Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Cutants!

If for whatever reason you've been down one of those spooky pink aisles at any toy department, you may have spotted Polly Pocket's "cutants." Polly Pocket is a toy line marketed exclusively to little girls, but her freaky new pals have an appeal that easily transcends such primitive distinctions...I'd have freaking loved these damn things when I was a weird little boy, and I love some of them even as a weird little man. You look at these and tell me with a straight face they aren't awesome:



You are looking at a shovel-clawed hermit crab with a bucket for a shell and a second crab that is also an entire sandcastle. This is the GOD DAMN cutest thing I've ever heard of in my life. Why aren't these also Pokemon?



A hat that is also a venomous, stinging fish. Hatray would be right at home with all those Dungeons and Dragons monsters that disguise themselves as clothing.



Isn't fishbowl fish just fascinatingly baffling? Why would you need the fishbowl at all when it's also the fish itself? Does Polly Pocket put normal fish in there? ...Maybe that's how it eats. Maybe it digests them. Oh my god.



Those conjoined headphone snails are as impractical as they are adorable. They would probably smear mucus all in your hair and ears, but would you really care? You have headphones that are also two snails. You're probably completely insane anyway.



Here we have "Snailana Split" and "Icecreamapillar," two squirmy invertebrates somehow composed of frozen desserts. I wonder if they have to be kept cold to avoid melting to death. I also wonder if they're actually edible in Polly's world.



The octopus submarine is a pretty awesome concept, I really should have thought of that myself.



The whale/wave is kind of strange, since it really just comes off as an ordinary whale in a wave, but anchor squid might be even cooler than submarine octopus...and it's cute that they packaged these obvious natural enemies together.

There are dozens more of these things, but I can't even find pictures of a quarter of them. I really hope they sell well, because there's so much more they can keep doing with these...like, say, branching out into a counterpart line for boys? It happens all the time, and even happened once before with Polly Pocket; her success with girls resulted in the amazing "Mighty Max" horror toys back in the 90's. Today, cell phone puppies...tomorrow, chainsaw cockroaches?