Monster spitballs

Entertech's Spitball line of the 1980s started out as a fairly generic range of character-based water-squirting doohickeys. The image above (cribbed from a French GI Joe forum) shows a mixed bag of designs: "beasts" (specifically, a beaver, a pig, a shark and a frog); "jocks" (a baseball player, an American footballer, a soccer ball and… a beach ball, I think) and "wacko's" (Frankenstein, a skull, a Jack O' Lantern and, inexplicably, a boy scout).

As time went on, the line seems to have focused more on monsters - possibly influenced by those Madball toys from around the same time. Just look at the Monster Spitballs (available second hand, at the time of writing, from Goblinhaus):

Frankenstein has better things to do than hang around with boy scouts. Look - it's a small rubber approximation of Bela Lugosi! And just like the real thing, it projects water over eighteen feet when squeezed.

It's not just classic horror fans who were catered to by these things. These Spitballs also branched out into contemporary films - namely, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. A number of websites have covered these oddities, in particular Dracula Dinosaur, from where I have shamelessly swiped the photos below:

While Drac and Frank were sold together, Freddy and Jason came separately. But Entertech stuck to its two-Spitballs-per-pack guns, resulting in the curious decision to sell each slasher villain with an unnamed victim.

"JASON." "VICTIM."

Exactly what this fellow's a victim of is unclear. Freddy's victim has clearly been slashed down the face, but Jason's hapless teenager… well, he's in pain, but has no visible injuries beyond a pink patch in the shape of a comic book "pow" effect above his nose.  An axe wound would have been more Jason's style - this guy looks like he's just trod on a rake.

At this point, some people may be raising an eyebrow at gruesome slashers such as Friday the 13th having merchandise that was clearly aimed at children. Well, rest assured that Entertech also covered more age-appropriate fare, with some Spitballs based on the Real Ghostbusters cartoon.

The packaging depicted Slimer and an orange ghost squirting water at pink and yellow beasties, but the set actually partnered Slimer with, curiously, the Ghostbusters' car. Doesn't quite fit in alongside Dracula versus Frankenstein or Freddy versus slasher victim, but there we go.

Most sites I've seen go no further than the eight horror Spitballs covered above. However, thanks to the magic of the Google image search, I managed to find two more entries in the series, again tying in with Ghostbusters…

These are from eBay listings that are long-gone, so I was unable to find higher-res images. Still, these should be sufficient to demonstrate that the line also included a 3-D version of the Ghostbusters logo and quite possibly the most unsettling representation of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that the world has ever seen.

The whole point of that scene in Ghostbusters is that the world was in danger from something that looked utterly harmless. But this… this I can see bringing about the apocalypse, somehow.

One last thing I'd like to note about these is the ingenuity in nozzle placement. Most of these Spitballs shoot water out of their mouths, as the brand name - nay, the very tradition of character-based water squirters - dictates. But there are exceptions: Frankenstein shoots water out of the scar on his forehead, the Marshmallow Man out of his stomach, and - best of all - Jason out of his nose.

Now that's a Friday the 13th remake I'd pay to see.

Mr.Tom taps into archetypal childhood fears

When I was a child in the nineties, I once ate a certain candy bar. Forgive the Americanism - "chocolate bar" would be inappropriate as there was no chocolate involved, the confection in question consisting mainly of peanuts and caramel.

But it was not the bar itself that stuck in my mind, it was the packaging. I found its wrapper so fascinating that I squirrelled it away in a box of trinkets, still in my possession today. Here it is:

Look at it. Just look at it. Gaze upon that phantasmagoria of clowns and monkey-men, and imagine the effect that it would have on the psyche of an innocent child. If you can't be bothered to zoom in, here are some highlights:

Mysteries within mysteries. The bar is German in origin, but yet bears the Anglophone name "Mr.Tom" (not to mention the English word "PEANUT" proudly emblazoned to the right of the wrapper). Unlikely to have been named in homage to the fiction of Michelle Magorian, the bar was possibly intended to carry the exotic feel of genuine Americana.

On only one occasion during my childhood did I ever find a place that sold Mr.Tom bars. Were it not for the fact that I held on to the wrapper, I may even have passed off the experience as merely a product of my fevered childhood imagination.

However, just this week I visited a local bar that sold Chomps, Milky Ways and… Mr.Toms, still bearing that familiar packaging. Without hesitation, I plonked down 50p.

As can be seen, the wrapper did not survive the past twenty years entirely intact, the imagery having been truncated to make way for nutritional information. It is also worth noting that, although the design is much the same, a side-by-side comparison will reveal a few adjustments - such as the baffling absence of the strongmen. Did somebody decide that musclebound men squeezed into leopard-print shorts were an inappropriate subject for a children's confection?

Long may you live, Mr.Tom. Long may your bizarre images be burned into the minds of impressionable children as they devour your peanutty goodness. If only more confectionary followed your approach to packaging...