Ron English’s Telegrinnies Make Me Grin

Speaking entirely personally here, Ron English’s Telegrinnies were the sleeper hit of my Comic-Con 2010 experience. While the majority of my central nervous system despises surprises, a tiny area of my brain delights in a sensory shake-up. I’ve always been on the fence about toys involving broad strokes pop culture appropriation, so I wasn’t expecting to even really like Ron’s Telegrinnies. Instead, it was adoration upon visualization.

The toys are eight inches of shiny, candy-colored vinyl produced by Made by Monsters with perfect paint application. Like the Teletubbies on which they are based, each figure sports a different “antenna insignia”. They all have the matte-skull signature “grin” of Ron’s Grins series, plus a transparent red rib cavity. They are, in a word, wonderful.

Thanks to the power of Twitter, I was able to find someone else similarly smitten with these enough to split the $175 pair. In a perfect world, I’d have the whole smiling set and smile right back at them. Isn’t that what it really comes down to with art toys? This glossy green piece of plastic makes me feel something–and that feeling is happy. Perhaps that’s the intended effect: subverting the typical programmatic reaction to Peanuts characters or Barney the dinosaur (or Teletubbies) by giving them a “scary” skeletal smile, which somehow only actually makes them seem sillier and cuter. Call it the visual version of binaural beats: your brain combines your expectations with the creepy vs. cute waveforms your eyes are absorbing. Um, yeah. Or something.

I know many people were similarly surprised to see me walking the Comic-Con aisles with what a quick glance would appear to be a Teletubby. My pal Frank Kozik expressed it the most eloquently by saying simply that “Teletubbies are for girls”. Maybe they are, and maybe cigarettes are for idiots, but when it comes down to it, those of us who make stuff, make stuff we like, and those of us who buy stuff, buy stuff we like. And in case you didn’t notice over the weekend by being in San Diego or reading the blogs, there’s more than enough STUFF to go around. I like some stuff that smorks, and some stuff that grins.

Ron English was around all weekend signing at several booths. He was even cool enough to re-sign something for me after I smeared it seconds after he was done. Nice guy. I anticipate a Meet Your Maker interview in the future…