Monster Marbles

Monster Marbles were blind-bag toys that came out mid-2012.  They were produced by WowWee, a toy company known for making much larger, quite expensive, electronic toys like the Robosapien and Roboraptor.  I don't know if this was their first pocket-money toy attempt, but it certainly was a super sloppy effort.

First of all, the name is unfortunate.  You want your toy name to stand out.  You want something unique.  You want it to lead directly to your product in an internet search. "Monster Marbles" is so boring and generic.

Second, these are not even marbles.  Marbles are spherical by definition.  These are plastic figures on top of steel bearing balls. The toylines Puck Hedz and Angry Birds Go! Telepods use the same basic gimmick.

At any rate, they came in blind-bags of two or three. Each pack also contained a silly little piece of chalk. You could use it to mark up your sidewalk or just throw it away.

To examine these further, we must consult the checklist included with each pack:

As you can see, we have twelve original sculpts.  They are actually pretty cool. 

Then we get this weird smattering of incongruous variants.  This could have been executed so much better.  They knew enough to produce all the popular variant types, but chose the strangest possible way to include them. It really makes no sense at all.

First, there are alternate-paint variants of eight sculpts. Why not all twelve?

Then there are green translucent plastic version of only four sculpts.  Four of the same sculpts that already have paint variants.  And, notice that two of the four are the worst possible choices because the painted versions are already green! 

Next, we get some glow-in-the-dark variants. It's a bit confusing because the checklist mentions "16 varieties" but shows only four figures.  Well, here's the deal.  Each of those four figures are found in each of those four glow-in-the-dark plastic colors.  So, there's only four sculpts producing a glut of 16 glow-in-the-dark figures. The other eight sculpts got completely screwed!

Finally, in a somewhat logical move, we get eight sculpts with a silver variant, and the remaining four sculpts with a gold variant.

In all, there are four sculpts with four varieties, four with three varieties, and four with six varieties.

Total set: 52 figures.  

Now, imagine a tiny bit of logic applied and we could have had a really cool collection.  It's this simple:  12 sculpts.  One paint variant of each.  One translucent variant of each.  One glow-in-the-dark variant of each.  One metallic variant of each.  Total set: 48 figures.  Or... one silver version of each, plus one gold version of each.  Total set: 60 figures. Consistent.  Fun.  Done.

One more thing:  In perhaps the weirdest move of all, virtually all the varieties of the same sculpts have been given unique names!  This makes no sense at all!  There is no backstory to the toyline, so we are left to wonder how "Sobig" becomes "Ray" when he glows, but becomes "Nugget" when he turns gold.

Trust me, there are plenty of other things we could nitpick (like the fact that every single 3-pack contained the exact same figures), but let's just look at the pictures:

(pics coming soon)