In the mid-1980s, millions of unusual small creatures were lurking everywhere, and Mattel's M.U.S.C.L.E. was king of the heap
By Matt Caracappa
Posted 02/25/08
Tiny terrors tumble in the small brawl for it all! When Mattel brought the world 1.5-inch pink wrestlers in 1985, “M.U.S.C.L.E.” proved that the best toys weren’t always the biggest! With its roots in Japan’s Kinnikuman franchise, the American version of the story was far simpler: over two hundred tiny-sized grapplers fought a strange war not on the battlefield, but in the wrestling ring! Boys usually stick with primary colors, but this was one time when it was okay to “think pink.” Here’s the skinny on the popular toy line and its tie-ins.
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Collect them all!” For some toy lines, that wasn’t just a slogan—that was the whole point. The materialism of the 1980s brought about a new type of collectable toy line—one where dozens of smaller, less expensive figures were released at once, so that kids could accumulate more toys more quickly. And the one brand that everyone was trying to beat was Mattel’s M.U.S.C.L.E.
It stood for “Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere,” although only 236 were released in the U.S., rendering the anagram woefully inaccurate. This gigantic collection of weird, one-to-two-inch pink toys sprang on the scene in 1985, an import from Japan (where they were actually collectable pencil erasers) with characters ranging from simple ninjas and masked grapplers to bizarre monsters with extra limbs. The figures were available in blister cards of four, garbage pail containers of ten and 28-pack “team sets,” which divided the figures into good Thug Busters and evil Cosmic Crunchers.
A short comic strip (above) on the 28-packs said they were intergalactic wrestlers, but with no cartoon tie-in, kids had no way of knowing the full story of M.U.S.C.L.E.—or at least the manga that it was adapted from. Japan’s long-running Kinnikuman (“Muscleman”) comic ran for 387 issues and spawned a cartoon series that ran for three years. Created by writer-artist team Yudetamago, it started off as a parody of Ultraman but eventually focused entirely on wrestling matches. American kids knew none of this…and didn’t care. M.U.S.C.L.E. was a bona fide phenomenon—a welcome success for Mattel, who had recently lost ground to Hasbro’s G.I. Joe and Transformers lines.
Hasbro retaliated on the tiny toy battlefield with the Japanese import Battle Beasts (a Transformers spin-off in Japan) and the home-grown Army Ants, but they never managed to topple Mattel’s M.U.S.C.L.E.s, especially once Mattel re-issued the figures the following year in a variety of colors.
Though M.U.S.C.L.E. eventually faded away, Kinnikuman never really died in Japan, and the 1998 manga sequel Kinnikuman Second Generation (the basis for 2002’s Ultimate Muscle cartoon) is still going strong. To celebrate the brand’s 29th anniversary, February 29th will be the first official Kinnikuman Day in Japan, and Bandai is reissuing the entire ’80s line! More proof that size doesn’t matter.
