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For decades, Shrinky Dinks have delighted kids across the world by giving them the chance to -- literally -- cook their favorite television and movie characters in the oven. Each of the many kits included sheets of plastic with etched outlines of your beloved heroes, and after coloring them in, you'd cut out the characters and let them shrink down to a more novelty-level size for a few minutes in a 350 degree oven. That's almost, almost one degree for every day of the year. WHOLE LOTTA DEGREES PALS, A WHOLE LODDA TINY ASTERISKED CIRCLE THINGS. When finished, you were left with pint-sized "figurines," but more importantly, you were able the stretch the successive length of time spent playing with a single toy far longer than you could with most regular action figures. Then there's that whole deal about being allowed to fuck with the oven so young, so make no mistake -- Shrinky Dinks were seriously top shelf, ace card toys.
If a cartoon show or kiddy flick was popular, you could always count on someone buying the rights to make a spinoff Shrinky Dinks kit. The ones shown above are just a small sampling from a specific generation -- you could go back or further a decade and still find kits based on pretty much everything, and even today, Shrinky Dinks remain a popular standby in most toy stores. Actually, they might be at their very peak of popularity right now. As people debated Matthew Lillard's performance in Scooby Doo, I noticed the more pertinent issue of every toy store on every planet in every galaxy being absolutely covered in Scoobo Doo Shrinky Dinks kits from corner one to corner eighty-six. Consider them a quieter Slinky -- just as perennial, but without the frequent cultural mentions.
My first experiences with 'em takes us back a long, long time ago, so far back that I can't even remember if I'd grown my dick yet. My grandparents were watching me for the weekend, and while on a grocery trip with Granmutha on Avenue U in Brooklyn, she saw an easy way to get me through the afternoon in a box of Masters of the Universe Shrinky Dinks. We sat there coloring the plastic sheets in and cutting out the characters in a strangely Kodak moment that we've yet to duplicate, and right before we could fully establish this newfound bond, the idiot went and overcooked my Teela. We've talked since, but things aren't the same.
It occurred to me that some of you might not have ever seen a Shrinky Dink in action, so just talking about 'em won't shed the proper amount of light on how great they were. No, looks like I gotta show you. Time to break out that box in the attic with the "DON'T OPEN TILL NEW TECHNOLOGY OFFERS NOSTALGIC JOURNALISM PATH" sign written on it in black marker.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shrinky Dinks! Bold, important. Made by Milton Bradley in 1990, I finally opened the sealed box to offer you a firsthand look. Today's article details the process of Shrinky Dink cooking, through words and pictures and lots and lots of coffee. I love being a turtle.
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The plastic sheets are translucent, not so much "window clear" as just translucent enough to tell if there's something alive behind them. Like many of the others, the kit included a package of colored pencils with which to do the obvious. The damn fools only threw in a single green, and considering who I'm drawing, looks like it's back to eating pencils because I absolutely cannot find the sharpener. The rest of the colors do little to keep all of the realism intact, as I'm left without the means to illustrate Donatello's purple robber mask and kneepads. I'll live, because I love being a turtle.
The instruction manual assures us that the colors become more vibrant in the shrinking process, so you needn't worry if I seem to have missed a tiny patch of skin on one of the Turtles' arms. Oh, and these plastic sheets? They still sell blank versions so you can create your own brand of Dinks, and they're cheaper than most of the other toys out there. There's even a stupid Shrinky Dink oven available, though that kind of robs kids of the opportunity to, like I mentioned, fuck with the oven.
Without the right pencils for Donatello's bandana, I elected him as the guinea pig in my experiment to see if the Ninja Turtles could've rekindled interest in their formerly dying toy line by painting the heroes in a rainbow of colors rather than by continuing to repackage them in different wacky outfits. Donatello's given pose fits the mood, too -- kind of a "Hey guys, notice anything different?" thing. Works out.
Using the scissors as carefully as you'll ever use scissors in your life, the next step is cutting the characters off the sheets around their birthright black dotted lines. This is definitely the "bathroom break" step for curious onlookers -- tedious, boring, and misleadingly seeming to up the chance of someone bleeding. It's an essential process for the person actually making the Dinks, but if you're just watching, now's a good time to flip channels.
When finished, grab a nonstick cookie sheet. Or a stick cookie sheet covered in nonstick foil. Or a stick cookie sheet covered in stick foil topped with a few dribbles of nonstick flour, something oddly suggested in the instruction manual, swear to God. After preheating the oven to extremely toasty temperature heights, shove the sheet in as carefully as you can, because no matter how much I beg and implore, I know you're not gonna wear the floral-theme oven mitts hanging in the kitchen.
The manual says to leave the things in there for four minutes, but I'd suggest making a few spot checks. You never know with ovens, they've got minds of their own. I'm sure some ovens will fry the Dinks to levels of ugliness in 90 seconds flat, while others get lazy and spend half an hour making the dinkies shrinky. Plus, you've gotta do spot checks anyway -- while the characters cook, they go through an incredible transformation that first entails a bit of heatstroke acrobatics, and it's worth watching.
I know it's tough to tell from the picture, but the Turtles are all swirling around in various stages of half-curls, with several of them appearing to swallow themselves whole chest-first. What's incredible is just how mangled they get -- I really didn't think mine were going to come out okay, and scrambled to figure out which step I must've done incorrectly. The manual relieved my stress: don't worry, they'll flatten, and when they do, they're done!
After icing my hand for a few minutes because I tried to grab the Shrinky Dink figurines off a cookie sheet that was roughly six million degrees hot, it was time to see the final results. The kit comes with a set of plastic stands, removing the need to lay the things against walls to keep 'em upright. After they cooled, indeed, they were all perfectly flat. More importantly, they were a whole lot smaller and shinier...
Viola! Shrinky Dinks! Ninja Turtle Shrinky Dinks! Notice how my multicolored Donatello clearly leads the pack? Mirage and Playmates totally missed the boat. I've put them in front of various spices so you'd have a size comparison -- they're each under two inches tall, but have grown much thicker and more durable. I did the chew test -- they didn't break.
Shrinky Dinks were always one of my big favorites, and I'm glad to see that newer generations haven't pissed all over 'em in favor of more electronically enhanced afternoon activities. The beauty part is, these things can change right along with the fads. While things like The Smurfs and Masters of the Universe were represented during my childhood, it can change to whatever's currently hot. If a new cartoon about a lamp that was afraid of light bulbs became popular, as stupid as it sounds, the lamp would soon be a Shrinky Dink. They'll be here forever. The world is still worth living in. I love being a turtle.
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