The Little Bendable Gremlin Creatures

Some time in 1984, my mother brought me home a delightfully weird little critter with pink scales and an owl-like face. Its official name was "Ooggy," but she misunderstood it as just "Ug." Whatever the name, all that mattered to my not-quite-two-year-old self was that his pincer-like hands and bendy body made him the perfect companion to hobby-bug, which usually served as his mount.

I never once saw any of the other Gremlin Creatures in stores, but sometime in the early 2000's I would snag the entire set off ebay for a perfectly reasonable $35. Nowadays, you're lucky to find even one of them for that price! I wound up reviewing them all in a short webpage not long after, but I've taken brand new photos and rewritten my tribute in 2023. First, we'll go over my original little pal:

OOGGY

Child-me went through a disturbing phase of attempting to cut up his own toys, and my original "Ug" or Ooggy still bears a few of these scars. I'm so sorry Ooggy :(

At first glance he appears to be owl-based, but on closer inspection he's something far stranger than any bird. His small body is covered in large fishlike scales, his huge spherical head is covered in finer, more pebbly bumps, a pair of segmented yellow horns frame his massive, bulging green eyes and he has four tinier horns on his scalp. Weirdest of all is the tapir-like trunk that curls down over his mouth, but amazingly enough, I somehow never noticed he had a mouth until the first time I took photos for the internet. A simple, thin smile peeking out from just under the trunk. Instead, I'd interpreted him as a sort of mouthless creature, the trunk almost like the face shield of a cicada, and noticing his smile turned my entire reality upside-down forever. Sorry, Ug, but I reject the existence of your mouth. I deny your reality.

TIGGY

I guess Tiggy is named for his little catlike muzzle, but the rest of it is clearly not of this Earth. Tiggy is a wrinkly thing with martian feelers on his head, "ears" that look more like round stereo speakers on the sides of his head, big fishlike eyes and long-fingered, humanlike hands with pointed nails. The little kitty cat smile is cute, but he's otherwise kind of frightening!

UGGY

I'm sadly indifferent to this one's simplistic design, but I can't deny it has a bit of personality. Uggy is a furry muppet-like one with no extraneous claws or tentacles or weirdness, but the mischievous sneer makes you want to characterize Uggy as the biggest troublemaker. This is the one in the hypothetical cartoon show that always drives the moral of the day by lying or cheating or otherwise being the biggest jerk of the friend group.

MOOKY

This is another fairly plain one, but Mooky is at least a little weirder than Uggy. Basically an alien monkey, with a serene expression and large spectacle-like white eyes with no pupils. Kinda haunting! I should mention that each design actually comes in two colors, and Mooky comes in either an intense pinkish orange or a slimy martian green, and I'm definitely more sold on this design in algae flavor.

OKKY

Now we come to what is almost objectively the coolest Gremlin Creature. It's a cephalopod Gremlin Creature! Okky has large three-toed feet, a thinner body than most of the others and longer, thinner three-pronged arms, all lined with little round octopus suckers! Okky's face has small, reptilian eyes surrounded by even more suckers, and a fan of short, thick tentacles hiding the presence of any mouth. I like the extra large one in the center, like a big "nose," giving off the kind of tapir/elephant vibe I was originally getting from Ooggy. Maybe it's just the beard-like vibe of anything with face tentacles, but Okky comes across as the oldest and wisest of the bunch. The dad. Or maybe the mom. Or neither or both, I don't know, I don't know Gremlin Creature biology or cultural norms.

BLOBBY

Ooggy remains the most special to me personally, and I called Okky the coolest, but my favorite design & concept combo of the bunch is the downright ghastly Blobby. A Gremlin Creature made entirely of dribbling goop, with eyes on long, segmented stalks! The inclusion of black sockets at the base of the stalks, a large nose-like protrusion, and a black mouth covered by dribbles of ooze give this one the most uncanny and grotesque visage of the bunch. When I focus on the eyes at the end of the stalks I see a cute, inquisitive critter, but when I focus on that melting half-human face in the center I see an almost sinister and conniving ghoul, the one that would have probably been typecast as the main "bad guy" in that imaginary cartoon show, so I'm glad there wasn't one, because I wouldn't have wanted the TV to decide any of their personalities for me. I'm going to say Blobby is actually the nicest one there is. And maybe so is Uggy, the one I flagrantly profiled as the troublemaker earlier. None of them are rude, actually. All of the Gremlin Creatures are angels. They are beautiful and gentle angels.