'From the Craters of Outer Space...'

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.

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.