Haunted with Your Favorite Monsters: Remembering Remco’s Mini-Monster Play Case (1980)

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I can’t let Halloween 2015 pass without re-visiting one of the most awesome Monster-themed toys of my youth.

Way back in 1980 — when I was ten years old — Remco manufactured a line of toys based on the classic Universal Monsters of the 1930s and 1940s. The Remco Monsters set included 3 inch high figures of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Phantom of the Opera, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Mummy.

I knew all these characters from old movie reruns on television, and was particularly enamored with Lugosi’s version of Drac.

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These action figures were cool all by themselves (especially because they were the right size to menace Kenner Star Wars action figures…), but I loved their home even more: Remco’s Mini Monster Play Case, a small, fold-up playset made out of laminated cardboard.  The set was described as a “monster mansion and portable storage case for all the mini-movie monsters,” and it sold for just $7.99.

Replete with “Glow in the Dark Features,” this monster mansion also features “a flip-top mummy’s tomb,” “carrying handle,” “creature cage,” “disappearing lab table with instrument panel,” and a “spooky laboratory set with doorway.

Just as the ads promised back in 1980: “you can almost hear the chains rattle and the hinges groan as the haunted house opens to reveal your favorite movie monster.”

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