Mad Scientist: A Great Forgotten 80s Toyline

It was 1986, and slime was starting to become big in the toy industry. This was the year that The Real Ghostbusters would hit the shelves for the first time. It was also the year that Mattel released the Evil Horde Slime Pit as part of their popular Masters Of The Universe line. The Slime Pit was essentially a kid friendly torture chamber for your action figures. You would lock a figure in place, and then pour slime down on them from the dinosaur skull up above. However, Masters Of The Universe was not the only line from Mattel that would bring us slime that year....

Sometime in 1986 (or maybe early 1987), I was watching TV with my brother and an ad for one of the Mad Scientist toys came on. Nine-year-old me thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. In the commercial, an animated version of the Mad Scientist from the boxes would talk about his newest invention. Whenever he would go into detail, a hand holding a stamp would drop down and say "Too gross!" or "Too yucky!" in a deep monotone voice, while stamping a label saying the same thing. Growing up, I think I only knew of one other kid that had these toys, and I'm honestly surprised that it's somewhat forgotten, especially considering the fact that gross out and monster themed toys were fairly successful in the 80s.

The first toy I had from this line (and my personal favorite), was the Monster Lab. This was just utterly amazing to me when I was a kid. You would start by getting "flesh" on little plastic skeletons. These were your monsters. Once the flesh was on there, you would stick the monster into a clear vat and then pour in the flesh remover. You could witness the very thing you had created get it's skin ripped off by the wonders of science. It made you feel like you were a nine-year-old version of Peter Lorre's mad scientist character in the old Looney Tunes shorts!

Are aliens real? Is there life on other planets? No one knows for sure, but one thing's for certain... they love to abduct humans and experiment on them. Anyone who's seen Fire in the Sky or the first episode of South Park knows this. Sick of aliens using mind reading rays to steal their ideas, the folks at Mattel decided to turn the tables on extra terrestrials when they released the Dissect-An-Alien kit. Instead of an alien experimenting on a human, you are now a human experimenting on an alien. The alien's body exploded and you needed to reassign his organs and intestines back to the correct areas. You could also put in slime and pretend it was alien blood. This should've been rereleased in the 90s when FOX aired the Alien Autopsy video.

Aside from the two big sets, I also owned a few of the weird little rubber guys that spewed slime (aka alien blood). The first one I remember was Sammy Sneeze, who looked like a hybrid of ET and a monkey. You filled him with slime and upon squeezing him, it would rocket out his nose! The other one was called Billy Belcher. He was a weird little troll-goblin looking character. When you squeezed him, he would vomit slime out of his mouth. Between monsters and bodily functions, the people at Mattel who did this line really knew how to market to kids.

Well, thanks so much for reading my article! I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you enjoyed reading it. Mad Scientist really is one of my favorite toy lines. I tried to make this article nostalgic for the people who remember these toys, and informative for the people who have never heard of these before. Thanks for letting me share my memories, and have a nice day.