I grew up with an aroma that used to be a regular part of the ambiance in my house. It was hot Plastigoop.
Like most kids on my block, I had a Mattel Thingmaker. And, like many of my toys, it would never be sold in today's litigious society. It had an oven that got STINKIN' HOT! And another familiar sight was burns on the hands and arms of my friends and myself. We didn't care. We were making some incredibly cool flexible rubbery toys.
Thingmakers produced many flavors of toys. I owned a Fright Factory. It made third eyes, scars (to add to the real ones caused by oven burns ;-), skeletons, bones that clipped to your nose, and the ultimate: shrunken heads. The shrunken head even had hair you could attach to it!
But what made it megecool was the fact that you could swap molds with your friends and make other stuff, like Creepy Crawlers (snakes, lizards, newts, bugs), Creeple People (ugly little dudes that lived on your pencils), and Fighting Men (soldiers). The Fighting Men would let you stick little wires inside, so you could bend them into fighting poses! But you would always run out of wire, so you ended up with fighting men who just stood there like scarecrows.
Like so many of my other childhood treasures, they sell for big bucks on eBay now. Check out This guy's collection
Comments (2)
I remember this well although I never had one. I had friends who did and remember seeing it advertised in the Monkey Wards Catalogs. I remember the bugs and creature version mostly. I myself had the Matel Strange Change machine that had basically the samer characteristics as the Thing Maker! That plastic smell and the burns! I had them both! Mattel made the neatest stuff!
Posted by Rivers End | April 24, 2009 10:25 PM
Posted on April 24, 2009 22:25
Coolest toy ever. We had the thingmaker and Vac u Form. Both were great. My brother and I spent countless hours making worms for fishing, and scaring our sisters with the Fright Factory stuff. Man what a trip. The lovely aroma you refer to is most likely styrene. I work in a chemical plant and it took me a while to figure out why it smelled so familiar.
Posted by J Madigan | July 31, 2009 10:31 PM
Posted on July 31, 2009 22:31