The Mausoleum of Madness!
Welcome to Dino Drac’s Mausoleum of Madness! Here you’ll find daily drops of creepy collectibles from my personal collection, all never previously seen on the site. Everything from eerie ephemera to terrifying toys. There are some major gems waiting to be featured here! Feature now complete for the season!
#28: McNugget Ghouls Sign! (1998)
Those wanting to collect all of McDonald’s Halloween McNugget Buddies are in for a tougher time than they might realize. See, back in 1998, there was another set of four released in an Australian Happy Meal.
These special glow-in-the-dark figures are pretty rare today, with complete sets typically selling for hundreds of dollars. Course, as rare as the figures are, they have nothing on this giant sign, which hung in an Australian McDonald’s back in 1998. I paid a lot for it, but given the strong likelihood that it’s the last surviving example on the planet, I still think I got a good deal.
And for anyone after the actual figures? If you want my advice, you’ll wait until Halloween is over. The prices won’t totally collapse, but sellers will be much more likely to accept lowball offers once the toys are out of season.
#27: Kool Stuf Halloween S’mores! (2000)
The brief saga of Nabisco’s Kool Stuf toaster pastries began in 1999. A rebrand of Toasterettes meant to more fiercely compete with Pop-Tarts, they were only around for a few years, and left little in their wake beyond occasional Reddit posts from people who remember them as “Cool Tarts.”
Along the way, the brand dropped this absolute masterpiece. Halloween S’mores toaster pastries, with two-tone filling and sprinkled orange frosting. They don’t even look real! In fact, I’d been searching for a box just to prove that they were real, because the evidence of these things was so scant, I couldn’t rule out that the few online images were just fan creations.
It’s one of my all-time favorite Halloween package designs, looking more like something from the early ‘90s than Y2K.
#26: Pizza Hut’s Bigfoot Pizza! (1993)
This is a genuine Bigfoot Pizza bag, complete with sauce stains. Back in the ‘90s, it was stuffed with a two-foot pie containing 21 erratic slices. It certainly wasn’t the best pizza around, but for kids reared on Ellio’s and the “three minute nuke” rule, it was perfectly serviceable weekend fuel.
The thrill was in the volume, and in the theatrics. If Pizza Hut sold the Bigfoot Pizza with a less-flashy title, we wouldn’t have nearly as much nostalgia for it. Presenting the pies as being under the auspices of a sasquatch who wore neon clothes was pure genius.
If you’re wondering what the Bigfoot Pizza is doing on a Halloween feature, well… hello? It’s a pizza named after a cryptid. Where else would it be? Besides, it was surely the food of choice at hundreds of Halloween parties in the mid ‘90s. You can just picture those wee little slices on disposable orange plates, while Hallmark’s Sounds of Halloween cassette blared in the background.
#25: Creepy Crawlers Fruit Snacks! (1993)
Back in 1993, Creepy Crawlers made the leap from toys to fruit snacks, thanks to this fine box of sugary vermin from Farley’s. (Farley’s was kind of a “budget brand,” but they made great fruit snacks and landed plenty of killer licenses – most notably the Ninja Turtles.)
The eerily appetizing shapes included spiders, butterflies, flies, scorpions, worms and grasshoppers, in bold colors that mimicked the “plasti-goop” toys.
I’ve collected a lot of old fruit snack boxes over the years, and I have to say, this one is particularly striking. Those colors! It was pretty much impossible to ignore in the supermarket. Course, whether it compelled people to eat fruit snacks shaped like bugs or not, I can’t really say.
#24: MIMP Monster Mountain! (1990)
I’ve wanted this for decades, and finally found one that was affordable enough. Behold, the Monster in My Pocket MONSTER MOUNTAIN – essentially a giant display case for all 48 first-series figures.
Despite this playset’s humble beginnings as a ten-dollar lure in KB Toys, it’s much better in the hands of an adult collector. This thing is fragile as hell. The mountain is made of a thin plastic only slightly more durable than the tray Nabisco uses for Oreo cookies.
While theoretically able to stand under its own power (I might debate that), Monster Mountain was really meant to be wall-mounted. All of the 48 first-series figures had dedicated slots, with neat name stickers right above them.
It might be flimsy, but it’s also gorgeous, and HUGE. Like, it’s so big that I can’t wrap my head around the retail angle. This was a cheap playset in its day, but the box was as big as Fireball Island’s. For the amount of shelf space a store would’ve given up, they weren’t going to get a whole lot back.
PS: Of the original 48 figures, my favorite was always the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Little cutie, that guy was. You can kinda/sorta see him at the end of the second row.
#23: Intellivision Dracula Game! (1983)
Released in 1983, Dracula for the Intellivison let you play as big bad Vlad himself. They didn’t whitewash him, either. The entire point of the game was to run around biting people!
While the graphics were pretty decent for the era, they were still modest by necessity, which left the hard sell to the box art. That was usually the case back then. Remember how good the boxes were for Atari games? They painted way more vivid pictures than the actual games ever could.
In the case of Intellivision’s Dracula, we got the lord of darkness in live action, over a reflective silver box with boldly colored stripes. Minus the vampire, it reminds me of the home decor from A Clockwork Orange.
#22: The Sesame Street Monsters! (1975)
The Sesame Street Monsters is an album starring… well, the monsters from Sesame Street. And since it was released way back in 1975, that includes some characters we haven’t heard from lately, like my boy Frazzle.
With smash hits like The Lovable Monsters of Sesame Street, you can skip the record store bins and listen to the whole thing on YouTube. Course, you may still wanna buy the album, simply for the fantastic cover art. What a blessed image! I’m totally framing it.
Also, can someone help me out? I’m struggling to identify the character on the lower-left. I’ve narrowed it down to Herry’s father, or a pre-horn version of Steve D’Monster. Anyone know for sure? I’m obsessed with him.
