Had I been a little more on my game this month, I would have stacked every week with a horror or monster-themed Toy Commercial Tuesday entry. Instead you get this pair of Mattel Mad Scientist commercials which will hopefully be enough. Above you can see the awesomely gooey commercial for the Mad Scientist Dissect-An-Alien. From the looks of it, you stuff an alien toy with slime and plastic organs only to rip its chest open and let everything pour out.

Meanwhile, you’ve also got the Monster Lab set which gives you a plastic monster skeleton which you’re supposed to build a body around using clay of some kind. Once you’re done with that, you mix a packet of something mysterious in some water, dunk the little creep and let the new concoction eat the flesh away.

Guys, how insane are these toys? I was thinking recently about how kids used to be exposed to scary things much earlier than they are these days (at least in pop culture, not necessarily in real life). When I was a kid you had everything from monster-themed cartoons to toys like Madballs, not to mention a kind of dull, general awareness of slashers like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. Plus, there were horror-like movies that were created in a PG or PG-13 space, but not in a way that felt truncated or less-than. Now, the best you get is a few weeks of Disney Channel, PBS and Nickeloedon programming about costumes and what not, though I will admit, I saw some pretty spooky things on Disney.

I didn’t actually have either of these Mad Scientist toys and probably wouldn’t have liked them back then (I don’t always like getting my hands dirty), but I love the idea of them.