The Design Genius of M.U.S.C.L.E. Men

John Brownlee
Magenta
Published in
8 min readAug 4, 2017

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How playing with the ’80s figurines sparked a lifelong fascination with how things get made.

OOne afternoon last summer, my mother called to tell me the basement of my childhood home was on fire. The house survived, but between the fire, the smoke, and the water damage, most of the childhood stuff I had stored in the basement was ruined.

The majority of it — toys and comics — was junk. But one potential loss haunted me. So a couple weeks after, I descended into the burned-down husk of my basement, and like an alchemist combing through the immolated ruins of his lab, searched the ashes for a special chest: a red plastic box, technically designed to store LEGOs, filled with a few dozen pink homunculi, each standing no taller than two inches.

When I found it—and better yet, discovered that the figures inside hadn’t melted into a puddle of protoplasmic goo—I breathed a sigh of relief: The rest of the junk could go, as long as my M.U.S.C.L.E. men had survived.

Soon after, my wife and I had a night in. We cracked open a bottle of wine, smoked some Girl Scout Cookies, and when we were both in good spirits, I said: “Let’s look at my M.U.S.C.L.E. men!” She humored me, and later admitted she was glad she did. We spent the next few hours taking out each little wrestler, discussing its design, and separating out our favorites. It’s since become one of our favorite nights together. These weird, kaiju-style wrestler toys—sold in transparent plastic garbage pails and briefly in fad in the mid-1980s—ended up generating a conversation that was, in turns, surreal, funny, and bizarrely stimulating. Since then, I’ve been thinking about what they meant to me, not just as the emotional artifacts of a long-lost childhood, but as intellectual totems that stood along the path to my own development as someone for whom design was important.

Any discussion of M.U.S.C.L.E.—which technically stands for Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere—needs to start with the toys’ color. The vast majority of the figures are pink — unusual, to say the least, for an ’80s toy aimed at boys. This, however, is a throwback to their origins as a line of collectable erasers. This eraser-toy pedigree is important: Like an eraser, the material and color of M.U.S.C.L.E. figures have everything to do with why they are such satisfyingly tactile objects. Even 30 years later, M.U.S.C.L.E. figures are undeniably pleasant to hold, feel, smell, or drop in your pocket. The softness of the semirigid plastic and the clean, wafting sweet smell of the rubber tip of a Number 2 are immediately calming somehow.

Mattel released M.U.S.C.L.E. men in America around 1986. But with characters like Keyman (a man made entirely out of combination locks), Planetman (a dude whose body is an anthropomorphic solar system), and Paper Mummy (a robot with a head made out of a roll of toilet paper), their Japanese origins are clear. Tell me any of these guys wouldn’t look totally at home smashing down skyscrapers and fighting Ultraman. Their cheap, solid construction—no moving parts, perfect for mass production—pegs them as costing no more than about a quarter each retail and a penny a pop to manufacture. Their diminutive size also gives a hint to how they were originally distributed: in the clear plastic eggs of a counter vending machine.

As to how they came from Japan to the States, I like to imagine it went something like this: Some toy executive from Mattel over in Japan on business forgets to bring his son back a souvenir and desperately fills his pockets with the little figures using his loose change in the lobby of Narita Airport. He lucks out: His kid loves ’em, and in the clocktower boardroom of Mattel, Inc., he makes the pitch of a lifetime:“The Japanese kids are going nuts over these crazy wrestler guys! My kid loves ’em too! And they cost peanuts to make, so they’re all profit!” he says, spraying handfuls of the pink plastic figures across the conference table’s gleaming walnut surface.

His boss picks up one of the figures. A CEO cigar chomper from the Sidney J. Mussburger school of executive toy management, he squints at it cynically. “Well, wrestling’s big right now, and this one guy looks kinda like Hulk Hogan. Still, they’re pink,” he says, his upper lip quivering in disdain. “Pink’s for girls.” (Remember, this is the ’80s, a different time.)

“Look again!” the businessman winks. “They’re not pink. They’re flesh-colored. Or, at least, that’s what we’ll say in our marketing copy. Nothing girly about that.” As far as he’s concerned, it’s just a branding problem. “If it worries you so much, call ’em something hypermasculine then.” He thinks for a second, then snaps his fingers. “I got it: How about M.U.S.C.L.E. men?”

This conversation may not be word-for-word accurate, but read this excellent Mental Floss article on the history of M.U.S.C.L.E., and you’ll see this imaginary skit is remarkably close to the actual thought process that brought the brand to America. Once they were here, M.U.S.C.L.E. figures were a smash hit, with industry magazine Playthings naming them one of the 10 best-selling toylines of 1986. The pink color of the figures continued to irk Mattel, so they experimented with different hues like neon green, magenta, and orange, but no one liked them as much; the slightly harder plastic of the colored figures didn’t have that same pleasant eraserlike tactility as the pink toys they were trying to replace. Switching up the colors, though, was the only evolution of the toy that Mattel ultimately wanted to do. Since they never fully owned the property, instead licensing Kinnikuman from Japan, Mattel wasn’t fully invested in M.U.S.C.L.E.’s success, and in the end, the figures proved a short-lived phenomenon.

By 1988, what had been one of the country’s hottest fads became another footnote in toy history, at least as far as the M.U.S.C.L.E. brand is concerned. Yet, look in the toy chests of any kid—before or after—and you’ll find toys of its type: Micro Machines, Polly Pockets, Pokémon, Sluggies, Shopkins, and many, many more. And they’re worthy of serious consideration.

Why? Kids, in my experience, have an innate appreciation of design. Even in today’s digital age, what child doesn’t have his or her own little wunderkabinet filled with arrowheads, baseball cards, magic nose goblins, or some other hoard of cherished objects, neatly arrayed and sorted? As we grow up, many of us Marie Kondo ourselves out of our predilection for collecting, but as kids, we’re practically fetishistic about it. What drives kids to collect isn’t mindless cupidity; it’s depthless curiosity, an inexhaustible attention to detail, an inherent faith in systems, and a thirst for infinite variety. The same deep passions that drive a 10-year-old to collect Garbage Pail Kids or Pokémon also drive Jony Ive, Jessica Helfand, Walter Gropius, or Zaha Hadid to pursue their art. Not all collectors become designers, but I would be willing to bet there is not a designer on Earth who is not a collector.

When I look through my box of M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, then, I’m not so much mooning over the toys of my youth, so much as I am revisiting my design awakening. It was by poring over these figures that I first came to ask myself the questions that lead to a broader understanding of design and the man-made universe as a whole: How did this object get here? Why is it designed this way, and not some other way? And what are the rules and systems that define it?

When my wife and I spent an evening over my LEGO box full of M.U.S.C.L.E. men, this is how we discussed them — in almost archaeological terms. “This guy, he’s one of my favorites,” I remember saying, pulling out a lithe, athletic knight in a tank-top who I’d been particularly fond of when I was a youth.

“Oh, he’s interesting,” my wife said. “Do you have two of them? I saw another knight elsewhere, but he wasn’t as skinny.”

I shook my head. “No, that’s a different guy. A lot of M.U.S.C.L.E. figures fall into design genres, like ‘knight’ or ‘biker’ or ‘robots’ or ‘multi-armed.’ They’ll often have identical design aspects, but just one or two small differences that mark them as a different figure: a slightly different build in the case of a knight, or one less arm. It probably kept production costs down, since the sculptor could just modify existing molds to make new figures, and kids would just mentally group similar figures into ‘teams.’”

My wife nodded. “That makes sense. Look at these two figures: they’re part of different ‘teams,’ but they both have identical legs. It looks like maybe they mixed-and-matched parts to create variety.” Then she held up another one of my favorites: a muscular titan named Parthenon with a body comprised of doric columns. “Is this guy also part of a team? I haven’t seen any others like him.”

I shook my head. “No. That’s sort of the genius of M.U.S.C.L.E. The designers weren’t afraid to pad out the line with a bunch of similar figures, but they also knew that there needed to be some figures who were totally unique to obscure the system. So you get these awesome one-off characters, and if you’re a kid, you’re like, ‘This guy’s special,’ and you treasure this one piece of mass-produced plastic like it was somehow created bespoke, just for you.”

A mass-produced object that feels unique. This is the beautiful contradiction—the strong-weak force—that spiritually bind together every great industrial design. An Eames chair has it. An iPhone has it. And, for me, a M.U.S.C.L.E. figure has it. It’s easy to dismiss any so-called “intellectual” appreciation of such toys as unthinking nostalgia, but I think it’s deeper than that. Whether they’re M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, Barbie dolls, or Transformers, toys deserve to be treated seriously by adults as design objects, because it is through loving such objects that children around the world eventually come to speak the language of design.

So pay attention to what kids are playing with. Sit down with them, pick up their toys, and ask them to tell you about them. Try to learn from what they’re playing with, as they are no doubt learning from it. No one who loves design should ever outgrow playing with toys. Especially when they’re as rad as this.

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writer, editor, journowhatsit. Design, tech, and health is my beat. Editor-in-chief of Folks (folks.pillpack.com). Ex-Fast Company, Wired, and more.