It struck me as odd that the only time I’ve ever written about Mighty Max toys was in this thoroughly Christmas-related entry, as the series was a much better fit for the Halloween season. So, here we are. Me, you, Mighty Max and October.
Created in the early ’90s by the UK’s Bluebird Toys and distributed in Da States by Mattel, Mighty Max acted as the “brother line” to Polly Pocket. Instead of guiding a peanut-sized Polly through merry misadventures inside beauty parlors and petting zoos, here we guided a peanut-sized Mighty Max through the bowels of Hell. The toys’ horrific slant was the stuff of legend, and once you got past the idea of a titular hero who looked like he could stand in for Dennis whenever he was too sick to fuck with Mr. Wilson, you realized that Max’s whitebread look was done almost ironically. Even in terms of peanut-sized action figures, it seemed somehow amoral to pit little Max against such a bloody, gooey volley of awful beasts.
Forget all you thought you knew: Mighty Max toys were hardcore. The sets ranged from tiny to gigantic, but the scale was always minuscule. Shown above is one of what I’d consider the “medium-sized” sets, titled Mighty Max Challenges Lava Beast, likely as a big fuck-you to brevity.
Mighty Max Challenges Lava Beast was part of the “Horror Heads” collection, as was the more piggish one shown next to it, called Mighty Max Defeats Nightwing. Whereas Polly Pocket sets usually mimicked cosmetic compacts and such when sealed shut, most of the Mighty Max toys looked like disembodied monster heads. The ability to piss while standing was something, but I always looked more to the dueling Max and Polly lines as proof that it was better to be male.
The head cases (they missed the boat by not actually calling them that) popped open to reveal not just tiny action figures, but finely detailed and impressively depraved environments for them to do battle within. These environments were a big part of the toys’ appeal. Whenever Mighty Max challenged Lava Beast, the fight seemed so much more main event level when staged inside a magma-laden terror cave than, say, on the gritty peach carpet of my childhood bedroom.
The Lava Beast set includes three figures: Max, a giant red bug, and Lava Beast himself. (According to an on-package comic, Lava Beast wasn’t the name of the big red monster depicted on the sealed toy, but rather the squiddish purple thing shown above.) The Nightwing set only includes two figures, but since one of them is a demon bat four times the length of Lava Beast, I’m happy to overlook that.
The environments were undoubtedly cooler than the figures, and since Mighty Max was a fairly successful line that produced a whole lot of toys, the scope of creepy environments that Bluebird created was incredible. The line featured twisted robot factories, savage prehistoric islands and everything in-between.
Mighty Max toys always retained their trademark minuscule scale, but the sets ranged greatly in size. There were enormous and elaborate playsets featuring oodles of figures and separate rooms, but there were also sets small enough to possibly survive swallowing. The three shown above, from Max’s Shrunken Heads branch, were among the smallest.
From left to right: Rock Monster, Brainface and Mummy King.
While the Shrunken Heads sets only included one figure (Max, of course), the sculptors built villainous misdeeders right into the environments. While this meant that all battles between Max and Monster X ended in a tie, at least some sense of “good versus evil” remained.
The real appeal of Mighty Max toys was in their transportability. I was a little long in the tooth to be toting toys to Grandma’s house by 1992, but when I still was young enough to actually do that, it always felt pointless. Recreating Vader and Luke’s duel in four-inch plastic worked in many settings, but Grandma’s couch wasn’t really one of them. Mighty Max toys, on the other hand, could be brought anywhere and stay just as awesome. It was just one of many things they had in common with Sugar Gliders.
Posted by Matt. E-mail me!
Ghosted by 
Like I said before in the Christmas thread, I had the Cyborg skull version. 
I have soooo many Might Max sets. I really liked collecting the mini figures of Max is slightly different poses. I think I had one that had a green magnifying glass, but I might just be hallucinating. My favorite mini head was the white face with the green respirator. I wish they had used that design in a full sized figure. Even though it goes against everything the series tried to be, I would have loved full-sized, 6″ figures from the cartoon.