A remarkably low-rent toy series aimed at horror-obsessed Seventies kids.
Today’s kids are spoilt with video games and extravagantly-sculpted action figures, but back in the 1970s, nippers could still be entertained by printed cardboard and endless imagination. At least that was the hope of an obscure American company called Toy Factory, who took a good stab at making a horror-themed concept called Little Creepies into a franchise. It goes without saying that they failed.
The Little Creepies emerged around 1973-1974 and consisted of both a playset and a board game. The former was the Haunted House, a two-storey cardboard building that came complete with no less than thirteen Little Creepies – which turn out to be less impressive than they sound, being nothing more than monster figures like Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster printed on cardboard. Kids could have absolute minutes of fun posing these cartoon figures around the house before either losing, bending or tearing both the Creepies and their Haunted House. Obviously, this toy was completely incompatible with any other toys and so your entertainment was forced to work overtime to create adventures for the Creepies and I suspect that most of these toys were quickly confined to the box or simply kept on display as some sort of diorama.
Despite the limitations of the Haunted House, the Little Creepies concept was nevertheless then expanded to a board game, one that has remained so obscure that even the usual board game experts seem barely aware of it. Information of just what the game involved is therefore thin on the ground, but the board apparently included a centre spinner and involved up to four players making their way around three different sections. If anyone out there has more details, please tell us in the comments.
The Little Creepies did not catch on, even among monster movie-fixated Seventies kids and the ephemeral nature of these two toys has invariably made them hard to find today.
DAVID FLINT
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