I originally considered this feature for the full month of October, but I've opted instead to concentrate a lot of it towards the end, while I work on a couple more of the video versions and other projects! For now, a non-video post about our beloved Mummy Men, from the Vo-toys brand! I found my first Mummyman in 2007, all alone at a pet supply place in West Virginia, spotting its beautiful big eyeballs from clear across the store.

Mummyman One's body design is kind of shaped like a puffy gingerbread man, with a purple base and raised white bands as "stripes," while its arms and legs just end in red nubs. The head is just amazing, a wrinkly and fleshy grass-green sphere with a O-shaped red-lipped mouth, two black dot nostrils, and two humongous white eyeballs covered in red veins. Nowhere for a pupil; just veins all the way! Like I said in an older review, no way is a dog going to appreciate this fine art!

It was years later that I found an online supplier of Mummymen, and learned there were two different designs! Mummyman Two has a bright white body with thin, black bands, and a slightly smaller torso area with longer limbs, though not by much. The head doesn't even really match the style of one at all, but it's wonderfully odd in its own way; a peach colored cylinder with two immense, tall, oval white eyes, kind of "South Park" eyes, but so much larger they truly fill almost the entire face. The flat top of its head is black, and its mouth is just a little black hole with two fangs and a red tongue, down at the white lower rim of its head.

What INCREDIBLY peculiar little fellas! I'm just still upset to this day that I found a bunch of them at Petco just days later at only seventeen cents each, bought a ton of them, and SOMEhow, SOME way, actually lost them all?! I seriously don't know where they went. I don't think I saw them again after buying them, even. Did someone steal them, or something? I have so little idea, I don't even remember where I was when I realized they weren't accounted for. I don't even remember where I last saw them since purchasing a whole bag full. Where did my mummymen go?!

Thankfully, I still know where my first two Mummymen went, because I put each of them in a little Halloween sock, and then I hung them up in these somewhere in every home I've since had. In 2023, that means they're dangling off a wire that runs across our living room ceiling, most recently hanging to either side of this Metroid.

The only thing I'm truly certain of when it comes to the Mummymen is that I do not at all interpret them as mummies. I suppose MM1 is at least wrinkly looking, and their stripes could hypothetically represent bandages, but they're just such oddball little alien-like critters, and just don't read to me as dried-up preserved corpses.

They're almost so different that I want to think they're unrelated, but that would feel almost sacrilegous. They don't comfortably fit together from an artistic perspective, but they were still intended as a duo, somehow. I feature them in Don't Get Spooked as just a couple of tiny inexplicable monsters. If I were to give them lore, I suppose I'm obligated to work their alleged "mummy" connection in there somewhere, but maybe it's not because they are mummies?

Maybe they're "mummymen" in the sense that you can be a "mailman" or a "cameraman" or a "fisherman." Mummies aren't their species or status, but their business! They make mummies! Or maybe they control mummies? Or deliver mummies? I think I'll stick with "making." And maybe not in the "Egyptian Mummy" sense, either, because these guys feel stranger than that. I'm going to say they simply make you into a mummified corpse in some way. They make dead bodies into jerky. Or living bodies, which (hopefully) become dead bodies in that process, whatever. Where do they come from? What are they? Doesn't matter. They're just the mummymen! The two little guys who will make a mummy of you yet!!!