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| This advert appeared in British comics during March 1970, utilising the same artwork that appeared on the backs of promotional packets |
Fifty years ago, a minor alien invasion
was under way across the UK. No, it wasn’t the Autons, or even the
Silurians, both of whom were being dealt with over on the BBC by Dr.
Who and the forces of UNIT... these invaders were small, brightly
coloured, and had concealed themselves inside innocent-looking
packets of breakfast cereal – Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, to be
precise. The invaders styled themselves Crater Critters and had
already taken America and Australia by storm...
These colourful, comical creations were
the work of Australian plastics manufacturer Rosenhain and Lipmann
(R&L) who had specialised in cereal premiums since the late
1950s. One of their innovations had been small, snap-together plastic
kits, requiring no glue, but their range of solid, moulded comical
characters was to prove even more popular. Many such series were produced
over the years, each of which typically comprised a set of six or
eight different characters, occasionally derived from film or
television copyrights, but often entirely original. If the internet
is anything to go by, the most popular of all these creations, by a
very long way, were the Crater Critters.
There were eight Crater Critters in
all, and in their British issue, they came in a variety of colours:
lime green, pale blue, orange, purple and magenta (not brown,
as one website claims). The designs were both charming and completely original – but
while the internet is very good at collating imagery and basic
information on the characters, there is no record of who designed
them.
In their original 1968
American/Australian issue, the Critters’ individual names were
alliterative: Curly Critter, Cranky Critter, etc. In Britain, they
were re-christened, somewhat randomly, with a variety of wacky or
space-related names. The whole range was illustrated on the backs of
the Sugar Smacks packets in which they were to be found, with the
same artwork also featuring in colour advertising which began to
appear in British comics and magazines around the beginning of March,
1970, with the above example appearing on the back cover of TV21 & Joe 90
dated March 14.
Despite the advertising, it's just as
likely that I found out about Crater Critters from the
cereal boxes themselves. Late in 1969, Star Trek’s Mr. Spock
had usurped Joe 90 as the cover star on the packaging of Kellogg’s
Sugar Smacks (as can be seen from the inset at the top of the ad),
and I’d been collecting a range of Star Trek badges that had
been offered over the past few months. Unusually, there were only
five badges in the range (previous sets had run to six), and the
promotion lasted long enough to enable me to collect all five
examples. Even with the full set completed, there was no reason to
stop eating Sugar Smacks (apart from the obvious), and in due course,
a packet must have arrived blazoned with the new promotion. Should
any doubt have remained, the colourful advertising would have been
more than enough to convince me to stick with (and, indeed, to) Sugar
Smacks for the forseeable future.
The first Crater Critter to come into
my possession was a friendly-looking creature called Glubber. He was
shaped like an inverted comma, with thin, bendy arms, and appeared to be
standing on one foot. If anyone had told me I’d still own this tiny
plastic creation half a century later, I might not have believed them
– although I’d probably have derived a kind of comforting glow
from such foreknowledge. My own personal Glubber was moulded in orange
plastic, and as the weeks wore on, it soon became apparent that
orange was the most popular colour for Crater Critters. Next to
arrive was either Gloob (two arms sprouting, tree-like from the top
of his head) or the endearingly daffy Upsy-Downsy, whose face was the
wrong way up for his body. Upsy also sported a black plastic boater
which could (wow!) actually be detached from the character. Excessive detachment
and re-attachment eventually caused the plastic connecting tip to snap off, at which point the hat
became a permanent, glued-on fixture. It must have been very
good glue, because it’s still firmly stuck there, fifty years
later.
Collecting Crater Critters became, it’s
fair to say, something of an obsesssion during the spring of 1970,
and to this day, my memories of the time are suffused with the
honey-sweet scent of freshly-opened Sugar Smacks. There were eight
Critters to collect, and only limited time in which to do so. All my
friends from school had jumped on the bandwagon, and new acquisitions
were proudly shown off in the playground. It soon became apparent
that not all Critters were created equal, with some examples turning
up in much greater quantities than others: the worst offender in the
‘swappit’ stakes was Lunartic, whose simpler mould probably made
him easier and cheaper to produce than more complex creations like
Buggsy Backbone and, holy grail of the entire range, King Crater.
Buggsy was immensely difficult to find:
he never showed up in our Sugar Smacks and in the end, I had to make
do with one I was given by a friend. His right arm had dropped off
and been flimsily re-attached with glue (Buggsy, not the school
friend), but like his fellow beings, he remains in my possession to
this day (albeit the broken arm has long since vanished).
King Crater, however, acquired a
near-mythical status. No one I knew had even seen one (although the
same friend who gifted me Buggsy often claimed to have done so). I’m
sure I even heard stories at the time, suggesting that King C had
been the victim of some manufacturing accident or otherwise prevented
from going into circulation. Whatever the reason, King Crater eluded
me, but I pursued him to the last.
By the end of May 1970, when the
promotion was winding up, I had amassed an otherwise complete set of
Critters: Gloob, Glubber, Upsy-Downsy, Lunartic (all in orange); Miss
Venus (purple), Jodrell Jim and Buggsy Backbone (pale blue). Of the
other colours shown on the box artwork, I had never encountered any
examples and would not do so for some forty years.
The Critters finally went the way of
all good cereal promotions – pushed aside to make way for the next
offer (disappointingly, this took the form of a ‘send in the packet
tops’ promotion, which was rolled out across all Kelloggs’
cereals in spring 1970). But, in the best Spanish Inquisition style
there was to be one last chance (and only one). I remember the day
with unusual clarity... warm, hazy sunshine... it was the late spring
bank holiday, and we’d walked into Mere Green, a villagey
collection of shops about a mile from where we lived. For some
reason, on our way back, we called into a smallish grocery store
which we didn’t normally visit, and it was here that I discovered a
scant few packets of Sugar Smacks which still carried the Crater
Critters promotion. A packet was duly acquired and, on arriving home,
opened up to reveal the identity of its inhabitant...
I couldn’t believe it. Inside the
small cellophane wrapper was nothing less than a ... third...
THIRD! example of the ubiquitous Lunartic. Whereas his previous
incarnations had both been of the orange plastic variety, this final
Critter came in a brilliant shade of magenta that I hadn’t
previously seen. Naturally, I had hoped against hope for King Crater,
and this had been the last chance to find him... but the King had
slipped through the net. It would take a different kind of net to
finally snare this Critter...
My collection found a home in one of my
dad’s used Embassy Cigarette packets, which I carefully marked up
with the warning: ‘Crater Critters! Do not junk in bin!’ (my use
of ‘junk’ as a verb pre-dating its adoption by TV archivists a
couple of decades later). There they remained for, well, the
forseeable future. Decades, in fact.
It was a similar craze of the late
2000s that reminded me of my Critter collection – kids were going
mad for a set of tiny, stylised monsters whose appearance strongly
suggested the R&L originals. Spurred by the sight of them, I
retrieved the Critters from the drawer in my former bedroom that had
been their home since 1970, and duly began to wonder whether I might
still complete the collection. By this time, ebay had arrived, and
had already proved its worth as a resource for finding lost or
previously unobtainable items from childhood. How about Crater
Critters? A quick search revealed a small number for sale, mostly in
the United States, and mostly deriving from a much later production
run originating in Mexico where a set of original moulds was still
being used to crank out copies in garish acid colours. The colours
aside, the most obvious way of identifying these imposters was by
their lack of headgear – Upsy-Downsy had no hat, and King Crater,
no crown.
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| The King finally rejoins his loyal subjects... |
Indeed, it was during these online
searches that I was afforded my first sighting of King Crater as
anything other than an illustration; but I needed something more than
a downloaded image. I had to own an actual example. Setting aside
considerations of the number of points on his crown (collectors
obsess over such nuances), I finally bit the bullet and shelled out
something like 25 dollars for an original example from America (there
were none to be found in Britain, suggesting that there really had
been a shortage). The King took a couple of weeks to come, and
finally arrived, wrapped in cotton wool, in a neat little cardboard
box of the kind in which small geological gems are often sold. His
crown had only one point remaining, but I didn’t care – a door
that had been left open for forty years was finally closed; and in a
nice bit of symmetry, the King was orange – the same colour as my
first Critter of all those years ago.
In the years that followed, I gathered
a few more examples of the Critters from ebay auctions, finally
clocking up examples of the colours that had eluded me all those
years ago – lilac and lime green. The internet had not only
completed my collection, but provided some background to the Critters
– I learned of their Australian lineage, and also saw pictures of a
Japanese set, which omitted two of the originals but added a pair of
oriental-styled replacements. What I also learned was that I was not
alone in my fascination for these ephemeral plastic beings – they’d
been popular with kids around the world, so much so that Kelloggs had
issued them in numerous territories (in America they even had a
second wind, with a reissue series appearing in 1972). All of which
is somewhat extraordinary when you consider their purpose – a
short-lived promotion intended to shift packets of sugary breakfast
cereal. There was no Crater Critters film, TV series, comic, or
indeed any other form of merchandising – and yet, in their own
small way, they had conquered the world... without leaving the
breakfast table.