Nabisco Picketed Over Monster Toys

By November 1971, the company was getting picketed by the National Organization of Women, who carried signs that said “Sick Toys for Children Make a Sick Society!” And the picketers didn’t show up at Aurora — they went to the headquarters of Nabisco Inc, the cookie company that had just acquired Aurora in May.

There was another New York Times article in December 1971, reporting: “After Six Years, Drive to Ban ‘Torture Toys’ in California Is Successful”. The article says:

“Gov. Ronald Reagan last week signed into law a bill that will prohibit, after July 1, the manufacture or sale in California of sadistic “torture toys”, as well as toy bombs and hand grenades.”

Now, if that effort really took six years, then obviously it couldn’t have involved Aurora’s Monster Scenes, which were released in spring 1971. But once again, Monster Scenes were used as the perfect example:

“However, there are holdout stores that still offer either a few or a full assortment of the plastic Frankensteins, vampires, Dr. Deadlies, mad scientists and “victim dolls”, torture chambers, guillotines, and battlefields wth dead and dying soldiers.”

There are eight items listed in that sentence, and seven of them are directly related to Monster Scenes. Aurora had released the wrong toy kits for the times.

So they tried cleaning things up a bit, to see if it would help. They renamed “the Victim” as “Dr. Deadly’s Daughter” and took the “Rated X for Excitement” slogan off the box. The Pendulum was getting a lot of negative attention, so that kit was discontinued.

Some critics were complaining about Vampirella and the Victim being “naked” because they were molded in pink flesh-colored plastic, and their clothes needed to be painted on. To make it clear that the clothes were already molded onto the figures, Aurora changed the Vampirella molds to red, and Dr. Deadly’s Daughter was molded in hot pink.

But that wasn’t enough to quell the protests, and Nabisco wanted to stop hearing about it, so Aurora pulled all the existing Monster Scenes product, and sold it in Canada, where nobody cared.

Source:

darkshadowseveryday.com