The Creepy Crawlers Bug Maker: a weirdly popular toy of the 1990s. Making your very own plastic bugs to scare your parents, scare your friends, and even scare your teachers. So says the commercial:

But what I didn’t know is that this toy was actually first sold in the 1960s!

Also known as the “Thingmaker,” I’d liken this toy to the Easy Bake Oven. But instead of baking delicious treats like brownies and miniature cupcakes, you bake plastic insects and bugs.

And as exciting as this sounds, Mattel eventually pulled the original Thingmaker from store shelves. The oven would become way too hot. Kids were burning themselves left and right. And even more wild, the liquid plastic squeezed into the bug molds? Turns out it was toxic!

In the late 1970s, Mattel released an updated, slightly safer version. And a couple decades later, the toy became widely popular once again. Made of plastic and considerably safer.

Did you have a Creepy Crawler Bug Maker of your own? I never had the desire to have one, but my neighbor did. And I can remember the hype around it. I watched him make some of the bugs, but what did we do with them once they were fully cooked? Beats me. This was the 90s, so these bugs had wild colors and some even glowed in the dark. What I can be sure of is how quickly he became bored of it, and I never saw the bug maker or the bugs it made, ever again.

Another thing I didn’t know (again, making bugs wasn’t my thing), this toy spawned an animated series by the same name.

It’s fantastic that a novelty toy like this managed to come and go over several iterations. So in the spirit of Halloween, plastic spiders and cotton cobwebs and all, it might be time to dust off the old Creepy Crawler Bug Maker. That is if it survived childhood, plus a few decades. 🕷️