Creepy Crawlers
Creepy Crawlers was like Easy Bake Oven, but for weirdos who liked bugs...and also you couldn't - well, I suppose you could but you likely shouldn't have - eat the end result that popped out the oven. And, sad to say, I never got the chance to experience first hand the magic that was Creepy Crawlers, despite it being tailor made for someone like me.
Growing up, and hell even today, I am obsessed with insects and weird critters. When I was in elementary school, my stepsister was deathly afraid of spiders while I went to see Eight Legged Freaks - a schlocky tongue in cheek creature feature about giant mutated spiders attacking a small quaint little town in the desert - for my birthday. My stepsister would cry if a spider came into her room, meanwhile I, a young girl almost the same age, went to a friends house constantly in elementary school because he too was obsessed with spiders and kept dozens in glass containers throughout his room. Even today, if I get the chance to enter a pet store, do I go right for the puppies and bunnies and kittens? Fuck no. Despite owning 5 dogs, I head straight for the scorpions and tarantulas and snakes. Living out here in the New Mexico desert we constantly see, during the summer, the return of not just Wolf Spiders who are menacing in their own right albeit completely harmless but also these things called Sun Spiders which look like mutated scorpions without tails, and I'm so thrilled to see them return every year.
I was a weird little girl and now I'm a weird grown woman. My interests never truly shifted, and I still love the same things I loved as a child, insects included.
But alas, I never got the chance to attain a Creepy Crawlers, which is a shame, because I saw the commercials constantly and despite wanting one tremendously talked myself out of it because I was yet somehow mortified to ask for one, like it would make me even more of a social pariah than I already was among the other girls I knew. So this is kind of a personal post for me, and here we go.
Creepy Crawlers, created by Mattel in 1964, consisted of a series of die cast metal moulds resembling various bug like creatures. You then pour a liquid chemical substance called "Plasti-Goop" into said moulds, which comes in a variety of colors by the way, before sliding them into an open faced electric hot plate oven. When it finally cools, it forms semi solid rubbery replicas which can be removed from the mould, and viola, like some strange Dr. Frankenstein entomologist, you've created your own bug life! The funniest part about Creepy Crawlers has to be that this wasn't the starting point, and in fact is an offshoot of a previous toy in the same line called the Thingmaker, which itself was spun from the idea of the Vac-U-Form machine. I suppose, really, the machine itself was less a toy and more a concept they could then spin off into other toys, but still.
Don't get me wrong, the colors on the box at the top are great too, also very spooky, and the oven is definitely nice, but I just have a soft spot for vintage versions of things, and what I like most about this one is how it has all the bugs right there on it. I have to ask though...whose bright idea was it to give children ovens and hot plates? What were people at toy companies in the 50s and 60s thinking? That's a recipe for disaster, not to be cute. The interesting thing about Creepy Crawlers is it's one of the few toys I've covered on this blog thus far to have actually gone out of production. After more than a decade, it was brought back by a company called Toymax in 1992 with much stricter safety precautions, and now that I know this, it's dawned on me how this is the version most people my age are likely familiar with. However, this revival didn't last too long, and it quietly went away again, until 2001, when that revival too was short lived. After that it went to a company called Jakks Pacific based in California and it's been in production there ever since.
In 2016, Mattel actually announced plans for a 3D printer version of the Thingmaker, but this ultimately never materialized and it was quietly and rather uneventfully cancelled much to essentially nobody's notice.
The thing that bothers me about this toy, however, is how off brand it eventually went. I mean, sure, Creepy Crawlers itself is an offshoot of the Thingmaker, but the issue is that it's the offshoot of the Thingmaker. People know the name Creepy Crawlers. Most people don't know the name Thingmaker, and I don't mean enthusiasts or hobbyists, I simply mean the mass outgoing public. So to the unresearched eye, Creepy Crawlers was the actual toy, and then descended into IP hell where it simply released alternate versions of the oven to make crappy moulds of pre-licensed characters from popular media franchises to bake. This is totally lame. I understand it as a business perspective, it's a survival technique, and easy money to use so they can continue to produce the Creepy Crawlers line itself, but it just kind of puts a dark stank on the whole thing in my opinion. I want to make a freaky wiggly Centipede, not a fucking jello Hello Kitty.
As with most toys, it had its own television show briefly, spanning 2 short seasons of only 24 total episodes and was even, in May of 2018, licensed out to become a feature film, though no real updates have come since this news. It's scheduled to be produced by Paramount, but as I said, nothing really has come of it as of yet. However, I will say that I feel as though Creepy Crawlers has the potential to be a pretty damn good pre-teen family friendly film franchise if it does well enough and it's done right, and frankly, we need more stuff like that. The Goosebumps movie was a perfect example, as was - perhaps for a somewhat older audience - the Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark film, which I found perfectly fine.
One last thing before I let you go, scope out this ad I found from 1966.
The whole concept of the Thingmaker, when grasped from this ad, makes a lot more sense honestly. It was a toy designed to make more toys. For a kid whose family is, perhaps, on a budget somewhat and cannot afford mountains of toys, it's sort of great, since as long as you can continue to buy moulds and expansions, you can just create your own line of toys that can be put into any playtime scenario your tiny child imagination can conjure up! Brilliant.
But my favorite part of this ad, actually is the second half, where they inform you of all the neat possibilities that lay before you as a child scientist of wiggly crap. Creepy Crawlers aren't the only options, oh no, you can also make Creeple Peeple, which - beyond just being a terrible name and spelling decision - sounds and looks rather dumb, or Fighting Men! You just know someone at Mattel said in a meeting before this whole thing went into production, "We can't call them Army Men, we'll get the plastic pants sued off of us, we have to call them something different."
Fighting Men seems to suffice, I suppose.
It's literally Army Men, but they're kind of goopy and jiggly and aren't called Army Men, nor are they pure green or in set poses, so it's a-ok in the patent lawyers eyes. I don't know why but I found this hilarious, and I suppose maybe you could too, so I figured I'd share it with you.
Creepy Crawlers are neat, really they are. I know I talked some shit, but they really are a cool toy, especially for that bug crazy kid in your life. Maybe you don't want actual Scarabs, Huntsmen Spiders or Carpenter Beetles hanging around your house, for reasons we'd all understand quite frankly, so this is the next best thing!
I admit, I'm still a bit sad for the little weird girl deep inside of me who never got a chance to express her adoration for the gross insect world as much as she would've liked to with the help of a Creepy Crawlers set, but now the adult woman I am literally lives with spiders surrounding her, and that's a pretty good rectification I suppose.
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