Monster Allergy

The popularity of the Godzilla films in their heyday did not just lead to homegrown competitors and imitators—as we saw with Yongary and Gorgo, film makers worldwide sometimes made their own attempts at similar monster material. I’ve written about that particular “Monster Boom” period pretty extensively, but a very similar pattern emerged following Pokémon, a later monster-based phenomenon that was clearly inspired by nostalgia for the original Monster Boom. That series’ thundercrack emergence in the late nineties led to a plethora of other media based on the idea of monster collecting and battling, especially in Japan, and I’ve written about some of those as well (you can also find a surprisingly deep recollection of even more Pokémon coattail riders in Daniel Dockery’s 2022 book Monster Kids)–but wouldn’t it be interesting to see how the basic ideas of a monster collecting franchise could be filtered through a completely different cultural lens?

This brings us to Monster Allergy, an Italian kids comics-turned-attempted-franchise that doesn’t outright announce its indebtedness to Pokémon and the other kids monster series of its era, but come on—it’s about “monster tamers” capturing monsters in small objects, and that alone makes the connection obvious. It’s certainly no rip-off, as any similarities largely disappear past those barest of surface elements, and instead follow more traditional western low fantasy storytelling. But regardless of the degree of intention, this does represent a very European take on some of Pokémon‘s core ideas, a kid-focused adventure in a monster-filled world, and In this way, it is to Pokémon what a Gorgo or a Reptilicus was to the original Godzilla.

Monster Multimedia: Monster in My Pocket

In my last post, I briefly touched on my childhood interest in folklore and mythology and how seeing the things I was learning about reflected in the wider culture was a unique thrill—it was an ever-expanding world of fantastical stories and bizarre monsters that felt endlessly rewarding. I’m not entirely sure what put me on that path to begin with, whether it was seeing references to mythology in video games like Final Fantasy or even Pokémon or finding books solely about mythological creatures in the school library (my parents even bought me a massive encyclopedia of Greek, Norse, and Celtic myths at that time), since those things overlapped and fed into each other, and when the Internet came into the picture, that put the whole thing into overdrive. Whatever the real originator of my fascination was, it is still very clear that that stuff can really hook a kid, especially when presented in a way that emphasizes the adventurous and strange nature of those stories and avoids the stuffy academic version of it that may make the youths think Beowulf is just a musty old poem and not the tale of a guy who rips a giant monster’s arm off.

Kids’ innate interest in the creepy creatures of legend has been exploited in pop culture off and on for decades (most of the books I read on the subject were clearly aimed at that demographic), but an interesting example of it from the early nineties were the Monster in My Pocket toys produced by Matchbox and Morrison Entertainment Group, if only because of how direct it was in marketing hordes of mythological monsters as something cool. Clearly taking inspiration from mono-colour collectible mini toys like M.U.S.C.L.E(which were imported Kinnikuman figures, a subject that, because I’m me, I’ve broached elsewhere) that had been popular in the eighties, MiMP came out in 1990, burned brightly for a year or two, and then disappeared off the face of the earth (except, apparently, in some parts of Europe, Central, and South America, and likely thousands of yard sales and flea markets), a veritable micro-phenomenon. Its business strategy was based on tried-and-true methods that still work to this day, cajoling kids into wanting to get as many possible (an early practitioner of “Gotta catch ’em all”), not just by offering a wide selection of different toys in blind or semi-blind packages and then making multiple colour variations of each one, but also by assigning them a “value” (here, a point system printed on the figures themselves) that serves no purpose but to make certain figures seem rarer or better than others based on nothing. It did everything you need to do to drive undiscerning young completists into a tizzy, yes, but I can also imagine that the subject matter also helped propel its early success: collectible monster toys were neat, but these ones were based on “real things”, which gave them an especially enticing angle. It was like one of those bestiaries I read, except in plastic form, which I guess some prefer.

Monster Multimedia: Monster Rancher

The success of Pokémon of course led to a host of imitators and coattail riders, producing a Japanese “monster boom” in the late nineties to early 2000s similar to the one from the mid-sixties, when Godzilla, Gamera, Ultra Q, and several others were all very popular. The big difference between those two eras, though, was that the Pokémon generation was all about the kid fans controlling the monsters rather than just watching them smash things, basically taking the “Friend to all children” aspect of Gamera to its logical conclusion, and so those particular series were all about partnering, training, and battling the monsters like they were martial artists. Having a superpowered creature as your friend and partner was and is, I think, a fantasy of kids just about anywhere, and this stuff tapped into that fantasy in such a way that even decades(!) after that peak popularity, a lot of these games and franchises still have fans.