Sunday, May 6, 2012

Monster in My Pocket: Super Scary painted vs. unpainted

Thunderdell, Jenny Greenteeth, Creature from the Closet

Click here for my original post on Monster in My Pocket.

I remember when I first discovered Monster in My Pocket series 4 ("Super Scary") in the store as a kid. I had been obsessed with collecting series 1, really disappointed that I could never find series 2 and completely surprised when I stumbled upon a sudden 4th series (at that time I had no way of knowing that there was even a 3rd series of monsters, which was partially released as premiums and partially unreleased). After the initial excitement of finding a new series passed, I remember feeling a bit underwhelmed by these new monsters. Even at that young age, I didn't like the fact that they added paint to the figures and made them a bit larger than previous series. I wanted them to fit in with my series 1 monsters. It seems Matchbox was trying to better appeal to kids by making the new figures flashier, but it had the opposite effect on me. Being the lover of mono-color mini figures that I am, I still feel that the paint apps are completely unnecessary. Interestingly, certain Super Scary sculpts were released in the U.K. unpainted; I recently acquired some of these for the first time and I think they are so much more attractive than the painted versions! What do you think?

11 comments:

  1. Growing up in the UK in the 80s and 90s, I was obsessed with collecting MIMPs. At the time of release, I was tremendously excited by 'Super Scary Series 3' (the actual S3 never turned up over here, except for the single figure released with the Nintendo game). They were big, and colourful, and elaborate... but these days, I prefer the mono versions. They just look better. They've a little class to them.

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    1. Yes! It's too bad they didn't produce unpainted versions of all the sculpts (as far as I'm aware).

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    2. Hey I grew up in Ireland and MIMP was huge, well huge to me, after years of them been stored in the attic I took them down and thanks too Ebay I completed series 1 and 2, For years I thought the Super Scary's where really series 3, I had all of series 4 and thought they where awsome but where I got them down from the attic they looked out of place to series 1 and 2, weird since I never cared when I was a child. I much prefer the mono colour ones now. I have some soft plastic ones like series 1 but they are painted and used every kind of remover to get the paint off so they can look like series 1 and 2 but nothing worked any ideas????

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    3. Hey trev. I have personally never tried to strip the paint off figures, but I think I've seen people talk about doing it over at the littlerubberguys.com message board. You should be able to find some tips over there.

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    4. Thanks mate I will do that, I got Genny Green Teeth, Yama, Thunderdell, creature from the,Wurdulac, Alu and Lamia unpainted and they look great I know for sure that you can Drude in Purple and Astaroth in orange unpainted because I had them when I was a kid. Although I only seen Astaroth once on Ebay and It had over 20 bidders on it.

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  2. Here's the funny thing - back when I first got unpainted versions of Thundrell and Creature from the Closet (can't remember where they came from, I was young), I thought they were factory rejects that got out somehow!

    I didn't chuck them though, because a toy was a toy and all that. Glad to have them now, although I've nothing against the painted ones either.

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  3. Wow.
    This is an epic moment of my life.
    For ages I've been looking for the tiny little monster figurine that gave me nightmares when I was a kid. It was this awful purple framed monster, and today, I'm finding it again. I'm sure that mine was unpainted and purple and I have NO idea where it came from, I've lost it years ago and now I want it again (revenge 20 years later). Let's rummage through ebay!

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    1. Glad this post could help! You should be able to find one on eBay fairly easily.

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  4. Crazy, never knew some of the Super Scary monsters were released unpainted.

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  5. Me and any of my mates that collected MIMP at the time were not impressed by this series for the same reasons you weren't. Size and painting made them not fit with the ones we had, making them less appealing. The other turn off was the point value. We kind of expected that (what we thought was series 3) would have numbers between 35 and 15 carrying on the trend from series 2 but suddenly they're from 100 to 50? What? We made up our own rules that 100 = 30 and so on to 50 = 5 to make trading and playing 'fair'. It seems the makers didn't notice people's displeasure there though, and most my friends stopped collected MIMP when the Super Creepies came out and switched over to Mini-Boglins.

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    1. Yeah, it's too bad they felt the need to mess with a good thing. I would have totally collected Mini Boglins as well, if they released them in the U.S.

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