Tales from storage: The Squinkies squad
If I hadn’t sold or gifted away most of them you could probably expect this column to be nothing but dodgy toys and action figures picked up from resale outlets like TK Maxx, Pound Stretcher, and wherever else used to be in the vicinity of Abbeycentre. I was certain I’d chucked these things years ago!
ah, Pound Stretcher, we hardly knew ye
actually we knew you extremely well, like your glut of merch for Spider Riders and The Golden Compass, but those foibles seem charming in hindsight
absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that
especially when this entire strip is just a dirty big void now
So, Squinkies. I haven’t a ballsy what they are. They’re soft, slightly malleable inch-tall figurines that exist to be stored in little ball capsules, it seems? And then you can stow them inside a stubby plastic vehicle? At least, that’s what I’ve picked up from the two sets I had in my possession.
I was fully expecting these things to be extremely short-lived and long gone by now, and although their website is still in business (albeit extremely downsized from its previous iterations), I’m having a hard time finding evidence new ones are being sold, or that Blip Toys is still in operation. Their YouTube channel hasn’t updated since before the pandemic, which isn’t a good sign.
The ones I’d encountered in the wild seemed to be skewed towards the boys toys market, the logo featuring robots, ninjas, and American football players, but its other products definitely lean more into cutesy territory. There’s a buttload of adorable little animal characters to collect, and the website very much expects kids to collect these things en masse, to the point where it has pages offering suggestions on how to best display them, or even for parents to incorporate them into homework lessons somehow.
I’d bought another Squinkies set featuring a cute little green tank, hoping to repurpose it for a Metal Slug diorama, but you should not be surprised I spend more energy in my life dreaming rather than doing.
No idea why I got this Space Ride set, beyond it probably being too cheap or too cute to resist. And in fairness, it is a bloody adorable little vehicle. It’s the perfect size for little hands to whoosh around, though even its rounded fins would cause some damage if they made impact with enough velocity.
I guess I’m just not sure what exact age demographic they have in mind. The aesthetic is extremely Playskool, and the texture of these things feels tailor-made to be chewed upon by teething infants, despite its “not for children under 3” warning. The comments on Lulaloopsey’s “A Deep Dive Into Squinkies” video unanimously rave about the mouth-feel of these things, so, hey, it had that going for it. Kids gotta satiate oral fixations without cigarettes one way or another.
Toy fansites are among some of my most favourite esoteric things, and it pains me that they just don’t exist in as great detail or frequency as they used to. This FanPop club seems to be the best one-stop-shop for images, though no sign of this or the other Squinkies Boys vehicle sets.
It did enlighten me to the fact there’s not only a gamut of licensed toys for Disney, Marvel and Spongebob Squarepants, but also two Nintendo DS games? You know I love it when video games are the best preserved relic of long-gone products, and I gotta know how many DS games are tie-ins to dead and buried toylines. Homie Rollerz can’t be the only one!
Dude! I completely forgot about these. I had no idea that there were sets that had vehicles with them. I had those packs that came with 10-16 unrelated characters (ninjas, skateboarders, punks, etc.) and a bunch of dice that made some sort of game. I had three of those packs, so I think I had around 30 figures in total.
I’d love to know more about the game aspect! I think Mega Bloks had an offshoot of fantasy figurines (that you had to assemble off a sprue, complete with pack-in sanding file) that were meant to take part in a tabletop war game, with elastic band catapults and goodness knows what else. I wish I’d documented them…!
It sounds like Squinkies were sold in every dang format imaginable, though the vehicles were the only ones that showed up in discount outlets to my recollection.