Blurp Balls
Squeeze the grinning monster head and it spat a ball across the room. ERTL's 1991 Blurp Balls were the gross-out toy in the Madballs mold — a squishy creature you loaded through the mouth and fired at your friends.
ERTL released Blurp Balls in 1991, riding the early-'90s wave of deliberately disgusting toys that Madballs had kicked off a few years earlier. Each one was a squeezable rubber ball molded as a ghoulish creature — you pushed a smaller ball into its gaping mouth, gave the body a hard squeeze, and the projectile popped back out with a surprising amount of force.
The line ran to a set of characters with names built entirely for the gross-out — Retch-a-Rat Tomcat, Spittooey Sooey, Tyrannosaurus Retch, and Boney Tossteeth among them. It was a short-lived novelty and the paper trail on it is thin; today Blurp Balls survive mostly in collector listings, kept alive by the fans still hunting a complete set.
Similar items
Creepy Crawlers
The oven where kids baked their own rubbery bugs and threw them at siblings. ToyMax's Creepy Crawlers used a lightbulb-powered mold oven — safe enough for the 90s, still hot enough to feel dangerous — and the smell of baking Plasti-Goop became one of the decade's most specific sense-memories.
Nickelodeon Gak
Mattel's stretchy, squishy neon compound that made a loud fart noise when you squished it back into its star-shaped container. Named after what the Double Dare crew called the show's on-set slime messes, Gak's genius was the noise—which was the entire point for most kids.
Sticky Hands
A stretchy rubber hand dangling from a string that you slapped against whatever surface was closest — a table edge, a sibling, a locker. Sticky Hands lasted about three weeks before they accumulated every piece of lint and hair in a three-foot radius and stopped sticking to anything.
Foam Disc Shooter
The foam disc shooter was the 1990s answer to playground warfare — a handheld blaster that launched soft foam discs across the yard with impressive speed and distance. Multiple toy companies jumped on the trend during the mid-90s, each claiming their foam discs flew fastest or farthest. The discs curved through the air, were harmless to catch, and sparked countless epic indoor and outdoor battles.