Madballs for Lunch

Watching VH1's I love the 80s (3D!) I was suddenly reminded of why madballs held particular significance to me. It was not a fan of aesthetically unappealing toys as a child, preferring barbies and My Little Ponies to their more obese counterparts, otherwise known as cabbage patch kids and the neon-haired wrinkled faced trolls. But this was somehow not apparent to my mother. (Somehow the time when I bit another girl because she was allowed to wear a dress and I wasn't didn't clue my mother into the fact that maybe I was a girly girl.)

So for my first lunchbox, instead of buying me one festooned with the likes of Rainbow Brite or My Little Pony, it was one, composed of flattering neon-green plastic, depicting madballs in all their wide-mouthed, buck-toothed, eyeball-enucleated glory, jumping out at a crowd of terrified school children. I was to scared to complain, and merely made it a point to press the pictoral side of the box to my body, hoping to fool my peers into thinking that some product-developer at Mattel was stoned enough to come up with a neon green Barbie box.

The idea of ugly toys always fascinated me. It seems to me that children should be revolted by such inventions as the madball, as I was. I never understood how prepubescent girls found those Cabbage Patch kids, with their cushionoid features complete with pin-sized eyes and obese habitus, appealing. One wonders if indeed advertising could be persuasive, as to catapult these terrible products en masse into public consumption -- and succeed! And if this were the case, how sad it is to think that the (assumed) good aesthetic sense of our youth can be led astray so easily.

Luckily, their attention span is often as ephermeral as their good taste, and such fads fade until VH1 bring them into our recollection, at which point they, all grown up, will scoff at their past temporary insanity, and continue playing with their Furbies.