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I was absolutely obsessed with action figures as a kid. In the 80s, the shelves of every toy store and K-mart were lined with action figures from every conceivable franchise, and during my childhood I collected pretty much all of them.

One of my favorites was a very small and short lived line from a company called Remco which, by the time I came into existence, was making lots of incredibly bad licensed toys. I’m talking The Monkees, Lost in Space and Star Trek toys that were effectively bootlegs. But, man, they absolutely crushed it when it came to Universal’s Monsters.

The Universal’s Monsters line were 3.5″ action figures — the size made standard by Star Wars — featuring the core characters from the history of Universal Pictures monster movies. We had:

• Bela Lugosi as Dracula
• Boris Karloff as The Mummy
• Lon Chaney as The Wolfman
• Boris Karloff (again!) as Frankenstein’s Monster
• Lon Chaney (yes!) as The Phantom of the Opera
• Guy in a rubber suit as the Creature from the Black Lagoon

These figures were fantastic, nicely detailed and painted with authentically ghoulish colors. Curiously, all of their original movies had been in black-and-white, so the painters of the figures presumably had some leeway as to what skin color Dracula should have, so they went with kind of a pale blue. Worked for me.

The best figures were The Mummy and, especially, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Probably because the models didn’t have to look quite as authentically human, but also because the Creature had these really cool flipper hands and little spikes all over his costume. It was an insanely cool figure.

Anyway, the characters were great, but the geniuses at Remco didn’t stop there. They created a playset, called the Mini Monster Play Case, for the monsters to live in, and, honestly, I never knew quite what to make of it. It postulates that all of the monsters end up living together in a studio apartment with stone walls and a laboratory on one wall. There’s a crypt for The Mummy — convenient — as well as an electrocution table for Frankenstein’s Monster. There’s also a dungeon kind of thing where you could lock up one of the leftover four guys who didn’t get their custom bed areas and a cardboard bench thing that 7-year-old me lost pretty much the first day.

What’s weird is that, as a kid, you get these monsters together in this stupid little house and do what with them? Are they supposed to terrorize each other? There were no other figures in the line, so unless you wanted to have them chase Princess Leia there wasn’t really much for them to do except for sit there and look cool. Because of their close domestic situation, you ended up having them hanging around the two-dimensional paper laboratory set on the wall arguing about who left out the milk or why Frankenstein’s Monster owes a double portion of the electricity because of the electrocutions and all. At least The Mummy had the dignity of some private space even if the marble clashed with the wood-and-stone aesthetic of the rest of the place.

I remember pretending that my Han Solo figure got transformed into The Wolfman, which, come to think of it, was pretty awesome.

Writing about this makes me realize how cool a Universal’s Monsters movie would be where they just hang out and grouse, maybe form a band, get odd jobs. Something like Flight of the Conchords meets What We Do in the Shadows. I’d be there day one.