kartooner

“Mon­ster in My Pocket is described as a “range” in some of the UK press mate­r­ial. It was cre­ated by Joe Mor­ri­son and John Weems, pres­i­dent and vice-president of Mor­ri­son Enter­tain­ment Group. Mor­ri­son and Weems were for­mer Mat­tel employ­ees who had devel­oped the Mas­ters of the Uni­verse toy line and served as pro­duc­tion super­vi­sors for Gary Goddard’s live-action Mas­ters of the Uni­verse film.”

Back in 1992, I remem­ber how my brother and I loved play­ing the Mon­ster in My Pocket video game for the Nin­tendo Enter­tain­ment Sys­tem. I mean, what kid wouldn’t love jump­ing around as the vam­pire beat­ing down zom­bie bad guys in your path? It was a high­light of child­hood play­time, espe­cially after a long winded day at school (at the time I believe I was in 7^th grade, but don’t hold me to it as I’m hor­ri­ble with dates).

The fun was in col­lect­ing these crit­ters from what­ever source avail­able, be it cereal boxes or a local swap­meet. My cousins and I couldn’t get enough of the MIMP espe­cially since you could haul them around at school in your pock­ets with­out any­one notic­ing. The only other time I hid a toy in my pocket was my Tam­agotchi who died in the mid­dle of Span­ish class in 10^th grade. It was pretty depress­ing con­sid­er­ing I nutured that thing for a good week.

I remem­ber own­ing the Hunch­back, Windingo, The Winged Pan­ther and the War­lock. You could stare at them for hours at their minute detail (sub­par by today’s stan­dards) and if you wanted to, you could edu­cate your­self with their elab­o­rate his­tory as each fig­ure came with a well-written descrip­tion for their bio.

Being the con­struc­tive and imag­i­na­tive per­son I was, I’d fre­quently use the MIMP char­ac­ters in my “toy shows” at Stu­dio C (the Couch). These were pro­duc­tions uti­liz­ing a sprin­kle of imag­i­na­tion along with a hand­ful of my toys (which included Ninja Tur­tles, GI Joe and the occas­sional Generic Toy).

These “toy shows” included spe­cial effects using Play Doh or Fimo clay as my makeup and behind the scenes excerpts imme­di­ately fol­low­ing the end of the show. Nor­mally I’d use the couch as my set­ting, the cracks inbe­tween the cush­ions were haz­ardous areas, and from there I’d con­struct a pro­duc­tion that would put Mr. Ed to shame.

As I men­tioned, to add extra fea­tures to the char­ac­ters I would use clay to build up their faces (add ears, horns, etc.) and usu­ally tear off their faces to heighten the drama. Another spe­cial effect I’d use was clos­ing my eyes for a split sec­ond to “warp” the toys to dif­fer­ent areas of the set. After the show was over, I’d sing or hum the end­ing song and announce the “Behind the Scenes” portion.

The behind the scenes con­clu­sion included show­ing how the spe­cial effects were cre­ated, the on-set drama between Leonardo and Papa Smurf and scene-by-scene shots with and with­out the sounds. It was a cre­ative fun fest and lit­er­ally kept me enter­tained for hours.

When Stu­dio B (oth­er­wise known as the bath­tub) was avail­able I’d stage on set cli­matic sea bat­tles using the soap dish as a pirate ship. Some­times I’d uti­lize the bub­bles to pro­vide con­flict to the char­ac­ters and no mat­ter what it always ended with the bad guy drowning.