Aaahh!!

Nickelodeon's "Aaahh!! Real Monsters!" had all sorts of interestingly weird characters, but some of my favorites only ever appeared once, despite being students at the school where every episode took place.









"Slimebucket" only appeared in one episode and had a couple of throwaway lines, but his entire concept is at least as interesting to me as any of the show's central characters. A living monster that just happens to look like a bucket full of slime? I like how the whole bucket has a sludgy texture, so it's obviously organic, and I like how a little slime is always coming out his mouth. He spoke with a heavy, wet lisp, and seemed to be a bit of a jerk. A lovable jerk.

Another one-shot monster was "Megavolt" here:







This cute little guy was only brought out to power a television, and looks like he's made entirely of wires. I guess I just generally like weird object monsters with stalk-eyes.

Dr. Chaos

Dr. Chaos was a notoriously difficult NES game that I couldn't make heads or tails of as a kid, but boy did I ever love the cover art:



In particular, I was fascinated by this little guy:



Is his weapon attached to his umbilical cord? It looked that way to me as a kid, and it still does. As far as i know, he doesn't appear in the actual game anywhere, but I used to draw him all the time. Wish I could find those.

LEECH CHORUS

Despite its hamfisted flaws and some grating scientific inaccuracy, "Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest" was one of my favorite animated movies as a child and I'm still pretty fond of it, but one very particular moment always delighted me more than anything else in the film: LEECH CHORUS.



The little guys show up near the end of a pretty memorable musical number about predation. It's never really explicit that they're leeches, but what else could they possibly be?



It's just too bad that the song is cut so short in the final product. The soundtrack version has TWICE as much leech chorus! Someone tried to concoct this extended music video, but they just threw in some random non-leech clips to fill the extra space, so you'll have to shut your eyes and IMAGINE the leech chorus:


ARE YOU IMAGINING?

More mutant neopets

So I've already talked about how neopets.com betrayed me once before, but the mutant chia is far from the website's only instance of something memorably badass getting buried and forgotten:




Here, we have the aborted "Mutant Aisha." This beautiful design was uploaded to neopets around the same time as the mutant chia, but was never released at all. They did eventually release a very different mutant Aisha which is fairly cool in its own right (it has tongues down its back and three mouths, for starters) but I'd have adored this crazy bug-eyed chestburster-cat.


Goodnight sweet prince :(





Next, we have the similarly aborted mutant bruce. This snot-dripping, eerie-eyed penguin looks like it was meant to replace the mutant chia, and was in fact uploaded to neopets shortly before the chia's horrible makeover. It even has some similar battle poses. Alas, it was deleted from the servers, and the mutant bruce available today is only about half as creepy.


The mutant "Usul" here is a pet that DID see release, and was changed the same day as the chia. The modern mutant Usul is a gothic, purple critter with three eyes, drawn in a reasonably neat style but nowhere near as creative or gross as this warty, hairless pusbag. THIS is what I think of when someone says "mutant." Sadly, I didn't save any of its other poses.