#0114: Moby Lick

Sometimes, very strange, very specific things lodge themselves in your memory — ingrained and inseparable as a flesh bud from the man named DIO.

For me, one of those is an exchange between my parents on my ninth birthday in February 1997. My dad took note of how nearly all of the gifts I received were Space Jam toys, and how the theme shifted so radically over the span of twelve months.

"Yep, this year it's Space Jam," my mom replied. "Last year it was Street Sharks, this year it's Space Jam."

I don't profess to know whether children's trends are as ephemeral nowadays, but as far as fads go, Street Sharks was pretty fucking epic. Also, I have told a version of that story on this blog at least twice before, with the details varying somewhat from telling to telling.

Such is the risk you run when you have hardly changed over the span of eleven years of blogging.

Also also, in case you were wondering, I had challenged myself to force a JoJo reference into this piece as early as possible, but even I'm impressed that I managed to land it in para 1. That's some next level meme-ing, y'all.

Anyway, enough preamble. It's time to Moby Lick.

As alluded to in my shitty Jab post, my memory of the Street Sharks lore itself is rather spotty. As one may suspect, he is apparently an ally of the eponymous fishy fellas, though his impact on the franchise was likely greater for toy manufacturing than progressing the narrative.

Indeed, the wiki even goes so far as to declare that "it's seen as somewhat of a sad loss then that at the end of Road Shark, that he takes off for a while."

That's a little opinionated for what should be a factual biography, considering someone removed my valuable thoughts on Stray within twenty minutes. Double fucking standards, I reckon.

The action figure version of Mr. Lick possesses a writhing pink tongue that could be flexed through the use of a dial on his back, and a blowhole upon his noggin that squirts fluids in a pinch.

I shan't be applying either of these features for the purpose of this piece, as the dial has long gone missing, and as you may recall, Street Sharks retain water like a motherfucker.

Get out of the sink, dude, I'm not falling for it.

Much like Big Slammu (and no, I will not ease up on dumping as many links as possible, that's just how clickbait works!!) Moby's paint job is beginning to see some wear and tear. It's not nearly as noticeable, as he is fortunate that it doesn't proceed up to his face like poor old Coop.

Back in the ancient era known as the 90s, Moby Lick apparently came equipped with a superfluous red hat. I have found no evidence that this ever appeared in the cartoon, though I am a bit miffed that I have misplaced it, because the notion that it would perhaps fly from his head with enough pressure is rather enticing.

Due to his tongue lashing talents, pressing on his fin does not result in a vaunted biting action. It's up to you whether this is a worthy trade off, particularly now that his tongue must remain forever stationery.

...No, that's not a spelling mistake, I like to use it as a pen sometimes. Don't judge me, and don't judge my muscular whale action figure.

Tragically, now that I've already gone through so many of these Street Shark items, there's not really much more to opine on that I haven't already said multiple times in the past.

What I will mention, however, is that a brief glance at his neon orange pants reveals the copyright patent for "Street Wise Designs" and a hitherto long forgotten extension of the anthropomorphic craze.

You may recall the Extreme Dinosaurs, but what about the Muscle Mutts? If you've got one of these garish canines somewhere in the closet, you'd best hope they're still in good condition, considering they could fetch you anywhere up to $15,000 on eBay.

That's assuming anyone is stupid enough to fork out the bones for such a ludicrous investment. I'll just stick with my broken lingua sea mammal, thank you very much. Him and me are getting along just fine.

#0099: Big Slammu

So let's talk Street Sharks for a second. I certainly haven't got anything more important to do with my evenings, and if you've dared click on this accursed blog, I'll fathom that you're much the same.

All of the Street Sharks had their gimmick. Their thing. The defining quality that helped differentiate them from their brethren. Ripster's intelligence and levelheadedness made him a natural leader. Streex was the smooth-talking ladies man, while Jab was a lazy piece of shit with some kind of weird eye thing going on. But Big Slammu? He was my favourite, by far. Was it due to his rippling musculature, broad fishman shoulders, and the promise that he probably had a gigantic schlong? No, no and maybe.

If you're a wily INAKA veteran, you'll be able to realise the source of my affection based simply on a picture of the crew.

 

Figured it out yet?

If not, let me just lay it out for you. Big Slammu was the best because he was fucking red. Nothing more than that. His personality didn't make a lick of difference, he could have been a simpering coward, a treacherous double-crosser or a mass-murdering pedophile - as long as he remained red, he still would have been my favourite. That last one would have been a really weird creative choice for a children's cartoon, though.

In any event, I unearthed a whole bunch of sweet shit in the garage recently, and was quite shocked and frankly a little disappointed in myself when I found this fella rotting away in a box. Sure, there have been a few neat things to discover out there, but a Street Shark? A Street Shark deserves better than that, especially when it's big Coop himself.

I must confess, I never really watched the cartoon all that much, preferring for my edgy storytelling to come from Swat Kats and Gargoyles instead. So I couldn't quite tell you what Big Slammu's personality is. I have vague suspicions that he fits the peaceful big man trope, but typing 'Big Slammu virtuous' into Google only leads to a bizarre piece of fan fiction. Gotta be honest, Azmodan0210, I think the world could have gone without this crossover.

But what of the toy itself? I know you're both quivering with anticipation for me to wax lyrical on its features, and lowkey infuriated that the Jab article only had one actual photo of the action figure itself. Fuck, I really mailed that one in, didn't I?

Clearly, Big Slammu has seen better days. His paint is peeling, half of his face seems to have collapsed, and he has the unnerving grin of an ice addict. Be it due to the rigors of the garage or the tragic aftermath of steroid abuse, he just looks absolutely dreadful, and we advise that you'd best keep your distance. These are probably byproducts of being such a weighty item, because Big Slammu here is definitely packing on the pounds. If you threw him at someone, it would likely cause some damage, or at the very least be a particularly upsetting and bewildering experience for them.

He is riddled with nice little details like the prerequisite veins and tendons bulging through his flesh, and even some nifty cankles that are worthy of a mention. Pressing on his fin opens his mouth, but it doesn't work nearly as well as it does with Jab. Instead, Big Slammu's major calling card is his mighty clobbering fist, and it packs quite the wallop. You lift it up, and he brings it crashing down with the power of a thousand extreme dinosaurs.

Poor Optimus. Now he'll never sire a child.

Overall, I have to say that Big Slammu is actually a lot of fun. Aside from his wear-and-tear (a quick scan of the Internet reveals that this is fairly common among Slammu figures), he still looks rather nifty, and I've stopped mid-sentence a few times during the writing of this piece simply to play with his silly whomping arm. I like to pretend he's demanding more food at the dinner table like an impetuous child.

The good parent in me thinks that such a tantrum should be reprimanded, but when the child in question is twelve feet tall and can chew through solid steel, perhaps we should just give him what he wants. Also, if the pants are any indication, he seems to play for the Niners, and I definitely don't want to be cut off from that kind of income.

#0069: Jab

When you're a kid growing up, you have your heroes. For a lot of young'uns, that immediately translates to comic book supeheroes: your Batmans, your Spidermans, your Supermans (proper nouns, ergo correct grammar. Doncha be givin' me no grief!), and in my case, I was no different. As I have alluded to ever so frequently, my childhood heroes were, most significantly, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, comic book heroes all the same.

I won't repeat myself, as I'm wanton to do, about how marketers worked furiously at recapturing the lightning in a bottle that was Turtlemania, though I will confess that the Street Sharks were my favourite of the many, many attempts. Whether Biker Mice from Mars were too edgy for my tastes, whether Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa were too irreverent and western (I never dug westerns), none of them seemed to catch my attention.

But Street Sharks somehow succeeded, and from the time of its inception in 1994 to the time of its death in 1996, I wanted me some sharks! Because not only were they cool and badass lookin', but importantly, they were very 90s.

Being an artefact of the 90s is a double-edged sword. Because although it holds nostalgic value, it also feels completely flippant now. Whether it's the tie-died wackiness of the early 90s, or the bubblegum pop and inflatable furniture preceding the millennium, it's not just dated, it's practically groan-worthy.



I mean, shit, I still love it to bits, but I can see why others wouldn't. As an aside, I have no idea who half of those characters are. I didn't know there was a pre-Mario Lopez era, and frankly, I don't like it.

And while we're at it, those lyrics really don't check out, do they? What kind of teacher fails to hand test papers to a student, simply because they were hiding in their chair? Are we to assume that this student is 8 centimetres tall?

But I digress once more. In the case of the Street Sharks, they're simply 'Jawesome'. Had radical, funky, gnarly or tubular been translatable to shark related puns, they'd have been all of those things, too.

So here we have Jab. My memory of Street Sharks lore is obviously waning, because I had him pegged as the brains of the operation, the resident 'Donatello', if you will, but apparently his defining characteristic was that he was lazy. It doesn't exactly grab you as being one of your archetypical roles: the uncertain leader, the rebellious cool guy, the virtuous peacekeeper and the lazy fuck, but hey, at least modern Tony can associate with Jab.

As you may have noted, Jab is a hammerhead shark, which means he's capable of doing neat shit like extending his eyeballs forward. A definite plus on the battlefield, as it allows you to stare at your opposition three inches closer, and could also be a means of showing surprise.

He's definitely a menacing figure, as one of his fists is permanently closed and raised at you in a very threatening gesture, which seems out of character for someone supposedly laidback, but we shan't split hairs. Really, if you're looking for something to complain about, you're more likely to point out the fact that he's a very shiny shade of silver, whilst the source material clearly had him as brown.

I don't know what he's holding in that picture. I just assume he's going to eat it.

His body is made of a fascinating rubbery material, and for the record, this meant that he retained water like a motherfucker. If you were like me, and assumed that shark figures would work well in the water, well then you were a damned fool, because he would then have to sit there for a week as he dripped all over the bathroom shelf.

This choice of material wasn't without cause, however. Because like all of the Boltons (excluding Michael), his trademark feature is his mighty jawline, and pressing down on his fin allows him to open his mouth and to feast upon his enemies! It's... not really that exciting, but if you were the really patient sort, you could actually make it look like he's talking.

I'm almost 100% certain I lifted that line from episode 3.

#0050: Ripster Puppet

Welcome, minions, to a momentous day in the echelons of INAKA. We’ve seen some cool toys, we’ve seen some shit toys, and we’ve seen some toys that defy imagination. And today, we hit the big five zero. In actuality, I don’t really see 50 as being a particularly special number; it’s really just riding on the coattails of 100, being halfway and all. 25 and 75 don’t quite go about gloating over their relation to the century mark, but the Napoleon complex 50, it’s all about it.

As such, we’ll appease it for now. Just don’t expect the same kind of treatment for 150, at which point I simply won’t care anymore.

So I went with the assumption today that bigger is better; and as such, I needed to up the ante from the previous size benchmark set by Krang’s Android Body and the cocaine snake. Today, I introduce to you a toy of mass destruction. Have you ever seen what happens when puppets go bad?

It’s pure and utter chaos! Even Vincent Price falls victim to their fury.

Today, we salute the efforts of a plush so obscure, I can’t even seem to locate it on Google. Effectively, this could make it my most valuable possession (worth more than my 3DS, my house and my soul), but in honour of thou, the loyal toy-loving brethren, I will sally forth. Puppets are good. Street Sharks are better. So the enormous Ripster puppet must surely be the grandest of them all!

It’s incredible how much swag they were able to push out through the small window of Street Sharks’ popularity. In 1995, they were the hot ticket, and toy manufacturers would capitalize like keen strategists. Keen strategists with sharks. By the end of the year however, they were old news. Suddenly, it was all about Space Jam toys. At least, that’s how it was in my little community, and I assume that, as the epicenter of everything, what I deemed haute couture was accepted as the norm.

The paraphernalia came in all shapes and sizes, and this isn’t even the only Sharks foray into puppets. The more commonly seen variety were much more conservative hand puppets, appropriate for roleplay and post-modern attempts at Punch & Judy. However, I have looked high and low, and cannot find anyone else in all of society who owns this particular majestic menace.


And frankly, that’s really weird to me. I’ve pumped out some toys that I never expected to be recognized, but in this case, it’s a part of a big fad franchise that isn’t even twenty years old. Why is it so damned hard to find anyone else who is willing to discuss their Ripster puppet?

Is it one of a kind? Was it a prototype from a cancelled brand extension? Did I make it myself?

Who knows. Alls I know is that this enormous sucker has been lurking about my closet for years, warding off intruders, and eating stray socks that came his way. I also assume that, within a week, someone will have successfully located another site where people have already discussed the Ripster puppet. There’s probably even a fan club dedicated to it, with weekly meetups and secret shark handshakes.

But enough about his shady origins, let’s observe with keen interest the toy itself. For starters, wow, he’s really, really big. He’s like the size of a small toddler, but he’s much buffer and has rows of jagged plastic teeth, which makes him better than a small toddler.

He’s pretty finely crafted (as is the norm with Mattel), and even has nice little details like stitching tactfully placed to resemble abs. He lives up to his puppet status through use of an opening in his back, where you can pop your hand into to make his mouth stretch open widely.


As you can see, this makes him capable of biting, singing, and saying ‘ahh’ for the dentist. He’s even got Velcro hands, though amusingly, he’s far too unwieldy and muscular to successfully stick them together. You can hold them in place for a moment, but as soon as you let go, he’ll yank those suckers back to neutral. I don’t know what exactly the intention was of providing Velcro hands on a toy that can’t hold them together, but it’s still a fun addition. For one thing, when you hold them there, it looks like he’s praying. It’s like the cover of a hip-hop album. With sharks.

He’s got some minor wear on his teeth, but they’re shark teeth man, they’re meant to be rugged. Besides, if this truly is the only Ripster puppet in existence, then there still ain’t a better conditioned one in town.

I can’t help but note, in case you were wondering, that yes, he is excellent for cuddling. He’s soft and he doesn’t judge. This might sound wussy at first, but I will justify this by pointing out that I am cuddling a shark. Much more badass.

He’s also got some soulful eyes, hasn’t he? Like he’s about to pelt out a few bars of Ol’ Man River, criticize the lack of progress in the civil rights movement in the United States, and endure the pressure of McCarthyism. Yes, I effectively cast Ripster as the lead role of a Paul Robeson biography. That would be fucking epic, in my opinion. And yes, I did base the terminology of that biography on the first paragraph from Robeson’s Wikipedia page. As all true historians do, no doubt.

Right. I think I’ve said enough. Because truly, this manimal speaks for himself. He is a powerful fish. He believes himself to be ‘jawesome’. And he hungers for flesh. Or Snickers bars. Whichever is more readily available.

#0013: Slobster

Some toys are ugly. They’re lumpy, awkward and reprehensible. If we were to see their visage in real life, we would flee in terror, praying for our lives and the lives of our unborn grandchildren.

Some toys are pretty. They’re detailed, up-market and precise. These are the pretty boy toys with rich parents who never had to work a day in their lives, who get everything they want. They’re the toys other toys hate, but secretly always wanted to be.

Some toys, like Slobster, are both.


It’s hard to express exactly how difficult it is for me to part with my very first bit of Street Sharks paraphernalia, even if it is with my least favourite character. Do I ever recall doing much with Slobster, other than having him kicked in the face and making silly crustacean noises? No, but he was mine all the same. Street Shark toys were simply made to be yours.

From the moment you took a look at them in their packaging, you said to your parents, ‘golly, I want me one of those’.


Odds are, your mother took one look at the hideous lobster monster within and then questioned your sanity. But if you were anything like me, you got your way and you got your toy. And like me, you were probably also very bossy and very bitchy, so you didn’t have many friends to share your Slobster with. Which is even better, for it is your Slobster and yours alone!

His vaunted ‘seize and slice claw’ is not really that exciting, you simply push his leg in and his oversized pincer clamps shut. I know that, in the right context, it’s menacing, but at face value, it looks more like he’s ticklish.

Incidentally, carrying around that claw for the last seventeen years has clearly been most taxing on his poor arm, because unless you wedge it right under his face, he can’t handle the weight and it merely veers down towards the floor. It’s like those women with really big breast implants. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but you know that in their elder years, it’s going to be a problem for them. Poor vain Slobster, he only wanted to look pretty.

His antennae are removable, though I’m not sure if they were supposed to be. I don’t know what purpose it would serve, but if you want your Slobster to be bald, he’s ready to accommodate.


Putting him up against a Ninja Turtle (the benchmark for how big your toys should be) reveals that Slobster is effin’ huge. Holding him in your hand makes you feel like you’re carrying an actual lobster around. All Street Sharks toys were big, and it makes me wish that I had had the balls to wage franchise wars between the Sharks and the Turtles. It would have been so epic. I suppose I could still do it, but it wouldn’t be as epic. Particularly since I’m currently unemployed.

Once he’s gone onto the next generation, the only thing we know for sure is that Slobster will still be a villain. Just look at his angry sneer, he’s destined to always be typecast. But as I doubt he’ll end up with other Street Sharks, I can only ponder who his enemies will be from here on.

…I hope it’s not just some dick.