Meet Squit the Boglin - The Greatest Monster Toy of all Time скачать в хорошем качестве

Meet Squit the Boglin - The Greatest Monster Toy of all Time

GROTESQUE FORMS. Everyone fortunate enough to have toys as a child has a favorite one that sticks in their mind for the rest of their life, no matter how old and boring they get. For some lucky children in the late 1980s, that toy was the Boglin, maybe the greatest monster toys of all time. Boglins were uniquely monstrous puppets made out of foam latex that looked and felt so real, it seemed like they could have been movie props. But unlike the movie or TV tie-in toys of today, Boglins didn’t have any other media presence. They were simply ultra-cool, satisfyingly gross monsters that kids could bring to life. “Boglins make their way on the toy itself,” says Patricia Hogan, curator at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. “There’s no Saturday morning cartoon, no comic, no trans-media existence.” While their lack of media saturation probably contributed to their brief life and quick demise, Boglins became quite popular in their short few years on the toy shelves. And to those that remember the toys, they are one of the coolest playthings of all time. Boglins were actually the brainchild of creature and prop designers Tim Clarke and Maureen Trotto. Clarke had been working with the Jim Henson Company, on projects such as The Dark Crystal and Fraggle Rock. Clarke began to see the potential for creating a figure out of foam latex, utilizing the expressive properties of the material. Inspired by the Olmec colossal heads of Ancient Mexico, the first ever Boglin was a green creature that kept about the same shape, with the addition of arms, ears, and a tail. Oh, and of course, a delightfully gruesome, and malleable face. Clarke added a simple mechanism that could control the eyes. Toy agent Larry Mass took the Boglins to Mattel, who loved them. By 1987, when commercial Boglins were available on the store shelves, Clarke and Trotto’s vision of the toys was remarkably unaltered. The original line produced three different Boglins. The toys were made of an artificial rubber called kraton, suggested by Mattel. “What I had wanted to do many, many years ago was to give kids the ability to play with something they were seeing in special effects movies,” Clarke says. “They are seeing Yoda, they are seeing Jabba the Hutt, they are seeing the creatures in The Dark Crystal, and being fascinated by movie monsters [made of foam latex]. Here’s this incredible material, and yet kids are ending up with rigid, non-malleable toys.” It was an issue the creepy, expressive little Boglins tried to fix. The greatest addition or change to the final released toys was the unique design of the box they came in. Designed by Trotto’s husband, the box was made to look like a wooden crate that the Boglin had been shipped in from its far-flung swamp. The front of the box was a plastic cage grate that could be lifted to release the creature. There was a hole in the bottom of the box in case kids wanted to bring their Boglin to life while keeping it in its cage. Some have pointed to the innovative packaging as one of the primary reasons Boglins took off. After their release, Boglins became a brief, but bright hit in America. “The notion of horror and humor combined became big in the 80s,” says Hogan. “Especially around toys like Boglins, and others like the Gremlins and Ghostbusters. They combined the horror of the monster genre with comedy, so that you’re screaming one minute, and laughing the next.” The original trio of Boglins was joined by Soggy Boglins, which were a trio of all-new Boglins designed with an aquatic bent that had new features like squirting water or a sticky tongue. Unfortunately, despite the explosive line growth, about two years after the U.S. release of the toys, Mattel fell out of love with the Boglin line and left it out in the advertising cold, essentially rendering the American Boglin extinct. After just two years on the American shelves, Mattel discontinued Boglins. Why don’t we see unique toy lines like the Boglins anymore? Clarke says that the market no longer exists. “Right now, everything has to have a cartoon animation, or a movie, or a TV show tied to it, that was still in the day and age when independent toy designers could place products at companies, which is unheard of now.” Today Boglins live on mainly in the nostalgic minds of the grown children who once played with them. (Though if you can get to Rochester, New York, you can see them in person - the Strong National Museum of Play has purchased a few Boglins for its collection.) Clarke says that the Boglins may soon be reborn as a high-end collectable figure for adults. It would be a bit different—more of a designer action figure. Whenever and however they return, Boglins will continue to live on in the memories of every former kid who got to bring home their very own monster.