Entertech & LJN Toys: Spit Balls toy line Review (1988)

Oh the 1980's...how I love the strange and weird things you contributed to the toy world.. What never ceases to amaze me is just how many different random toy lines exist out there that I am continually discovering every day. I grew up during the big fad of Madballs, but as they were gross toys I never could have any of them. The one concession I had was the Madballs Head Popping Action Figure version of Skull Face as he was just a skeleton and not anything gross like Slobulus or Bash Brain. What's funny is there was an entire line of similarly sized crazy ball toys out there that I could have gotten instead, had my mother or my 8 year old self known about them.

This line I only discovered back in 2013 while a friend of mine & I were in a local retro toy store. Inside a bin of random crap I found one of these Spit Balls called Sgt. Spitz and I had no clue what it was from. Only "1988 LJN Toys" stamped on it's reverse side was the only clue I had. My friend said "Oh! That's a Spit Ball! I had those when I was a kid." and then the game was afoot. After a few quick eBay searches I found a few MOC sets and quickly bid on three of them. One was snagged out from under me, the cooler set as it had a Jack-O'lantern & Shark Spit Ball in it (what an awesome pairing that was!), but the other two I acquired and am now reviewing for you today.

So, without further blathering, let's jump right into Spit Balls!

These guys are great, why did no one want to buy these back in 1998???

Contents! What do you get??
Two Spit Balls per pack and that's it! There were a total of 12 produced and divided between 3 different teams or factions which I will get into below. The two 2-packs I'm reviewing contained Shades (a beach ball) & Spitz-Skull while the other contained Frank N-Spitz and Kicker (a soccer ball). They come carded on small blister cards with FIVE whole Spit Balls Points!

5 Spit Balls Points...my ship has finally come in!

Why? Because every toy line back then had to do this so you would feverishly stock-pile them like a squirrel in a blizzard only to find out the line was cancelled and these were as useful as wet toilet paper. As far as I know, there were never any promotions or mail-aways so these are really just nice to look at if not anything else.

Okay cool, tell us about 'em!
There is no story or world for the Spit Balls like there was for Madballs, and maybe that was the reason why the line was not a smash success? Each of the 12 Spit Balls are divided up into three different groups:

The Wacko's!

The Beasts!

The Jocks!

And that was the most we had to work with. Are they all on the same side and these were just classifications OR was each group against the other? The world may never know...

My favorites right off the bat had to be Jack O: Spitz and Lockjaw so I was most annoyed when I lost the bid for them. I love Halloween and a shark-shaped ball creature is just an added bonus. Next time eBay...next time...

Okay, so let's look at the actual toys now: the sculpts all all of these are great but you can see how they cut corners here & there to save on sculpting costs. The backs of every single Spit Ball are exactly the same with a little square sculpted on the bottom. Why? So you can stand them up on the table. This blew my mind. Where as my Madballs roll all over the place, here LJN solved the problem with a little flat square for them to balance on. Brilliance in it's simplicity.

Kicker (Front View)

Kicker (Side View)

Kicker: Just a soccer ball that appears to have taken one to many kicks to the head...ball? The sculpt is really fun and they even incorporated one of the black Pentagons of the soccer ball design to give him a nose. It's a clever touch that really adds a a lot of character. Only downsides are I think the red paint from his tongue started to leech into the right side of his face leaving a little pink hue and the rear of him does not have the soccer ball design painted on. These totally ruins the illusion that this is a soccer ball and I really wish they had a larger budget for paint applications.

Shades (Front View)

Shades (Side View)

Shades (Rear View)

Shades: Out of the 4 here, this one is my favorite. So much character and expression on his face. Plus his sunglasses show his eyes by use of clever paint applications. This was a great touch and really gives the illusion that they are real plastic or glass lenses, especially as they easily could have just left them blank. The attention to detail was very present in some of these Spit Balls, the sculptors definitely had fun on this line. Unlike Kicker, LJN chose to paint the 2 large orange sections of his ball on the rear of the sculpt, so this does look more like a complete toy and less like one they sent out half-painted.

Spitz-Skull (Front)

Spitz-Skull (Right Side)

Spitz-Skull: Part of the "Wacko's" group of Spit Balls, this is your typical skull type of sculpt. Again, like all Spit Balls only the front is sculpted but it was done in such a way that it appears the rounded rear of the ball is just the back of the skull, so it somewhat blends together nicely. Spitz-Skull has tiny purple dots for eyes with gray surrounding it to make them look either hollow or sunken-in and it works well. His mouth is sculpted in a sort of 'grin' making him look rather insane...or just really giddy. They painted him a gold tooth (because why not?) and he squirts his spit not out of his mouth, but out of his nose-socket. That was clever, they did this again with Sgt. Spitz who squirts his spit out of the tip of his cigar. Gotta love ingenuity!

Frank N-Spitz (Front)

Frank N-Spitz (Left Side)

Frank N-Spitz: An interesting take on Frankenstein's Monster, this one is your stereotypical green color with bolts on his....neck? Since Spit Balls are basically disembodied heads, the sculptor still tried to give him his signature neck bolts, and this actually works. I just wish they were painted and thus stood out a bit more. Frank here has black eyes with tiny red pupils and an expression on his face that is more of...sadness then anger or rage. He seems rather placid, just living his un-life and minding his business. His hair is painted gray with a very high and tidy cut to it typical of most Frankenstein's Monsters.

Unfortunately he also succumbs to the 'rear-ball-look" all these Spit Balls have. What really distracts from the design is that the change is so abrupt leaving the hair to sort of pitch towards the center of his head and then vanish into a large, green sphere. Out of the five I own, this one ruins the illusion the most, and really does not compliment the sculpt at all. Sgt. Spitz has his green helmet painted all the way to the back, Shades has all his orange quarters painted, but by leaving it blank here makes it seem like he's emerging from a ball instead of being a ball. The real saving grace of this sculpt is the placement of his spit squirt hole: the center of his forehead. Designed to look like the stitches along his forehead have begun to separate, the water squirts from here instead of his mouth and it's a perfect hiding spot if you just want to display this as a Frankenstein's Monster head and not use it as a Spit Ball. Touche' LJN.

How to work a Spit Ball really was very simple, as is depicted in this drawing from the back of the card:

It's amazing they had to go so far as to explain this...

...I think we could have figured it out.

Oh what ever would I have done without this. I

Should I try to get this brand new?:
Absolutely, if you can find them that is. These show up far less frequently then the licensed Horror & Ghostbusters sets but keep hunting for them to see if they turn up, they are worth the wait. On card their price can fluctuate based upon the seller and how much they want or need to make on the sale. I believe my carded samples cost me $15 each which was not too bad given how rarely they show up. Finding them loose is not a bad idea either as the paint they used is very durable since it needed to flex with the squishing of the Spit Ball. My Sgt. Spitz toy still had a very decent amount of paint coverage for a toy that probably had been bouncing around a toy box for the better part of 2 & a half decades, so if you see some loose snatch'em up!

So what do you really think about it?:
These guys are fun, and if the price was right back in the day I may have bought these up like crazy. They're small, squishy, they fit in your pocket AND they squirt water. With amazingly fun sculpts that have a lot of character, I think these really could have found a nice little niche for themselves up near the front of stores by the cash registers. I guess people were just not into the whole idea by 1988 especially as Madballs was already gone. Good line that did not get nearly enough attention.

Check out me de-carding Frank N-Spitz and Kicker as well as showing off Spitz-Skull and Shades in the video below!