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!
#7: Franken Berry Cereal Box! (1987)
This is from an era when the Monster Cereals were still available all year, and needed to constantly refresh their gimmicks to compete with the likes of Lucky, Sonny, and the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee. Maybe someone should’ve told them… they all worked for the same company!
For a few months in 1987, boxes of Franken Berry were blessed with a lenticular sticker that brought our pink pal’s eyes to life. His curious stare would follow you around the room, which was either amusing or super embarrassing, depending on what you were doing.
Count Chocula had his own version of this box, of course, but I don’t think Boo Berry did. (In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Boo Berry had way worse distribution than the other two, and often got left out of these revamps. Poor guy.)
#6: Disney Adventures Magazine! (1996)
The Halloween ‘96 issue of Disney Adventures was an all-spooky affair, and had one of the greatest covers of the magazine’s entire run. (For the uninitiated, that’s Curly from Goosebumps.)
Adventures was basically Reader’s Digest for kids. Each issue was long and detailed, and covered a little bit of everything. My time with the mag came a few years before 1996, but it was always such a thrill to grab a copy at the supermarket. In pre-internet times, it was like a lifeline to everything that really mattered. (Cartoons and pretzels, mostly.)
The nostalgia people have for Adventures is well-warranted. I mean, just with this one issue, I jumped to three random pages and landed on a Mighty Ducks comic, a story about hunting ghosts, and an advertisement for Dannon Sprinkl’ins with color-changing magic crystals. What a treasure!
#5: Toxic Crusaders Candy Heads! (1991)
People think of Topps as a trading card company, but for a long time, that was just their side hustle. They were really in the business of shoving unremarkable candy into weird plastic heads.
Topps released a gazillion similar sets of candy containers in the ‘80s and ‘90s, covering everything from Return of the Jedi to Gremlins to Little Shop of Horrors. The candy inside would best be described as “Smarties-adjacent,” and was never the reason anyone bought these things. It was all about them heads.
In this case, the colorful characters of Toxic Crusaders – Toxie, Major Disaster, No-Zone and Dr. Killemoff – were immortalized as hollow plastic busts that worked nicely as finger puppets once you finished the candy.
#4: Disney’s Scary Tales! (1983)
I wrote about this videocassette ages ago, but only recently bought a copy. At our first neighborhood video store, which was the size of a closet and smelled like the inside of a stereo, this was the tape I rented the most.
Scary Tales was a compilation of Disney’s spookiest shorts. Well, some of them, at least. The tape mostly focused on Donald-centric stories, which worked for me, because I was a total mark for that guy. Like, at no point in my life did I ever entertain the notion that Mickey beat Donald.
Now that I think about it, I was the same way with Looney Tunes. Daffy over Bugs, 10 times out of 10. Excuse me while I come to grips with my apparent thing for ducks. No wonder I fell for The Sopranos so hard.
Among others, the shorts on the tape included Donald Duck and the Gorilla, The Skeleton Dance, and Pluto’s Judgement Day. (That last one, by the way, was too intense for me as a kid. I always stopped the tape early.)
#3: Matchbox Vampire Van! (1979)
Well here it is, my new favorite Matchbox car. (Or maybe my first favorite Matchbox car? I can’t say that I ever gave the subject much thought before today.)
Matchbox’s Chevy Vampire Van – the “VANPIRE” – came out in 1979, and was re-released at least once in the ‘80s. My understanding of vans from that era is shaded by movies like Friday the 13th Part V, so I assume VANPIRE was a rolling tribute to hedonism. Sex, drugs and hairspray! A party van, but not in the Ninja Turtles sense.
I have seven or eight ideas about the type of people who might’ve driven Chevy Vampire Vans, and while wildly dissimilar, they’re all people who would’ve known how to get pay-per-view boxing events for free.
#2: Kenner Slimer Puppet! (1986)
There have been a few different Slimer puppets over the years, but I specifically wanted this one. Not only was it the first, but it’s the only one with psychotic bloodshot eyes that look like they’ve seen some shit.
This was part of Kenner’s Real Ghostbusters collection, and while “Slimer puppet” says it best, its official name is “Green Ghost Plush Hands-in Action Toy.” Why Kenner moved that many mountains to avoid the word “puppet,” I can’t say.
I just love how demented it looks. This was produced before the cartoon series gentrified Slimer, so Kenner didn’t have to worry about making him too cute.
#1: Haunted Mansion Tape! (1987)
Just one of the many (many many many) Halloween SFX tapes that used to be a staple of the season, this version stood out from the pack thanks to its bomb-ass packaging. What phenomenal art! Like a cross between the Bates Motel and one of the many (many many many) Jersey shore dark rides that died by fire.
If you’re curious about the tape’s contents, the whole thing is on YouTube. It’s your average compilation of shrieks, creaks, roars, chains, thunder, and the occasional aggravated cat. The idea was that you’d use these tapes to boost the ambiance of your yard haunt, but I just played them in my bedroom like they were UB40 albums.
