It Came From A Vending Machine: Bumping Weirdos!

Halloween is just right around the corner, so there is no better time of the year for some frights and scares.  Today, fellow Earthlings, let's scream in horror as we venture into the world of It Came From a Vending Machine!

Before we get chills down our spine, let's first just say vending machine toys can still be collectable, or to be precise, American vending machine toys can.  Japan still has keshi in theirs and are still very much popular.  Ours here have sadly been reduced redneck teeth and stickers, but I bet here and there, you could still find a hidden gem.  I still hope for the day something catches and ignites the craze once more.  Until then, let's look at these sad guys.

I went to Super Walmart and found these guys hanging in a 75 cent machine.  They were called Bumping Weirdos, and they looked silly enough, if not a tad unimaginative.  Silly-looking, but your standard lumpy plastic character with goofy googley eyes.  I didn't have a lot of hope, but it was worth a look anyway.

Inside the capsule, was a yellow figure and a long checklist and game rules.  The checklist says there are 45 figures to collect, but there are actually a lot of color variants.  In fact, I was turned off quite a lot by this checklist.  It felt very forced to make this toy line a collectable game.  Not only are there a lot of duplicates with minor differences, the names for each figure are nonsensical and seemingly random.  On the opposite side, there are rules about flicking figures into each other and knocking each other down.  Complexity at it's finest.

The figure is a little sad too.  It's a chunk of hard, cheap, plastic - the sort that would shatter and blow apart if dropped at any sort of considerable height.  The paint application is a transfer sticker that may flake away if I stare at it hard enough.  Surely, if this guy was in a child's pocket for any period of time, his face would be chipped off in a day.

It's a cheap toy and certainly will be sent to another collector as a freebie, but it's nothing I plan on collecting in the future.  I keep an eye out though, because I still would like to support vending machine guys.