The original Boglins were grotesque hand puppets made of very soft flexible rubber. Anatomically they were basically huge faces with legless bodies and tiny arms, that you could manipulate into grotesque facial expressions. I definitely had and one as a kid in the late 80s when they were first released, and remember the soft rubber getting all sticky and gunked up with grime, which shows it was popular and got a lot of play, but probably also explains why it got thrown out at some point!
I’m sure we’ll look at the original hand puppets eventually, but today we’re going to focus on a later release in the Boglins range, a small mini boglin from the early 1990s (the line was sold between 1991-1994). By 1992 there was a main line of 56 mini boglin sculpts, each available in six monochrome colours in a soft but rigid plastic. Additional sculpts were later released in 1994. The brilliant website Little Weirdos has an excellent overview of the mini boglins line, so I direct you there for some nitty-gritty details.
Mini boglins were categorised into ‘tribes’ of a idiosyncratic nature, and each sculpt had a snappy short name. Stog here is part of ‘The Rude Dudes’ tribe “noted for their disgusting or rude behaviour”, or so the pamphlet states. This was one of the original mini boglins released in 1991.
True to form, Stog is pulling a rude face, with his finger up his nose, and the other hand pulling back the wrinkles on his forehead. He has one eye closed in a squint and has a short tadpole-like tail behind. The skin of the body is textured with semi-circular, almost fish-like scales, whereas the long lanky arms are smooth skinned. My Stog is olive green.
You can see why children would have found these mini boglins fun and a little naughty. This one is 5 cm long and 2.5 cm wide, so they are small and highly collectible, and since there are dozens in the line we’ll surely encounter more here on the Monster Toy Blog later!
It looks like the hand puppet Boglins may be due a resurgence as they’re being rereleased – check out theboglins.com! But there’s no sign of any new mini boglins on the horizon… yet.
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