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.