Wednesday, December 02, 2009

The 30 Most Mind-Blowingly Strange M.U.S.C.L.E. Figures


From toplessrobot, Back in the 1980s, American kids hadn't yet fully experienced the wonderful madness of Japanese toy designers that would become more commonplace a decade or two later. One of the early tastes they got was the short-lived but popular M.U.S.C.L.E. toyline, a collection of little pink (and sometimes other colored) wrestlers that Mattel imported from the very bizarre Kinnikuman series in Japan. While Kinnikuman was an epic tale of galactic wrestling told through anime and manga, Mattel ditched the story, characters and even most of the references to wrestling to instead focus on the basic idea of MILLIONS OF UNUSUAL SMALL CREATURES LURKING EVERYWHERE!!! Kinnikuman would later be presented in a form closer to the original as Ultimate Muscle in the western world.

See entire list here

3 comments:

Octopunk said...

So cool! What a great article, for 1)having so much backstory I never knew existed, and 2) including Inverted Pyramid Guy and The Hand Monster. I love that the hand was #1!

I still have my MUSCLE Men but I think I moved them into the "to sell" pile. Which means nothing because I've sold nothing (and I'm leery of trying right now because the economy's so bad... I've seen many items from my "to sell" pile already posted on ebay, and nobody's bidding on them).

So, maybe I'll keep them for Zack.

JPX said...

How could you possibly have a "to sell" pile??? You should never sell your treasures, damnit! If you get the urge please always run it by me in case it's something I want to buy off you.

"to sell pile" (eyes rolling)

Octopunk said...

What can I say? There's a lot of crap that I've bought or received that I'm not interested in owning any more. You'd agree with some of my choices, I'm sure. It's a small percentage of what I've got.