Mighty Max

For as much praise as I gave the Polly Pocket line last week, even I can't deny how much cooler its counterpart, Mighty Max, was. But, I also have to state for the sake of transparency that I was not your typical little girl by any means whatsoever. I always liked the weird and dark and macabre, and none of those words fit better than they do with Mighty Max. While Polly Pocket obviously, seeing as it was the girl lineup, leaned more toward the cute with its designs being inside clamshells, makeup cases and the like, Mighty Max definitely leaned more towards the, how do I put this...absolute badass? Because yeah, they were absolutely badass. And while Mighty Max is cool, there's another aspect that's even more interesting, and that's the fact that for perhaps the first time in history, a girls toy was so popular it spawned a boys toyline spinoff.

Girls were always given the meager shit. We were always pandered to. Our toys were always the spinoffs and we always got the one token female character in every cartoon and video game. But for maybe the first time ever, and perhaps the only time as far as I can really think of, a girls toyline was so clearly popular that the makers over at Bluebird were like "we need to get into the boy market". Thus, Mighty Max was created. While I love all the cute shit that exists in the Polly Pocket universe (and, frankly, she does have the cooler name), the Mighty Max brand was where it was at, all things considered. As a weird girl growing up who enjoyed dark independent comic books and movies about anthropormorphic toasters being sung to about the emptiness of life by cars in a junkyard preparing to face their demise, I was fully immediately interested in this toyline. Sadly, I never got a whole lot of them, but that's alright, because to me they exist more as a visual spectacle than an actual toy I'd play with and they likely would've simply ended up as decorative pieces on a bookshelf.

Mighty Max, created in 1992, a whole ass 4 years after Polly Pocket, also by Bluebird, ran for an astonishing number of years with a ridiculous series of toys, but by far the most easily recognizable and thus the most cool, quite frankly, was series 1, the Doom Zones. There were 6 toys in this lineup (I will not, for the sake of length, go through all 6, because that would be exhausting and frankly this is not that kind of blog, sorry) and they had excellent titles such as Slay The Doom Dragon, Trapped By Arachnoid, Terminate Wolfship Seven, Liquidate The Ice Alien, Escape From Skull Dungeon and Conquer The Temple Of Venom. Absolutely killer names. Sound like kid friendly Indiana Jones plots. And I guarantee you that, if you're of the right age, the photos of these will be instantaneously recognizable.

I was a little girl OBSESSED with insects and other animals that most girls were terrified of, like spiders and snakes, so to get not only a scorpion but have it all play out inside of a snake? Mother fucker you better believe I was all up on that shit. It's the exact same design premise as Polly Pocket, it's just that instead of cutesy restaurants, stores and homes, it's battle wrecked arenas where you fight off horrifying grotesque monsters trying to kill you, and, presumably, eat your bones. Monsters do that, right? They eat bones. I like to think they do. And the colors! Sure, the tiny insert toys are pretty meh, but we're not here for those, we're here for the set itself. And that thing does not disappoint! Look at this coil wrapped snake, with his mandarin orange coloring and his green diamond overlay, that little splurge of black on his head. Gorgeous. Just absolutely gorgeous. What a perfect toy. The design work on the sets alone is what makes these worth it.

And the inside is even better! Look at the levels, each one filled to the brim with details and props. We have the multiple sarcophagus (is there a plural term for that? sarcophagi?), some insects crawling on the wall behind the broken brick and, what I'm assuming are, the skeletons of other children who weren't so lucky. This is master craftsmanship. And while they might not have been as well detailed or designed as Polly Pockets were, I can forgive that because the concept itself is so fucking cool. Sometimes it isn't about the details, sometimes it's actually about the bigger picture. And that's not really fair either, because Polly Pockets were often depicting simplistic domestic scenes, whereas these bad boys were trying to fit a whole ass 80s kids adventure flick into a tiny toy. I'd say they did pretty well, considering the size restrictions. But there's one thing we need to talk about, and that's the fact that this has a legacy that is more recognized, and I for one don't think that's fair. Because, according to multiple sources, thanks to the popularity of Mighty Max, other toy companies soon implemented the whole miniature playset style into merchandising for their own properties. And this isn't hard to see, there were billions of these things, and they existed for everything from Batman to Star Wars. Even the Ninja Turtles got some.

And that's not surprising. When one brand does something exceedingly well, and it does financially well, you often see knock offs. But the problem doesn't stem from the fact that there's knock offs, the problem stems from the fact that everyone says it's because of Mighty Max, when Mighty Max itself was derivative of Polly Pocket to begin with. Honestly, big a fan as I am, even I don't think it's fair that Mighty Max is the one to get the recognition, but it happened because boys toys were far more widely accepted and considered important than anything made for a girl. To give that acclaim to Polly Pocket, to say that it had that big an influence, would be to somehow connect all these follow up toys, most of which made for the male audience, to a female toy, and that just doesn't stand.

I don't think that's fair. I understand, but I don't that's fair. Especially in a post Brony era, where grown ass men went to entire conventions for a TV show geared towards 8 year old girls and kept the show afloat with their fanart and enormous amounts of money devoted to its merchandise, I think we can safely accept at this point that the legacy of miniatures within the toy industry didn't happen because of Mighty Max, it happened because Polly Pocket invented Mighty Max. Without her, I'm not even sure we would've gotten this one, and without this one, we likely wouldn't have gotten the others. You can trace it all back to Bluebirds first toyline, and that's the one that deserves the recognition. Argue all you want over the semantics of who did it better, but we can all agree which one came first and the first is the one with the biggest impact, bar none. Without the first, there'd be no others. So even if Mighty Max was the reason for the explosion of miniatures in the toy industry, because people noticed sales of boys toys and their influence on the culture far more than they'd ever recognize anything marketed to a girl, you still can't deny that that wouldn't have happened had Polly Pocket not been so successful as to warrant a boy toyline.

Of the toy, Polly Pockets were the more well made, hands down. Their detailing was better - likely because it was more simplistic concept wise - but aside from that who could say they wouldn't like to fight a scorpion INSIDE of a snake? Come on, man. You're just lying to yourself. You know you'd do it. And sadly, Mighty Max had only a four year run, running from 92 to 96 and has, despite being given that questionable legacy, had virtually no lasting impact or permanence on the culture as a whole, whereas Polly Pocket not only came back but also has extended her hand to childrens cartoons now. And while Mighty Max had a cartoon of his own, that only aired while the toys were being produced, but Polly Pocket has a cartoon in mother fucking 2020, so you tell me who's the more culturally relevant and enduring brand.

Exactly.