Friday 28 March 2014

Crashlings Series 1: Monsters

Company: Wicked Cool Toys
Year: 2014
RRP: Varies

BACKGROUND
The Trash Pack seems to have been a phenomenal success over the last couple of years. So I suppose it’s no surprise that we’re now seeing a few similar products show up in stores – miniature blind-packed figurines, centred around bizarre themes. The most recent of these is Crashlings – more than 150 figures spread out across five subsets – Dinosaurs, Insects, Aliens, Monsters and Sea Life.

THE FIGURES
I bought a Crashlings Monsters 4-pack, which had two visible and two blind-packed figures. The green werewolf (Moon Howler) visible in the packaging was the strong point for me. Cast in a firm plastic, each character comes with its own meteor which it can be stored in. The colour of these meteors varies according to subset; for Monsters, they’re black.

There are also 10-packs and individual meteors available too. These meteor containers can also be used to play a number of Crashlings-themed games, which are outlined on the back of the checklist. Some of the meteor halves are also cast in soft rubber, and can be used as pop caps. Beware though – these ones leave an oily residue in the packaging.  


Moon Howler

Though 150+ characters are advertised on the box, there are actually only about 50 individual characters to collect, 10 in each subset. The remaining 110 are made up by recolours of the main figures – some are simple repaints, others are cast in metallic colours. As might be expected, some are rarer than others.
Zombie Zoomer

Compounding this further is the fact that there seem to be some colour variants which aren’t listed on the included checklist. My Moon Howler is a lime green, similar to glow-in-the-dark shade – that’s how he’s depicted on the packaging, but I can’t find any trace of this variant on the checklist. There’s just brown, lavender and metallic red. Crashlings are quite new, and there’s very little information about them online at this stage – so I can see these toys starting a lot of rumours and urban myths in the playground about rarity, value and even existence. From memory, it was a similar situation with Monsters in My Pocket back in the 1990s. 

The four characters I got were Moon Howler (a werewolf; green version), Bigfoot Dipper (brown version), Franken Star (Frankenstein’s Monster; metallic green version) and Zombie Zoomer (brown version). Yep, pretty much all the characters have pun names related to the cosmos. Moon Howler is fantastic, Bigfoot Dipper is pretty ordinary, Zombie Zoomer is okay and Franken Star would be cool if he wasn’t metallic green. He may be “rare”, but I’ve never really enjoyed these single colour variants, unless it was glow in the dark. I may sell him off via eBay.

Franken Star
 
PAINT
As might be expected, paint apps tend towards being a little sloppy. That’s okay for this type of toy; they’re tiny and cheap.
Bigfoot Dipper

OVERALL
Crashlings are a cool idea – I loved blind-bagged stuff and miniature figures, so it’s always cool to see another variation on this theme. There are some cool ideas in series 1, but I think they may have stretched themselves slightly too thin by including so many colour variants and themes within in the one series. A tighter focus in future will serve them well, I think. I’m curious to see what series 2 brings. Include some glow in the dark characters and Wicked Cool Toys could have a real hit on their hands!    



Black Meteor container

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