Sesame Toys: Adorable and Horrifying

We haven't done heaps of coverage on merchandise here at Tough Pigs lately, but this week two recent products came to our attention that I just had to mention.


The first one is a line of officially licensed Sesame Street items made by Fisher Price. They're called Collect-a-Pals, and they were apparently designed to finally provide an answer to the age-old question, "What if Sesame Street characters were little round balls with tiny arms and legs?" You can see all of them on Muppet Wiki, but I think my favorites are Grover (as seen above), Cookie Monster...


...and Snuffy.


They had to cram a whole lot of Snuffleupagus into a tiny little space there, and I think they did an admirable job. These are reportedly available at Target, among other places, so if you've ever wanted to play softball with Elmo as the ball (and I know some of you have), now's your chance.

And now for the opposite end of the spectrum. ToyCyte.com recently posted a report on some unlicensed Sesame toys, produced by a company called RealxHead, that have to be seen to be believed. They're calling them "Real Street," and they're evidently meant to be kaiju-style, kaiju referring to the genre of Japanese entertainment involving bizarre giant monsters.


Yikes. In case you're not sure what you're looking at, that's supposed to be Cookie Monster, Elmo, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and the Count. Now, it's tempting to put these into the "Ugly Muppet Toy" category, but the thing is, these are ugly on purpose. They're grotesque... but they're kind of amazing, too. Most of them are obvious enough reflections of what the characters would look like if they were involved is some sort of freak accident involving radiation, but look at Big Bird:


If I hadn't told you that was supposed to be Big Bird, would you have guessed that's who it was? Maybe the orange feet would have given it away. Then again, I guess it wouldn't matter much to these toymakers if their Hideous Mutant Monstrosity Big Bird doesn't look like the real Big Bird. And here's the best part: If you follow the link on that ToyCyte page, you can order this complete set for just $160 plus shipping! What a bargain!

So, there you go. Two sets of radically different Sesame Street toys. Which ones do you like best?

Click here to talk about Collect-a-Pals, and click here to talk about kaiku Sesame toys, both on the Tough Pigs forum!

ToughPigsRyan@yahoo.com