Hand-puppets from hell

You have to hand it to some genius at Mattel; once they’d hit on the brilliant consonant-swapping simplicity of the name, the Boglins story must’ve written itself. Essentially near-relatives of the Finger Fright family, these fist-powered fuckers sprung seemingly full-armoured from the ground and onto toy shelves back in the late ‘Eighties. Packed into caged boxes which doubled as display cases (replete with faux bent bars and plenty of “do not feed” warnings) Boglin lore borrowed quite heavily from that other mischievous monster hit of the era, Gremlins.

Seemingly fashioned from more old re-treads than an ITV Saturday night line-up, these clammy rubber collectables initially arrived in one of three flavours (Dwork, Vlobb, and Drool) and were marketed as pets with puppet pretensions. Given that the average kid only had two hands, we doubt that many people owned all three. Simple operation (and large glow in the dark eagle-eyes) made for almost instant “alien voice” ventriloquy practice and plentiful under-the-bed ankle-biting assault tomfoolery. Woe betide the little sister who mocked a Boglin.

A worrying element of the Boglin box-top back story (at least for sensitive souls with a penchant for thinking too much about such things) was the implication that humans had somehow descended from them whilst the originals remained – until now – buried in the primordial slime. The non-biodegradeable nature of Boglin parts probably means that they will be dug intact from the decaying sludge of human remains when the aliens finally do arrive.

Plenty of other Boglin subspecies were released to cash in on the success of the initial range, including Soggy, Baby, Hairy and Glow Boglins, with astonishingly swift diminishing returns. By 1990, when Matchbox launched a competitor, Monster In My Pocket, Mattel’s lumpy swamp offspring had already decided to take the hint and, well, bog off.