Showing posts with label Koosh Lings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Koosh Lings. Show all posts

Monday, November 19, 2012

In transit


T.K.: This is it, guys! The next step of our amazing adventure! First, we're going to climb into this great big yellow bag, then we'll be taken to a great new land... this amazing world known as 'opp shop!'

Tugs: I give this yellow bag a thumbs-up.

Skye: You gave that dead puppy we walked past a thumbs-up.

Tugs: It is my gift. It is my curse.


Dracula Don: Well, make yourselves comfy - you may be here for a while. The waiting list is pretty backed up as it is.


Festive White Bear: Fresh meat...

Hollywood Hulk Hogan: WHATCHA GONNA DO, KOOSH LINGS, WHATCHA GONNA DO?

Roaring Lizard: (is incapable of roaring. Strokes his nonexistent beard maliciously)


T.K.: ...This is the worst adventure since Terminator 3.

Tugs: I give this tragic turn of events a thum-

Skye: SHUT THE FUCK UP, TUGS.

#0065: Koosh Lings


I find my lack of progress disturbing...

Gotta be honest, clearing away a minuscule toy once every thirty days is simply not going to cut it - and now that I've moved out of home, progress will be slowed even more, because I'm literally having to take toys to my new place in order to get rid of them. So when I'm going to such effort, I want to create more space than that which was left by a tiny finger puppet. What kind of entertainment system can I fit into that vacated area? A comically small one?

So basically, I'm going to ramp up my efforts, and create more multi-toy entries, a la the Cocky's Circle books. Which, in actuality, turned out to be one of my favourite entries. Might have had something to do with the constant references to fapping.

Here for your consideration, lie the Koosh's best chance at returning to relevance in the mid 90s - the Koosh Lings! If in case you've forgotten who they are (my last Koosh Ling article was written more than a year ago), they're effectively a group of fun-loving Kooshes who go on zany adventures. They're a tight-knit group, and as such, you must buy all of them. Otherwise you run the risk of completely alienating their circle of friends.



If this commercial featuring the Mowry twins didn't get you excited about owning a Koosh Ling, then I don't know what would. After all, as they so creepily state, Koosh Lings can make you feel good. Physically? Emotionally? Fiscally? I don't know. I guess they made me feel okay.

They also make a rather audacious statement that the enigmatic 'Cool Scenes' Koosh Lings (which I had never even heard of before) do the same stuff that we do. How many young children were jamming on guitars? If they really wanted to make Koosh Lings we could associate with, they'd have been eating cereals in long johns and watching Garfield.


The first fun fella at top left, his name is T.K.

It's never established what T.K. is short for, it was just cool in the 90s to be called by your initials, but I like to think his name was something stupid like Todd Krautz.

He's the leader of the group, and as such, he's brave, adventurous, compassionate and vanilla as fuck. He has an intense wide-eyed stare that borders on menacing, and his favourite colour is probably purple.

To his right is Skye, and like most women, her hair is really, really fun to play with. Whether it was based on factuality, or just a notion I came up with for no apparent reason, she seems to be the sporty tomboy. She can kick around a football with the best of them, she won't back down from a fight, and she digs Caster Semenya's style.

Front and centre is Teeter, and as evidenced by his untamed mane, great big grin, and simply scandalous lack of footwear, he's the crazy party animal. He probably would have been my favourite based on personality and appearance alone, but took second place to the almighty fiery hue of...


Tugs. Tugs was the best, because he was red. I know, it's starting to become redundant, but when you're an idiot kid, you pick favourites for idiotic reasons. Tragically, my collection of the original quartet was slightly incomplete, because as you may have noticed, Tugs is randomly riding a skateboard. No, he wasn't just different in an effort to be an attention-seeking prick, this just happened to be one of the spin-off series: I never could find the original Tugs.

As you can see, he's borderline safety-conscious: he's adorned with flamboyant elbow and knee-pads, but is defiantly absent a helmet. It's funny, actually, how the helmet is the most important protection, and yet the part most commonly missing from children's toys. Look at that big ol' smile, he's pretty fucking ecstatic to be without a helmet.

Once I completed my little motley crew, I think that was pretty much it for me. Despite their advertising scheme, they were much more fun and practical to play with individually. I took Teeter to the beach one day, that was excellent. I pretended Skye got turned into a frog during one adventure, that was quite epic. You put them all together, and you've simply got too many Kooshes for your mortal hands to handle, and in the end, the only recurring storyline becomes how they keep relying on Tugs as the designated driver, since he was the only one with a mode of transportation. He'd love to decline, but unfortunately, his hand is permanently moulded into an affirmative thumbs-up.

Afterwards, they just kept adding more and more friends, and more and more variations of the same characters. Completionists no doubt scrambled to collect such exciting things as a Koosh Ling engaging in gymnastics, but my interest began to waver, until finally, the Lings were toy chest fodder like so many other fads.

They may be forgotten curios from a bygone era, but they're not without their charm, I think. They'll go down as one of the good points of 1996. Good like Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong Country 3 and No Diggity by Blackstreet. Maybe someday soon I'll explore the bad things that happened in 1996. ...in fact, here's a preview...


Saturday, June 18, 2011

#0016: Slumber Bunny Pip


Something foul is afoot deep within the recesses of my tub of toys… There’s something in there, that shouldn’t be…


Perfect! It’s jammed up the fan on the Ninja Turtles’ sewer-surfin’ skateboard.


Ahh! It’s wedged within the axels of the Hot Wheels lizard car, ruining its lofty goal of claiming that coveted golden cup.


Perfect! Lord have mercy, it’s infested the once-thought-impregnable ass of prehistoric Bebop. When queried about how this was affecting him, Bebop meekly responded that he felt ‘violated’.

This is wrong! This is downright unholy! Is this the doing of the wicked Megatron? Could it be a devious scheme hatched by none other than Dr. Robotnik? Perchance, even, it is the result of Julia Gillard’s ill-fated carbon tax?

Alas, no. This villain should never have been. She was once a lovable young lady, with nothing more in her heart than childish ambition and a love of snooze. But now, she has descended slowly but surely into a state of madness, with her wicked clutches taking hold of all toykind.

Today, we do battle with Slumber Bunny Pip.


Good gracious, look at that face. It’s a sickening combination of bitter misery and power drunkenness. Once upon a time, she was a simple Koosh Ling. They were a new line of Kooshes with faces and limbs who presumably got up to wacky adventures and each had their own strengths and personalities, making it necessary to collect them all, lest their team feel flawed and incomplete.

At least, that’s what they promised. On face value, they were the same old Kooshes you had been buying for ten years, that did nothing more than dangle from your dashboard and have a curious ability for collecting hair.

A different line of ‘Kooshes with attitude’ had already hit the scene some years earlier, the Koosh Kins, who even had their own Archie comic series, but they certainly failed to capture my imagination in the way these Koosh Lings did. I don’t know what it was, perhaps it was the fact that they had legs, but I needed to nab them Lings, and fast.

After the first line had had some success (because otherwise, why else would they have continued?), the Lings expanded into a second series dubbed ‘Wild Times’ Koosh Lings, which essentially translated into ‘Koosh Lings doin’ stuff’.

Their leader, T.K. became ‘Charming’, gaining a bouquet of flowers, a box of chocolates, and a penchant for singing Tom Jones ditties. The resident vagina Skye donned herself a pair of roller blades and a helmet, for she was now ‘Skatin’ Skye’. But if these new upgraded Lings weren’t enough to whet your whistle, they had introduced fantastic new acquisitions to the squad, like our girl in blue, Slumber Bunny Pip.

For those of you crying foul that going to bed hardly qualifies as ‘Wild Times’, you can perhaps take note of her aggressive stance; her left hand outstretched as she questions your presence in her bedroom, standing between her and a good night’s sleep. Believe me, Pip fought hard for her right to nap, and she would take on anyone foolish enough to try and stop her. Wild Times, indeed.

Beyond that, I’m now having Wild Times trying to decide what’s happened with her once light and fluffy head of hair. I don’t know what sort of product it was made out of, but it appears to have disintegrated over the years. This, I’m sure, is further evidence of Pip’s Wild Times qualifications, possessing the exciting but unlisted ability of melting hair. Stick that down your pipe and smoke it, grappling hook Action Man! She even makes alopecia awesome.


Tragically, Pip is otherwise much the same as any other Koosh. Her rubbery blue appendages wiggle when you shake her around, and her limbs are bendable and posable. You can lift her arms and legs to the air if you should so choose, proving once and for all that she is clearly ready for… yes, you guessed it: Wild Times.

Indeed, those aren’t just slippers and a plush teddy she’s holding, but hollowed out rabbits and a dead baby bear, that she wields like some sick trophy. She isn’t quite up to the standards of Predator and skull collection yet, but trust me, she’s on her way.

Plus, she looks a little bit like a Muppet, which makes her okay in my book.

Despite this, Pip was most definitely my least favourite Koosh Ling. She lacked the wackiness of Teeter, she wasn’t the strong independent woman figure like Skye, and she was clearly inferior to Tugs, for Tugs was red, and red be mighty.

If it wasn’t for the completionist in me, I would have never added her to my arsenal of Koosh Lings. She’s a toy for sissies, and I can’t deal with being a sissy for any longer. Pip’s very presence is a heavy blow to my precious reputation.

However, we can’t just give her away to a bright-eyed young whelp in her current state, can we? Children have a tendency to giddily inhale stuff, so all that flaky hair is a definite no-no.

What now follows… is perhaps the darkest moment in INAKA history… This isn’t for the faint of heart…



I hadn’t intended for the television to have provided such appropriate narration, it was more just in case you were bored and wanted to watch Toy Story 3 for twelve seconds instead. However, I’m immensely pleased with the results. Slumber Bunny Pip can now state with pride that she was voiced by Ned Beatty.


And, looking like she does now, she could be appropriately cast as an extra in Deliverance. The world works in mysterious ways, doesn’t it?

So I’ve saved the children, but potentially jeopardized Pip’s chances of being a coveted treasure. For the more artistically inclined, you might see parallels between the damaged lives of Pip and Fantine from Les Misérables. They were both once young and ambitious, but fell on hard times, and lost their hair. In Fantine’s case, she sold her hair in order to support her daughter. As for Pip, bitch please, her rebellious life of ursine murder led to her hair being ripped out from her skull. She’s hardcore, yo.

Methinks she too will now follow a similar career path to Fantine…


“Hey there sailor… Looking for Wild Times?”
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