Bless my delinquent grandparents. Not only did they let me stay up and watch late night movies like KING KONG and the INVISIBLE MAN, buy me comic books like SON OF SATAN and GHOST RIDER, and tell me personal family tales about hauntings and seances gone awry, they also bought my brother and I these 'playsets'!
My god, what were the marketing folks at Aurora thinking?!?
Retrocrush has a perfect little summary of the
Monster Scenes product line and it's fallout, including a comic book promo that has to be seen to be believed!
From the site--
"Massive protests against the kits came from religious publications and general newspapers, since they all thought that it promoted sex and sadism among children. All the negative publicity led to an immediate stop of production for these kits in May 1971, by the company which now had new owners: Nabisco Inc. The kits
remaining on the toy store shelves led to new protests in November, this time outside Nabisco's headquarters in New York. These protests held by groups as: Parents for Responsibility in the Toy Industry, and National Organization for Women, resulted in a recall of the Monster Scenes kits from store shelves in the U.S." Despite all the fuss, I am sort of embarassed to admit that I loved those kits, and honestly wish I still had them (we never had 'the Victim', just so you know... just the torture chambers and death labs). Believe it or not, I didn't turn out to be a sadist. You can see what the sets looked like painted over at
Cult TV Man... Rob Mattison has done a pretty decent job.
