FRISWELL'S FREAKY FEATURES: Ugly Buttons

Some months ago Alan Friswell, the bloke who made the CFZ Feegee Mermaid and also the guy responsible for some of the most elegantly macabre bloggo postings, wrote me an email.

He had an idea for a new series for the bloggo. Quite simply he has an enormous collection of macabre, fortean, odd and disturbing magazine and newspaper articles, and he proposed to post them up on the bloggo.

Here’s another freaky feature, although this one should perhaps be subtitled: 'Reasons that I became the balanced and well-adjusted individual that you see before you # 1.'

As I’m sure you can imagine, a large percentage of my childhood years were spent--thanks mainly to the tolerance and indulgence of my Mum and Dad--watching Harryhausen films and late-night horror movies; haunting the museums in South Kensington; reading horror magazines and super-hero comic-books; making my own monsters; and building a small zoo in my parent’s back garden containing frogs, toads, various newts and salamanders, and a large grass snake, which--creepily, I suppose, to the uninitiated--ate baby frogs with ghoulish enthusiasm.

Perhaps it’s just the old chestnut of viewing the past with rose-coloured specs--whatever idiot thought that one up--but the shops of my childhood seemed to be positively overflowing with grim and gruesome jollies, freely available to kids--things that, if you tried to sell them to children now, would see you swiftly carted off by the thought police for contributing to the corruption and subsequent delinquency of a minor.

Yeah? Well, stuff that! As part of the freaky feature feature--you know what I mean--I’ll be dropping a few of the terrifying, unsettling, and sometimes downright nauseating toys, comics, picture cards, and model kits of my youth right into your laps, so you can fully appreciate just why I’m so normal…So here's the first one.

When I was about nine years old a new novelty appeared in my local newsagents. They were called Ugly Buttons--a series of badges that came in paper packets, featuring horrific and gruesome images of death, destruction, and lots of other great stuff. The badges were huge--over two inches across--and seemed gigantic in my small hands. They were originally produced in America in 1967, but came over to Britain years later. Does anyone remember them? Here's a link to an Ugly Buttons site

http://www.normansaunders.com/UglyBts,01.html