With it being mid-October, an obligatory Halloween post was well past  due.  And that also means another Boglins post, seeing as Boglins were originally released at the tail end of the creatures movie craze of the late ’80s. With the line bringing the creepy magic of  movies like Gremlins and Critters home with their hand puppet line in 1987. As a more affordable pocket money line, kids could also pick up Mini-Boglins, a smaller line of the creepy rubbery creatures released in 1991.

Although I covered both a hand puppet and the mini line in the past couple of years, I still discover new and interesting oddities that I never knew existed. Like this thing!

 

 

A Mini-Boglins carry case! I love carry cases that provide storage, portability and playability all in one go, which is part of the reason that the Mighty Max line is so treasured by me. The case states that it can store up to 12 characters, and comes with a Boglin chief, and features a neat bit of artwork showing the swamp.

 

 

The case resembles an old VHS case, but is about twice as thick, and has a kind of plastic cover atop the artwork.  It also feels a little less sturdy than a video case, as though if accidentally stood on, it would shatter instantly. I’m not testing this.

 

 

The back of the box shows more artwork featuring all of the creatures in the line and a bit of a backstory. Overall, the case feels more like a product of the ’80s than the ’90s. Perhaps in my head, I’ve made everything from the ’90s neon and bright, but this definitely feels a little more muted for a ’90s product, more akin to something that would be released in the middle of the eighties. Anyway, opening up  the case reveals the boggy Boglin world within!

 

 

 

The swamp is sculpted nicely with a few bits of stone and tree stumps jutting out of the marshy bits. The paint on the tree stumps isn’t applied greatly in my opinion, and looks a little messy. But as this is meant to be a world for toy creatures that are spewing up or picking their nose, I can just about forgive that. The set also comes with two bits of flocked plastic, which is supposed to resemble a treetop and a bridge which fit onto the sculpted tree stumps, as well as Boglin chief figure.

 

 

The swamp really comes to life when you add some Boglins to it. I’m not a fan at all of the flocked tree or bridge, they feel very cheap and don’t really look like a log or a treetop. I would much rather have had a log painted or moulded in brown plastic, and a tree top that looked like those found in the Robin Hood Sherwood Forest Playset, but I gather this was meant to be a cheap and simple little carry case, so again I should lay off the bitching. But it would be nice if the log and tree fit properly into the tree stumps, as these really don’t.

 

 

One thing of note is that the text on the case reckons you can fit twelve Boglins inside the case, which seems like absolute crap to me. I tried putting ten in, and had to play a kind of Boglin-Tetris to rotate and fit all of them in the best possible way to get the case to close, and even then I was worried I might be damaging the brittle plastic of the flocked log and tree top. So my collection of Boglins will not be residing permanently in this swamp, as I have far too many. But they do display nicely on it, and it is cool to have a kind of base for Boglin operations.

 

  Get outta ma swamp!

As far as I can tell, this display case was only ever released in the UK, and as such it isn’t the cheapest thing to find. Truthfully it probably isn’t really worth the amount I paid for it, but if you like obscure oddities and little scenes in which your figures can thrive, this is an undeniably cool little set.

More spooky things to come!