutant freaks that spread pollution and slime all over the planet. The Disposors were the good guys, who took care of the environment the only way they knew how - with guns!

Sgt. Wastenot doesn't mess around.

It was often hard to tell who was a good guy and who was bad. Both sides have killer robots, and almost all of the good guys are cyborgs with glowing red eyes. They also all wear black and carry guns, which is usually a sign of villainy. This is because, as you can learn here, the original series was just going to be called Robots, Aliens, and Monsters (at least by Galoob).

The complete set

The toys weren't very fun to play with. Much like Monster In My Pocket, they didn't have joints, although they did have good neon colors and detail. The fun was in the packaging. They came in opaque "garbage bags" that would dissolve when you dropped them into water. Not only would the bag dissolve, but the water would fizz because of a tablet that was included in the bag. Only then would you know which ones you ended up with. This element of mystery made buying the toys exciting.

A Trash Bag Bunch package

My brother and I had about half of the collection between us. I can't remember playing with them, but I do remember which ones were my favorites. Their names were Garbeast and Muckoid, and they were both villains. I especially like the extra row of teeth on Muckoid.

Muckoid

So that's that, another of the coolest toy series of the '90s. If you liked reading about the history of the series, I'd suggest looking at the sketches for later toys - some of them were really weird.

Summer Reading - Calvin and Hobbes

Today's post is about Calvin & Hobbes, which I consider to be a pillar of my experience of the '90s. That's why it's so late - I had to take extra time to summon up the words to do it justice. And I probably still can't do it, but I can't wait forever, either, so here goes.

Perhaps no artistic work has had as great an impact on my mind and worldview as Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson's magnificent comic strip about an imaginative six-year-old boy and his pet tiger. As soon as school was out and water fight season began, it was once again time to go to the library and check out every Calvin and Hobbes anthology I could get my hands on.

And now I have it all.

The basic plot of Calvin and Hobbes covers the daily life of Calvin and his imaginary tiger, Hobbes, who only he sees as a real tiger and not a stuffed animal. Calvin has a very active imagination that often lands him in trouble, whether he is daydreaming instead of paying attention or turning it towards mischief. Hobbes is a foil to Calvin, often advising him against his more foolish adventures, providing a counterpoint or another perspective to Calvin's philosophical musings, and frequently fighting with him. Both characters are extremely well-developed and have many different sides.

The strip started in 1985 and ran until 1995. I actually never read it in the comic section of the newspapers, and I don't know how I even became aware of it. But for the ten years it ran, it was consistently excellent. It features wonderful, intelligent writing that is usually hilarious, but at other times can be profound and have a lot of emotional depth, such as when Calvin finds a dead bird and muses on the fragility of life, or when he loses Hobbes and can't find him. The deep, cerebral writing is complimented by the incredible illustration. Calvin's world is seldom limited to a few talking heads - it's full of surreal landscapes and styles. It's very detailed, and there are many full page color strips.

I love the duplicator story.

 These styles frequently surface when Calvin imagines he is one of his alter-egos. As the intrepid explorer Spaceman Spiff, he is often captured by aliens when he crash lands on rocky desert planets, to be tortured with homework, math problems, or bath time. Then there's Tracer Bullet, a hard-boiled detective who only trusts his .38 special and his hip flask. His world is inspired by the shadowed back alleys of film noir. But Calvin can just as easily imagine himself as a dinosaur (or my favorite, a tyrannosaurus in an F-14), an ant, a living skeleton, or a two-dimensional boy as flat as a sheet of paper. Possibly the boldest, most unique strip features Calvin imagining himself as a malevolent god of the underworld.

I credit Calvin and Hobbes with introducing me to philosophy, for better or worse. This has been the most significant impact the strip had on me - after all, I went on to major in it. Calvin and Hobbes talk about such philosophically rich topics as ethics, meaning and purpose, mortality, humanity's place in nature, and whether or not a god exists. It was Calvin and Hobbes that first showed me that these were open questions worth pondering.

The thing about Calvin and Hobbes that sets it above and beyond all other comic strips is that there is not a single panel or storyline where Bill Watterson is phoning it in. It remains consistently wonderful for all ten glorious years. There are new ideas in every panel. It never becomes stale or repetitious, and unlike many long-running series, the quality never deteriorates. It's the project of one devoted artist, given the freedom to create, and pour out his good soul on the page. Humanity is richer for it.

Attack Pack

This week, I'll be reminiscing about a series of toys that I enjoyed quite a bit in my childhood - Attack Pack.

These strange toys combined three things I loved - vicious animals, transforming, and monster trucks. Created by Mattel, the corporation also responsible for Hot Wheels, it's pretty clear where Attack Pack came from. Someone on a marketing team said "Hey, the kids really like this Beast Wars thing, right? So why don't we make them into cars?" And they did, and it was awesome.

There was no TV show that Attack Pack was inspired by, but the packaging did come with a convoluted and confusing story with environmentalist themes like Captain Planet. The toys were also divided into good guys and bad guys as in Beast Wars and Transformers before it. It's a time-tested formula.

The Attack Pack toys came in many different models, some of which were sold at McDonald's. The first series were all based on monster trucks and rather normal animals, but later the series branched out to include flying vehicles like planes and dinosaurs. There was also a series of space-themed vehicles like rockets and UFO's, which were merged with weirder, grosser animals like leeches and maggots.

The toys typically could roll on their wheels, and they had a lever in the back you could push down on to make them rear up and transform into their animal mode - their teeth, claws, or wings would come out. Later, Mattel released the "growlers" series that made a roaring sound when you pushed the lever, but these actually weren't as cool as the original series - there was much less diversity in the types of vehicles and animals. They were all either cats or bears, all the models of the same species were in the same mold with a different paint job.

Looking at the pictures of these toys makes me remember how cool they were, and which ones I had and which ones either my brother or my friends had. But the happiest memory I have of Attack Pack toys is of my brother and I getting some really cool ones for Easter. These were in the "Big Ones" series released in 1993. I got Blowtorch, which was styled after what appears to be a bulldog mixed with a fire truck, and Slime-Inator - the ultra-cool huge Attack Pack monster designed after a hornet mixed with a cement truck. He had an ability none of the others did - he could dump a green goo all over them. Unfortunately, the goo was no good after the first use - I played with it outside and got dirt in it. Ain't that always the way?

My brother got Big Bones, a truck with a cage on the back that could hold a smaller Attack Pack vehicle prisoner. The really cool thing about the "Big Ones" series (as opposed to the "Biggest Ones" series that Slime-Inator was from) was that when you pushed down the lever, not only did they rear up and transform to reveal jaws, but their front wheels contained claws. This differentiated them from the smaller ones.

I only have foggy memories of playing with these toys, but I know it must have taken some imagination. I remember rolling them through the grass in my backyard and pretending they were stalking through the jungle. I remember the feel of these toys in my hand. They couldn't move like Hot Wheels, and they had no fancy tracks they could speed along and fly through loops, but they remind me of how I always liked the unusual and unrealistic monster-shaped Hot Wheels cars rather than regular sports cars and F1 racers. These toys tapped into the part of my personality that made me like horror movies better than action movies, anti-heroes better than traditional heroes, and death metal better than hair metal. They are proof that design by committee can actually work. And so it is with great fondness that I thank the soulless corporation Mattel for enriching my childhood.