The Ugly Pageant: Toys

Who's the foulest of them all? Part 1

I have a rule about Halloween: no cute costumes allowed. If you have to be a princess, it should be a dead princess, or a gross princess, or a scary princess. Ugly-only is my rebellion against the sexy-centric prefab outfits generally available to women for this holiday that I believe should be dark and dirty as intended. Also it’s just way more fun. Once I attended the Coney Island Mermaid Parade as an angry feminist pirate in a hopeless battle against the bikini-clad nation. Arrgh!

In celebration of the terrible unrecognized beauty of UGLINESS, I’m hosting a different kind of pageant that starts innocently enough with a sweet Show & Tell item and goes down the drain with last week’s hairballs from there—so get ready. I was going to pack the whole event into one post but it grew out of control and demanded to become my favorite thing: a trilogy. First third of the pageant for this week is the March of the Misfit Toys. Week two next time: Oozy Movie Monsters. Finally: The Worst Mythological Beasts. Each week will end with a popularity poll for you, the studio audience, to vote for the Ugliest of Them All. For the sake of the poll technology provided, each segment has been whittled down behind the scenes (by a secret pool of judges that includes me and some opinionated weirdos on Reddit) to five contenders each. Remember, the contestants are to be rated foremost by their foulness. They will be providing no vapid answers to any questions about how to solve world peace and I promise you don’t want to see them in bikinis. So grab your clipboard and your spit-up cup and let’s begin.

UGLYDOLL

My recent Show & Tell event and related essay leading up to that had me scouring my shelves to see what special item I might write about to launch a possible informal and occasional new Show & Tell series. I ended up choosing grandma’s death clock (i.e. the little clock that has never worked, but was gifted to the family as a trinket of her passing, frozen for eternity on the minute she died) and passed by this beloved black bat, because I didn’t have much to say about him at the time.

I still don’t have much to say about him, besides that I love him and the premise of a product officially called UglyDolls. He was an early gift to my Halloween baby, whose due date was October 31, but she came a week early after I induced the pressure on my uterus of marching in the Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow Halloween parade that year followed by partaking of an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet in Nyack. In any case, I love that this daughter embraces Halloween and has accepted getting gifted bleak thematic gifts in lieu of the endless line of pretty things available to any normal girl. UglyDolls were born in 2001 and frankly aren’t that ugly. Admittedly this one’s only here as a sentimental contender, a little nepotism insert. He’s graduated from my now-teen daughter’s bedroom to mine, where I am not above a snuggle with a poor rejected outcast.

Onto the worser of two plushies from my household, there’s this nervous Nellie:

FUGGLER

Insert hard teeth rather than fabric ones and I believe you have a superior monster, an f’in uglier and way less huggable Fuggler who boldly promises to ruin your life.

The story behind these dolls is amusing, from the Fuggler website itself, the origin story:

Fugglers are funny-ugly monsters that will ruin your life and warm your heart with their mischievous antics and straight-up bonkers appearance.

Created in 2010, a British lady named Mrs. McGettrick created the concept of Fugglers after encountering individual denture teeth on eBay and envisioning them as looking funny on teddy bears. She started to sew her own bears with these human-like teeth and so Fugglers emerged.

These horribly assembled animals disturbed her husband, which fuelled her amusement, so she started to sell them online. Over the years, her toys slowly grew in popularity.

There are many varieties of Fuggler but I’m partial to this foxy fellow who is also part of the Show & Tell menagerie from my bedroom since, sadly, he was not ever beloved by my Halloween daughter, but fast-tracked into my care as she immediately tossed him off in revulsion.

Hold onto these goofy guys from the 2000s while we go back in time for the rest of this segment to the decade with the best pop music and the most insane toys full of stinky toxic plastic—the 1980s.

MADBALLS

Madballs, born in 1985, were apparently so ugly, they inspired one kid to try to bite a chunk off his toy’s despicable face. Says one person in the ugliest toy forum on Reddit,

“Like, why? What was the point of this? I just remember getting frustrated one day and taking a big ol chomp out of it. Even that wasn’t satisfying.”

There’s one version with a catchy name and extra gear, the Madballs Swine Sucker Freaky String Blaster, of course. And there’s a whole ad compilation on YouTube, if you don’t remember these things that morphed into franchises of video games and comics, but still can be purchased in vintage varieties if you’re tempted to spend $150 on a rubbery eyeball on eBay. “Gross for one, gross for all; we play with a Madball!”

MY PET MONSTER

What’s not to love-hate about this rainbow-pride guy with a penis-nose and handcuffs?

My Pet Monster, shared from someone’s personal collection on Reddit.

This 1986 confusing confection has, according to Wikipedia:

blue fur, horns and a fanged smile, and is recognizable by its orange plastic handcuffs. The handcuffs could also be worn by children and came with a breakaway link so that the child could simulate breaking the chain. Several versions of the doll have been released in various sizes and other attributes. Other characters were also created with brightly colored fur and unorthodox names like Gwonk, Wogster and Rark.

From the Reddit comments, which abound:

• I was so jealous of my friend for having this dude. He was so cool! His chains were breakaway because he was unchainable!

• Oh I loved him, he was just the ugliest. He ruled, and I miss him dearly. They make a newer one, but it’s F***D UP looking. Took all the grumpy menace out of him...

• I always saw this in JC Penney’s. I think it was $50, which was like one billion in today’s dollars.

• I loved my My Pet Monster. I was kind of scared of it tho.

• His nose was a weapon!

Famous fighting words there. And if you covet this friend for yourself you can spend anywhere from $559 to $1,492 for an old one on eBay.

Onto today’s final contender, mind-bogglingly still in production:

BOGLINS

Do not despair if you pine for these ridiculous swampy puppets of 1987! They’ve been revived, complete with a new Boglins commercial on YouTube. Models feature moveable eyes that glow in the dark and a terrible clown version, because who doesn’t revile a terrible clown. The only thing worse than these Boglins might be their commercial:

The website has new edition toys that don’t come cheap—$49.99 for Kings, Dark Lords and Aliens; along with limited edition Bats ($59.99 for Dark or Vlad, and $149.99 for Orlock) and $59.99 for glow-in-the-dark Zombies.

• Kings—“These living legends are part of the very history of the Bog. They are a mixed bag of blind bravery and cunning schemes. At their hearts, or whatever the Boglin equivalent is, the Boglin Kings are a group of silly, ugly, pranksters who just want to have fun!”

• Dark Lords—“The Boglin Dark Lords are veiled in sinister mystery. In true chicken-or-the-egg fashion no one knows if the Boglin Dark Lords came first, or the tales that we tell children to scare them came first. Either way, what you heard is probably true!”

• Aliens—“From the planet Bogzania comes Alien Boglins!”

• Bats—”Bat Boglins simply shouldn't be. Although Boglin legend tells of these winged creatures, who would swoop down from the highlands to carry small animals (and sometimes young Boglins) away in the dead of night, these are the kinds of stories one tells children in order to get them to behave. There has, in fact, never been a confirmed sighting until VERY recently. Looks like the stories are true.”

• Zombies—“Out of the methane fog in the Valley of Meander rose the Unholy Six, each having contracted the zombie pox. Some in the early stages sporting bright red corpuscles and  popping them with glee, spreading their virus to all four corners of the bog. Others in the later stages of the pox, with faces filled with pink and purple pustules. Spiraling down into the Valley of Doom never to be seen again except maybe in your next nightmare! Ha Ha Ha Booo!”

Heard enough? Judges, it’s time to cast your vote. And if you have other ideas for an ugly toy stuck in your mental craw from childhood (might I suggest runners up, also from great ‘80s: the off-gassing Moss Man, the insane looking Toxic Crusaders Psycho, the Manglor whose limbs were supposed to rip apart and reattach but they never did) please…