Parents Gift Children Toy That Heats to 3,000 Degrees – What Could Go Wrong?

Ah, pop culture in the mid 1960’s, a place in time when Rolling Stone published its first issue, ABC debuted the maiden episode of The Addams Family and Mattel unabashedly marketed children’s toys which reached temperatures high enough to literally turn sand into glass.

Unearthed by the docu-series Collection Complete (which takes an in-depth look into the lives of artists and the collections that fuel their work, as presented by Gemr, an app for collectors worldwide), the show’s latest episode takes a look at Los Angeles-based designer and filmmaker Micheline Pitt’s collection of vintage horror board games and toys, including the hot-as-hell Fright Factory, considered to be one of the most dangerous children’s toys every marketed.

Part of the THINGMAKER line of products, Fright Factory provided baby boomers with a professional grade hot plate that achieved temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, in order to heat the game’s supplied ooze dubbed “Plasti-Goop.” The purpose? To allow kids to create plastic monster appliances, or course. From searing heat and toxic fumes to shrunken heads and monster fangs, Pitt muses of the progenitor of Mattel’s later and popular Creepy Crawlers toy series, “What could possibly go wrong?”

 

What’s more, Pitt also takes viewers on a tour of her rare 1960’s Transogram board games Ka-Bala (equal parts Ouija board, Tarot card and occult mysticism) and the glow-in-the-dark game Green Ghost (targeted at fans of the previously mentioned The Addams Family, with a heaping dose of The Blob thrown in for good measure).

The series’ eighteenth episode (future installments are set to showcase other items in Pitt’s collection, including an exclusive first look at her upcoming directorial debut Grummy, as well as more with screen-used prop collector Sean Clark), past episodes of Collection Complete have ventured into the personal collections of filmmakers Mike Mendez of Tales of Halloween fame and The Hills Run Red producer Robert Meyer Burnett.

Subscribe to the series’ Youtube channel here to see previous episodes of Collection Complete, and for more on Collection Complete, ‘like’ them on Facebook here and follow them on Instagram at @CollectionComplete and on Twitter at @CollectionComp.