Rude Ralph!

From X-entertainment, "It was probably 1986. Long after the summer season had peaked, my parents took me down the Jersey shore for one last look at the Wildwood boardwalk before it went into hibernation for the fall and winter months. I'm sure I was one bitchy kid during that trip, because many of the boardwalk hot spots had already closed, or if not, were working with severely reduced hours. With so few methods available to entertain their bratty son, my parents went with the faithful standby: A casino arcade. Those were still open, and there was nothing I loved more than feeding goofy slot machines rolls of quarters and getting back far fewer plastic tokens.

As the child of gambling addicts, I was Boy Fortunate. My family always racked up serious points at casino arcades. They always played enough slots, "Pop-A-Ball" poker and various other ridiculous cash-wasting games of chance to get me something good. After blowing enough money to buy a planet and having the hired help count up our points, I was free to shop around the shelves, window displays and glass cabinets for prizes. On this day, we didn't have enough for a video game or anything, but I could certainly snatch up something more luxurious than paper fans, plastic spider rings or fruit-scented erasers shaped like dinosaurs. And that's how I met Rude Ralph.

High up in one of the casino arcade's prize displays was "Rude Ralph," created by Axlon in 1986 to cash in on the success of another bunch of weird kids' toys -- "Madballs," from AmToy. The Madballs line was all but a runaway hit, surprising thousands in the toy industry by seeming more like Taiwanese dollar store crap than the kind of thing Toys 'R' Us would clear out poorly selling action figures to make room for. That same year, Mattel's collection of Boglins proved that this "gross toy" fad wasn't going to be limited to an audience who only liked replacing wiffle balls with drooling monster balls. It was something bigger. With inspiration from those previous creations, Axlon sought to outdo its teachers by creating a gross toy that was a bigger production, with a higher price point and with more special features than any Madball or Boglin would've ever dreamed of putting on its Christmas wish list. In Axlon's view, it was easy to be gross, but being gross in six different ways at once took talent.

As the box says, "He's totally gross!" I've spent the better part of my life remembering Rude Ralph as a nearly basketball-sized creature, and only now do I realize that my hands were just a lot smaller back then. Still, it's on the large side -- like a kickball that's only just begun to mysteriously shrink. Unlike Madballs, Rude Ralph was made from a rubber so rock hard that I still swear that it was some kind of secret government-issued experimental rubber. This technically meant that we couldn't use him as any kind of sports ball, but that never kept my friends and I from trying. If you're ever looking to get better at dodgeball, try playing a round with Rude Ralph in place of Whitey. The threat of getting pegged in the back with this thing will get your game goin' better than horse steroids.

Some toys always felt more "alive" than others, and Rude Ralph was one of them. He didn't have a body, no, but he had a head, and it was almost as big as mine. I can't remember what secrets I confided in Rude Ralph, but because he was only capable of saying one of four phrases, I know what his responses were: Burrrrp, Pfffffft, Guuuurgle and Generic Squishy Sex Sound. Yes, the toy could talk.

After yanking out his pull-string eye, Rude Ralph made a bunch of disgusting noises as his eye rolled back into place. As a child, there were few objet d'arts better than a ball that burped at people.

All toy pull-string mechanisms eventually die, and the Rude Ralph shown above no longer speaks. Well, actually, he does speak, but the noises that come out now sound more like a frog trying to recite our great nation's pledge than a monster ball belching and bragging about it. In fact, it's almost rare for Rude Ralph dolls to have survived the years even with their eyes still attached to their heads. Pull that thing out too many times and with too much vigor, and you'll be standing there holding an eye on a string with no monster head left to call home.

Obviously, the ability to make shitting and burping sounds was Rude Ralph's top feature, but he had more than that going for him. From hick teeth to the giagamundo wart on his nose, Rude Ralph came with more wrinkles, more scars and more fake orange hair than any dolls the world had previously known. Despite all of this, he wasn't very popular. Not in the slightest. Truth is, I may be the only person in the world to have ever owned a Rude Ralph doll. At least, I'd feel more special if that were true.

I don't know why Rude Ralph never caught on. Maybe it's because there wasn't a line of Rude Ralphs. You couldn't really "collect" Rude Ralph toys, because kids who got one on their birthday could attest to owning the entire collection, even if they hated the thing so much that they offered it to an older friend and neighborhood bad influence to blow up with firecrackers. Once you had Rude Ralph, you were done.

Rude Ralph also suffered by being good for very few things. Yes, it was awesome to make him burp, but like most things do, the gimmick grew tired. Compare that to Madballs. You could collect Madballs, Madballs worked both as action figures and as sport balls, and Madballs were soft enough to hurl at people without getting punished. You had to really use your imagination to get extra miles out of Rude Ralph, and toys that cost 15.00 should be awesome enough for us not have to.

Shit, why am I coming down on him? Maybe it's because I'm writing an article connected to Halloween on a sunny day with a damned overflowing kiddy pool on the lawn across the street. It's not Rude Ralph's fault. He was a terrific and terrible toy that made every meal at the Family Table more amazing just by burping at my sister as she scooped rice onto her plate. She loved that.

Doesn't he look like that smack-talking shit in Zathura who called the giant robot a biotch and made him fetch juice boxes?

Rude Ralph was my friend. I even used one of those long, cardboard comic book storage boxes and a trenchcoat to make him a body once. It wasn't a very good body, but Rude Ralph knew that it was well intentioned. I miss you, Rude Ralph. Not the one in these pictures. The one I originally had. The one that lost its last good eye and slept next to my feet."