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Remember Madballs? You should. I've written about 'em 50,000 times. Here's X-E's 50,001st tribute to AmToy's monstrous rubber balls -- the playthings that turned even the most devout young couch potatoes into full-blown sports madmen. While most everyone who grew up in the same timeframe as yours truly knows the Madballs and knows 'em well, far fewer have experienced the unbridled glory of their "third season." The baseball-sized originals were way popular, but there were a whole lot of 'em. Not too many kids were going to buy 80 of the same toy with different wacky faces etched on, so what could AmToy do to extend the line's shelf life? The answer was simple, and yes, the answer was super.
Super Madballs! Three new beasts of a much grander stature took the reigns from the usual rubber things and gave new meaning to the still-hip always-hip game of MadBallin'. The differences between regular and Super! Madballs ran deeper than mere size. While the originals were certainly "balls" and certainly adequate for small-scale games of catch, these Super! versions were constructed with precision and served as perfect replacements for real sports equipment. The "football" Super Madball was well suited for a real football's task, and if there's anything cooler than a game of football where the ball looks like a demon, my experiences paint me deprived.
Today, we'll take a look at the trio of hurt-you and try to figure out why the world didn't take to 'em as well as the originals. Capitalizing on the "Nerf" craze, these soft-bellied devil-headed egg-beaten times-a'changin' monstrosities seemed completely equipped with the tools necessary to be top sellers. Instead, they were just the little niblets of corn leftover when you've ate all the chicken out of a TV dinner. The corn ain't no chicken, but you're glad it's there to help you get over the loss.
We'll also check out a few of the other last-ditch attempts to cash in on a sadly short-lived craze, not really so much for the intent of good reporting, but because the article wouldn't have been long enough without it. Madballs like truth serum or some shit. Madballs yo makin me ca-ha-ray-zee. Oculus Orbus, LAUGHING OUT LOUD HERE.
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To let the customers know that what they'd be buying were really really real balls, a regular box just wouldn't do. We would've been too suspicious, thinking the mystery contents were going to be far too clunky to work for anything other than aiming at, I dunno, floors. AmToy's answer was clear exoskeleton packaging, pictured above. Much better than just sticking the price sticker on a loose entry, because now, even at worst, the item's previous purveyor could've only gotten his snot and various handshit on the clear, throwaway exoskeleton. AmToy? No no, AmazingToy. Girl you know it's true.
The first and obvious leader of the Super Madballs was "Touchdown Terror," the football. Armed with aerodynamic fins and flawlessly mimicked pigskin, it's the scariest predecessor to any post-touchdown glory dance. Take a look...
The commercial was sure to show kids using the things in real sports games, because as we've seen forty times in the past four paragraphs, this is officially the largest selling point in history. Still, don't forget Touchdown Terror's roots. He's Super!, but he's still a Madball. Dolled up with gratuitous doses of mouth slime and eyes bloodshot from the grief of prior murders, ol' Double-T even has purple eyebrow hair. You thought Farcus' yellow eyes were something? So help me, purple eyebrow hair. Indeed a terror, Touchdown set a new standard in a world previously filled with such substandardastardly shaped Madballs. Foam is fun, but this was Six Flags level loony shit.
Our next Super Madball tackles the formerly lacking game of basketball. No longer limited by casting a bland orange eyesore as a centrical piece, this Madball's purpose carried more weight than any other. He's Foul Shot, and he's got worms.
See, Foul Shot had one thing going for him that the other Supersss didn't. He actually looked like one of the original Madballs. Just mega giant-sized. He was like the proud papa of the baby Madballs, of which you probably owned almost a dozen of at that point. How could you turn down Proud Papaball? You didn't have to dream dreams of basketball stardom to get all nonphysically attracted to Foul Shot -- you've been buying smaller "hims" for the prior eighteen months, anyway. Plus, there's that whole bit about the worms.
Now, you've really gotta analyze this "worm" gimmick. It's more important than you might think. You know how all aspects of horror and whatnot are judged by their one magic gross-out scene? It's the "he skinned his face!" and "intestines axed!" over and over again, with everyone agreeing on which are indeed the most gruesome. Nobody really considers it as such, but worm feasting is the worst of 'em all. Think about it -- can you name one even moderately used gross-out gimmick that comes close to a clear shot of slimy worms squiggling through the Swissed-up and bloodied pink flesh of the deceased? I'm sorry, Liotta eating his brain and all that junk has nothing on a good old fashioned feeding of the worms. Aside from extended vomit sequences, it's the one thing I try to avert my eyes from seeing at all times. Except with Foul Shot. I kinda like it on him.
Besides the worms and the looking like the old Madballs and all that, Foul Shot was the only Super Madball with any real impressive bouncing ability -- in fact, he's the only Madball out of all of 'em who bounced like this. Since it wasn't quite as heavy as a real basketball, Foul Shot bounced higher with much less effort. He was a gigantic superball, a freak too large for the vending machine with teeth the size of Chiclets. Again, AmazingToy.
Though Foul Shot seemed to have all the aces with his attributes, he just didn't pack the same devilish punch as the other two Super Madballs. He didn't look anywhere near as vicious or intricate as Touchdown Terror, or more specifically, he didn't have green slime on his face or a bunch of aerodynamic fins. Sure, Foul Shot looked like an old Madball, but he looked like one of the boring old Madballs. Even while going up against the comparatively conquerable sport of soccer, Foul Shot failed the test. Meet Goal Eater, soccer's worst enemy. Whoa oh here he comes, he's a Goal Eater.
He doesn't scream "MADBALL!!!" as much as the basketball guy, but Goal Eater still retained the general shape and familiar scheme and haunting gaze oh God I'm hypnotized oh God I'm Reggie Jackson I must kill...the Queen. With the fangs you can't resist, he's an impressive commodity in the world of "sports balls that look like terrible carnivorous monsters." Really, no kid could turn down those teeth. Doesn't matter what they're attached to -- Madballs, animal-shaped G.I. Joe tanks, other children -- kids never pass up on a pair of eight inch fangs. Mostly because of Cobra Commander's incessant misuse of the word in times of frustration with his team, we would've considered it "treason." The fact that some of these exaggerated flesh-rippers were broken made Goal Eater all the better -- he was the only battle-damaged Super Madball. It's nice to know that he's capable of weathering the storm.
The commercial followed suit with Madballs' old ad campaign of making every kid who handled the toys appear pants-shittingly afraid of them. I never understood it. One just looked like a crazy baseball, another a mere giant eye -- they were Madballs, not Scaryballs. AhemToy. There's a link at the bottom of this article to download and view the commercial for yourselves, and I strongly suggest doing so. Not only will you get to see the Super Maddies in live action, but you'll get to see how much dollar-fiddy mousse was necessary to make an eight-year-old Irish boy's hair appear electrocuted from shock and horror. The Super Madballs weren't anywhere near as popular as the originals, in part because the fad had ended, in part because of their preclusively high retail costs, in part because Nerf had manlier color schemes, and in part because they couldn't negotiate themselves high enough into the air to hit any birds. Four strikes is a done deal, and if the franchise was going to find a savior, it sure as Hell wuddn't the Super Madballs.
Where could AmToy turn next? Come on, we all know the answer to that. It's the natural progression after life-sized sports balls. Freaky String. Doy.
Yes, it's "freaky fun for everyone" with the official Madballs "Freaky String Blaster," a chillingly gun-shaped mutant werewolf armed with a giant spider's supply of nontoxic webbing -- or in this case, knockoff silly string. I could be mistaken, but I'm very close to 85% sure that these are the toys Tom Hanks and Redhead Boy shot fake snot at each other with in Big. I think I made that up, but you believed it, right?
The character was named "Swine Sucker," and boy did this swine suck. If you had a friend who constantly pegged you in the head with Madballs, it could've been much worse. You could've been swamped with an entire can of winter phlegm-colored silly string. Shot from the mouth of a gun-shaped alien purple pig wolf. Controlled by your idiot friend who kept smacking you in the head with said gun even though it was made from painfully hard plastic. See, this swine did boy really suck. Junior Jumble.
It's not the most expensive of the Madballs collectibles these days, but the Freaky String Blaster™ is definitely one of the toughest to locate. AmToy didn't make too many of these, obviously saving their stockpile of green silly string for a more clearly marketable task down to road. Swine Sucker probably thought he pulled the highest card in the Madballs deck with that thing, too. Poor Swine.
What blew was this: yes, when you ran out of silly string from the included can, you could've replaced it with any similar store-bought brand -- and whether we want to accept it or not, there actually exists store-bought brands of silly string. But! The new can wouldn't have the official Madballs logo and alarmingly wacky color scheme on it. It'd just look all wrong on Swine Sucker -- the string was supposed to look silly, not him.
What can I say? When you're hot you're hot. The fun didn't stop with the string, though. AmToy refused to give up on one of the few household names in their entire history of toy distribution -- Madballs had passed their prime, but the offshoots and spinoffs and shootspins kept pouring in...
Swear to God, on one Halloween long, long ago, I wore that mask in the middle. Picked it up at a CVS (pharmacy chain) on the very day of Halloween, which probably doesn't speak well for the masks' popularity. As I remember them, they had the characters' names etched onto the back. For the children who wore 'em, these etched-on titles served nicely as escape clauses during kiddy Halloween party conversations that were going nowhere:
Steve: Hey, what are you supposed to be?
Joe: I'm a Madball. I'm Wolf Breath.
Steve: Won the raffle? The roof contest?
No more mask-muffled misunderstandings. All you had to do now was point above your spinal cord. AmazingToy. These things were really huge, too -- even in much later years, I could still fit the mask over my head. And my head, damn, my head was bigger than a coffee table broken up and somehow compounded into a spherical shape of equal mass. Finally, here's one last ending attempt to revitalize the once all-powerful Madballs franchise. This one particularly sucks because the offerings were so damn cool -- had they come out just a few months earlier, Madballs might've still be hot enough to really spark some big interest with. Balls or not, the Madballs were still collected very much in the same way as any regular action figure line. But they weren't action figures. Until now. Oh yes. It's true. Madballs action figures. With detachable heads.
Called the "Head Popping Action Figures," all of the classic and popular characters from the original series were brought back for one last hurrah with their very own bodies. All of us who wondered what a Madball would've looked like fully formed finally got our wish -- there were to be no more guessing games, Crayola contests, grasping dreams, gaping questions. Here they were, right there in front of us. They were pretty great little figures, actually -- even without the noted gimmick, they stood well against even the most iconic toy collections of the you-know-what generation. Regardless, they could've looked like crap and gotten away with it just fine. The damn things' heads popped off!
They didn't fly quite as far as a spring-loaded toy missile, being heavy and headish and all, but they got a few good inches of air before crashing down with a satisfying thud followed by less-but-still satisfying mini-thuds as the heads bounced into temporary dormancy. Blahhhh blah. These extended entries into the lore of Madballs are fun to look at now, but I guess they didn't seem as fun to us back then -- Madballs died a slow death amongst an innumerable amount of bootlegs and knockoff brands, and for whatever reason, hasn't gotten much consideration as a candidate for the Big Revamp with today's retro resurgence. If He-Man and Optimus, why not Wolf Breath? Wolf Breath deserves better, and so do those big ass cousins of his, seen in the commercial you can download below...
We've seen a lot, but not everything. Here's a little gallery displaying some of Madballs' odder entrees, from sleeping bags to coffee cups. Probably not the grandest way to end off this here article, but let's face it, articles about "Super Madballs" aren't really conductive to killer climax scenes.
    
    
(click pics to enlarge)
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