Sunday, September 27, 2009

DIENER SPACE CREATURES AND MONSTERS

DIENER LOGO

A large portion of my blogs gravitate around my weird quirks and obsessions and along that same track I thought I'd share a recent stop.
This summer I made a special effort to frequent the local thrift stores and garage sales and it was at one of these sales I came across a little red swamp monster made of rubber. It was buried down at the bottom of a box of old toys and as soon as I dug it out I found myself suddenly ripped back to the early 1980's file of my mind.
When I was probably three or four years old my grandma would take me on stroller rides on afternoons she babysat me and we would always stroll down Main St. where we would stop by Latta's. In the early 80's, Latta's was the equivalent of what would nowadays be a Hobby Lobby or craft/supply store. The first Latta's store was opened in 1898 by John Stuart who came from my home town of Cedar Falls. Latta's is one of the oldest school supply companies in the United States with a variety of categories including: arts and crafts, audio and visual, children books, early childhood, games, mathematics, multilingual, office supplies, science, social studies, teacher resources and more. My grandma was interested in Latta's large assortment of sewing supplies and would always stop in to pick up thing on our walks. To me the store seemed pretty boring with the exception of the eraser bins. Latta's had a long Plexiglas bin filled with hundreds of brightly colored erasers with dozens of different themes. If I behaved myself while she shopped she would always let me pick one out to take home. There were so many different ones to choose from. Farm animals, sports equipment, dinosaurs, airplanes, sea creatures, cars, popular cartoon characters like Popeye and Mickey mouse. I would pick through them to find the one I liked the best. Just holding that rubbery little figure in my hand as we strolled our way home was as good as it gets.
Flash-forward to that garage sale where I knelt by that cardboard box at the age of 32 holding that rubber monster I could remember that feeling. I recognized the little red figure as if I had just seen it yesterday.
I regret to this day tossing it back in the box because about a week later I found two more monsters from the same series at the thrift store. This time I didn't let them go, I was determined to find out more about these neat erasers and who made them.
After a quick search on the computer I discovered these erasers came from a series of monsters and space creatures created by Diener Industries the leader in eraser toys during the early 1980's, and there were a whole lot more of them than I remembered. If you were a child in the 80's you most likely ran into these at one time or another. Here is just a sample of some of the erasers:

801267-lB-1
801097-CP

My personal favorites are the Monsters and Space Creatures which were actually used as McDonalds Happy Meal toys in the 80's

MONSTERS AND ALIENS HAPPY MEAL

The cool thing is these were mostly based on actual movie monsters and aliens. Lets take a closer look...

DIENER FIGURE 1
Horned Cyclops - I’m guessing this one might be an amalgam of different cyclops. Pictured is the Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops from The 7 th Voyage of Sinbad, the Lost In Space Cyclops and the Siamese Cyclops from The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.

DIENER FIGURE 2
Winged Amphibian Creature - design based after the creature in the 1966 movie Destination Inner Space.

DIENER FIGURE 3
Vampire Bat Creature - design based after the Batman comic book character Man-Bat.

DIENER FIGURE 4
Insectman - design based after the Fly from the 1958 movie The Fly.

DIENER FIGURE 5
Lizard Man - design based after Ray Harryhausen’s creation the Ymir from the 1957 movie 20 Million Miles to Earth.

DIENER FIGURE 6
Tree Trunk Monster - design based after the aliens in the 1958 movie I Married a Monster from Outer Space.

DIENER FIGURE 7
Veined Cranium Creature - design based after the Martians in the 1957 movie Invasion of the Saucer Men.

DIENER FIGURE 8
Gil Face Creature - design based after an alien named Ikar from the 1964 television series The Outer Limits in the episode Keeper of the Purple Twilight.

These erasers are now collectables and not only are tough to find but usually sell for $10-18 a piece. I'll still keep my eye out for them but I definatly won't spend that amount of money on a 2 inch eraser. Recently I scoured a large flea market in the hopes of finding some and ended up finding one Ronald McDonald Diener figure. I wish I would have bought that "tree trunk man" swamp monster from that garage sale but, oh well.

RUBBER MONSTERS
Here's a pic of me with my 2 monsters!!

RONALD AND POPEYE
Here's my Ronald McDonald and Popeye Diener figures.

I'll post another blog if I find anymore.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for writing this blog! I had several of these toys in the 1980s and they intermingled with my M.U.S.C.L.E. men, but I never knew what they were. The strange part is that while I had the exact same figures, they were definitely not erasers. They were made from harder rubber. Maybe they just used the same molds or were knock-offs???

They're still in the attic. I'll have to dig them out and see what I can find out. (Sorry, they're not for sale!)

Bonhomme said...

Great post indeed!

As a collector of M.U.S.C.L.E. men and other little rubber monsters I fell on those and their vintage feel and link to glorious B-movie of yesteryear instantly made them instant favorite.

Never had those as a kid, but sure would have LOVED them.

I like to think that a pre-Intrenet kid who loved Ray Harryhaunsen movie could stumble upon these to celebrate is love of misunderstood creature, as the Master like to call them ;)

Unknown said...

The Fly picture you have up is from RETURN OF THE FLY (1959)- if you need a picture of the 1958 (much smaller head) you can take one off my web site. www.davidhedison.com

Andre lives!

Diane

Unknown said...

thanks for the post! soy un coleccionista de juguetes de macdonalds y de verdad me dio gusto volver a ver aunque sea en fotografias esos juguetes de nuevo! un saludo y adelante!

Lee said...

these are not tough to find.
Hmmm..... when was this written?
where are the Space Raiders ? - I am trying to collect all 8 in all colors.