Missed a day here — apologies for those of you who waited for today’s installment with bated breath yesterday! To make up for it, at some point (hopefully today, but no promises there) we’ll do double duty.
Though we haven’t seen the figure on which he is based yet, Bingo is actually another repaint — this time of Fluffy, the tsunami-pissing dog that makes a brief but memorable appearance in the Creepy Freaks cartoon. Given my incredible lack of things to say about Bingo, it appears that I have difficulty talking about the repaints even when we haven’t yet covered the original versions — but here that simply could be because Bingo is a wolfman-esque dog. I like dogs, but they don’t strike me as being terribly creepy or freaky (Chinese cresteds notwithstanding) or even interesting outside of their personalities and tricks, both of which Bingo lacks because he’s a gamepiece figurine with very little in the way of a supporting story.
Anyway, Bingo is really a nicely-sculpted figure with a lot of detail, but the darkness of the paint job means that most of these are barely visible — I can barely make out his green leash, and I didn’t even notice that animal (or squeaky toy?) he’s crushing until I spotted it on the lighter-colored Fluffy figurine. All of these details give him the potential to be a neat second-tier kinda guy, but even a giant dog (which of course fails to impress given that the Creepy Freaks figures are not to scale with each other) doesn’t really have a chance as far as uniqueness goes when he’s pitted against toilet-head monsters and spooky milk cartons. Sorry, Bingo.
Creepy is also a repaint — again of a character who appeared in the cartoon but has not yet shown up in the countdown. But whereas Bingo is just sort of there, I really hate Creepy. Insect men are fairly standard characters for these sort of monster lineups, but whoever designed Creepy mistook lameness for novelty. Look, it’s a walking cockroach with bug spray! Oh ho ho ho ho how clever! Except it’s really not. I’m not exactly sure what the other instruments are, but I’m not interested enough in him to reexamine the figure and find out. (Maybe that’ll happen if and when we unearth the other version of this mold.)
I even dislike Creepy’s name. I understand that it’s meant to mesh with that of his brother or pre-evolution form — who goes by the name of Crawley — but given the uncertain nature of the collecting process and the apparent simplicity of the game, Creepy Freaks characters really should be able to stand alone. Unfortunately, Creepy requires his twin in order to have any redeeming features whatsoever about him.