Do you remember the days when the Kenner toy company decided that kids had been mollycoddled enough and it was time that they lost a few fingers?
I give you ‘Mini Traps’ from The Real Ghostbusters toyline!

 

 

 

Now I am exaggerating a little bit when I suggested that these toys could remove fingers, but only somewhat.

 

 

I wasn’t actually around when these toys were first released but was introduced to them when my cousin donated a plastic treasure chest of toys to me around about 1995. Being bright orange and purple, these figures look fairly inoffensive, but looks can often be deceiving.

The gimmick with these toys is that their jaws are ‘hinged’ so you can open the mouths of these ghosts really wide, and they lock open like this.

 

 

 

Then if you press down on the tongue of the ghost, the mouth will snap shut like a mousetrap, removing your finger in the process.

 

 

It may be be that these toys are over thirty years old and the springs have weakened over time, but my finger luckily remained attached to me after I let the ghost snap shut on it for a picture. As a kid I remember it hurting a lot more but there is every chance that I was just more of a wuss back then. It was only ever the orange one that hurt though, maybe because the purple one didn’t have sharp teeth.

 

The packaging suggests you can use these toys to ‘maul’ Peter Venkman, and they work a treat, as you can see from the below picture where he is on the receiving end of a real savaging.

 

 

 

The back of the packaging also suggests that these traps can fit over other figures heads, so they are walking around with them over top. It just kinda looks like someone went and made an action figure based on the elephant man.

 

 

 

Although the traps snapping shut probably weren’t as painful as I remember them to be, I can’t imagine anything like that being made today. That said, there are probably far more dangerous toys on the market right now in some countries. I should perhaps do a post specifically on dangerous toys one day, as I remember at least two things from my childhood being pulled from shelves.

 

That wraps up another day of horror in the Halloween Countdown anyway. A bit of a shorter post today as I’m tired and really struggling to write nice, fluid sentences about a toys from thirty years ago that do minor owies.

More to come tomorrow!