Hahaha, it’s much more fucking awesome than I remembered, thanks so much. Jfc of course somebody on this forum would have the answer in under a week; I love this place.
I recall now I was conflating the “Lunar Invader” - Mickey D’s… who woulda thunk it? - with a feature of these cute little mini furbies. Not like furbies, but McDonald’s party favor sub-furboids, you could squeeze their sides and they’d light-up a heart/open eyes and mouth playfully etc.
What nutty designs. Dang I could even still buy one and have it shipped to me for 8 bucks. Thanks again.
ohhhhh that’s weird. mcdonalds did an attack pack promotion here too, but it must have been with a different set, as the one i got from there was a tiger-striped pickup truck
matchbox also had a monster vehicles line called carnivores, but they were more explicitly monstruous, and also a lot bigger.
i had these (not my pictures):
venom spitter
buzz off
for some reason, venom spitter ended up being the ruler of all the evil characters. maybe because he was way bigger than most action figures? i dunno.
even as a kid, i always saw right through most of the toy companies’ attempts to get nerdier kids into toy cars, like sci-fi/monster-themed hot wheels tracks and so on
but these lines of monster cars were always something that got my attention for some reason
also, finding the pictures for this post reminds me of a d-list toyline called carzillas
the only one i ever saw of these was illegal wheels, and i guess the line must have been a big flop, as i only ever saw them in discount supermarkets (though to be fair, those places were also where i’d get the first series of spawn figures, as well as mighty max sets and other cool stuff, usually for absurdly low prices like £1-3 each (though the mighty maxes from there all only came with instructions in foreign languages, that was a small price to pay for such a small price to pay))
i remember mighty max being super popular! me and my friends all had a bunch of them. only the most spoilt of spoilt bastards had that huge mountain one though. i think it came with something absurd like 20+ monsters
that picture isn’t even close to all of the ones that got released, either!
turtles is a weird thing for me, i loved the cartoon when i was little, but i never had any toys from it. maybe they were more expensive than ghostbusters toys (of which i had many)?
there were some power rangers ones too styled after the original morphers.
wonder what really started this trend, these always seemed so weird and inflexible to play with, but I could see them coming back into fashion for the kinds of people that like to put Anime Waifu’s on their literal desktops at work
i was actually gonna post about magus when i could be bothered to go and find images of him!
he was the only “big” mighty max i had, and he was awesome. the coolest thing is there’s lots of holes and little vents and stuff in his torso, so one time me and friend got the mechanism from some trick “exploding gum” (that used capgun caps) and put in in there and closed him up quickly so there was smoke coming out of him.
i guess he must have been a big seller, as some time after they released a series of smaller figure/playset hybrids.
i had the liohead one, and inside him it was like a little castle-type medival dungeon place? i don’t think these sets came with any smaller enemies, just weapons and stuff. so i guess they’re like boss fights or something?
i don’t know about anyone else, but i used to have like, little monster towns made up of all the mighty maxes i had opened and put next to each other. i guess the appeal is that even with the small ones, you get a couple of monsters and a little horror/fantasy/sci-fi environment for them to do stuff in, for a very small price.
a bigger mystery is why the concept carried on in girls toys for many years after it had burned out for boys toys.
Can’t believe we’re talking the Mighty Max and the TMNT Mini-Mutants and we haven’t even mentioned the original line of 1990s Polly Pocket (starting in 1989 in the UK by Bluebird), which predated Mighty Max (1992, also Bluebird).
Obv, a p different aesthetic, but my sisters had a few of these and I remember encountering Mighty Max and Mini-Mutants and being like “oh, like Polly Pocket but meant for boys.”
also there was a kind of spin off contemporary of these dude called Monster Force and I think the main character is the reason I love masked dudes so much
I somehow missed Hot Wheels’ Road Wars; those looks amazing.
One of my favorite toy cars though came from a presumably earlier Matchbox line called RoadBlasters (I think the arcade/NES game was a tie in). They kind of ran the gamut between Mad Max-y and Death Race 2000-y.
And my dream has always been to somehow become some kind of geeky version of Cristo and build life sized versions of old He-Man playsets. What museum wouldn’t want a giant Snake Mountain or Castle Greyskull on it’s ground?
You know, it is a wonder a group like Arcane Kids haven’t made soe kind of low-fi 3D walkabout through a he man playset or Mighty Max or something. We are ripe for this content
oh this is such a cute idea!!! i loved micro machine playsets so much, alot of them had a similar idea iirc. there’s a playset i had that was a giant bomber that would fold out into a military base, and several star wars ones that were like, just some star wars head that folded out into a playset
One of my favorite toys as a kid was this series of small futuristic vehicles that were sold from a big plastic tub at the checkout counter of toy stores. They were very inexpensive, but well-designed. I’ve tried to search for a picture of them a few times over the years, but it wasn’t until just now that I came up with the right keyword combination.
