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! Updated daily through Halloween!
#23: 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.
#21: “Spookjes” Happy Meal! (1995)
Here’s an interesting and very rare McDonald’s translite from 1995. If you’ll recall, the October ’95 Happy Meal in the United States featured McDonaldland figures in snap-on Halloween costumes. Well, over in the Netherlands, they got this variation!
The Dutch word “Spookjes” roughly translates to “little ghosts.” See, in the Netherlands, Halloween was hardly on anyone’s radar, and certainly wouldn’t be the theme of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. So Ronald transformed what was clearly a Halloween thing in the States into a more generic “spooky” Happy Meal for the Netherlands.
While the set of toys was mostly unchanged from what we got here, you might notice that they swapped Birdie’s original jack-o’-lantern costume for a witch outfit. (Obviously because jack-o’-lanterns are inarguably Halloweeny.) That makes the “Witch Birdie” figure – which I own – one of the rarest McDonald’s Halloween toys of ‘em all! Read More…