Trash Bag Bunch
Galoob's tiny monster figures came sealed inside miniature trash bags. You dropped the bag in a sink, it dissolved, a tablet inside fizzed like Alka-Seltzer, and a Disposer or a Trashor floated up out of the foam. It was 1991, Earth Day was cool again, and you never knew which of the 36 you'd get.
The Trash Bag Bunch was designed by the toy designer Mel Birnkrant, and it grew out of a fight in front of his own house. Around 1991 he had spent years, alongside his neighbors and the River Keeper John Cronin, opposing a proposed landfill near his home, and they won. Out of that came a toy pitch he and his partner Andy called The Garbage Bag Gang: "tiny Garbage Bags with Bio-degradable 'garbage' that when dissolved in water releases a Disgusting Ugly Mutant Pest." The presentation to Galoob was a single drawing and a display box he called the Dump Display, a garbage-heap scene filled with a dozen little bags stuffed with toilet paper. "There were no monsters, nothing!" he wrote. "Those were left to the imagination."
Galoob had a shelf of robot, alien and monster figures it had not figured out how to sell, and the bags were the answer. The company swapped the real garbage bags for ones that dissolved in water and added "an Alka Seltzer like effervescent tablet that fizzed dramatically when dropped in water." Legal worries about the name turned the Garbage Bag Gang into the Trash Bag Bunch, and the artist Daryl Cagle worked on the packaging. The card-back story set two factions against each other: the Disposers, who defended the environment, and the Trashors, alien monsters who made pollution and were tossed off their home planet, Garbigo, by Professor Garbof. There were 36 figures in the original run.
The line sold through Galoob's 1992 and 1993 catalogs, with a second series and a "Grip 'n Dip" play set, and the 1993 catalog was marked for international sales only; a Trash Bag Bunch II appears to have been sold only in Sweden and Denmark. Birnkrant, who had stepped away once the design was done, later found a photo of all 36 on eBay and judged that "when all the bubbling and fizzing was over, the figures that appeared were never disappointing." He called it "quite possibly the best product I Never did." For kids, it was the pleasure of the mystery bag and the fizz, years before anyone called them blind bags.
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