A million years ago (re: April of 2020) I was presented with an unlikely Monster Squad Mystery™ that set a fire under the collector that dwells inside of me. I wrote about the initial bits of the mystery before, but to summarize, a very cool mutual on social media (Twitter at the time) took it upon themselves to try and figure out if the plush dog Scraps, Phoebe’s beloved toy featured in the Monster Squad was a true crafted prop or an actual toy one could buy back in the mid to late 80s. As it turns out, the plush dog was in fact a real toy manufactured and sold by the Russ Berrie company. The dog was named Puddles, and after Kelly (the rad mutual) alerted me to this fact, I immediately rushed to eBay to try and track one down. Which I did, and then wrote all about this adventure.
But this was just the beginning of the Monster Squad Mystery of Scraps™. You see, I’m one of those weird collectors that will save certain eBay searches for decades, even after I’ve found and procured the things I was searching for, out of pure nostalgia for the hunt. so two years after picking up a Puddles plush to have as a centerpiece in my Monster Squad collection, I stumbled upon a new auction for an insane Russ Berrie plush that seemed too awesome to be true. The auction was for an Official, vintage Scraps plush dog, complete with the original plastic Russ Berrie plastic logo tag, as well as a paper tag proclaiming the plush to be Scraps™, Mascot of the Monster Squad. When I scoped this auction I was floored, both excited and incredulous. I did not initially believe that this official piece of merchandise was legitimate. I wrote a thread about it on social media (archived here) as a sort of window into my madness. It was written as an invitation into my collecting madness, meant as a real-time adventure that you could take with me to see if together we could solve this mystery. At the start of my thread I was very skeptical for a bunch of reasons, namely the asking price ($4,999.99).
Here’s an excerpt:
“I was all ready to write a really snarky post about how some jerkwad stumbled upon my article & crafted a fake tag that they bent up to make it look vintage so they could try to grift some poor sap out of $5k for an rare Monster Squad piece. (Jokes on them, I don’t have $5k.)”
Now, dear reader, at this point in the story, 2022, there wasn’t a whole lot of information about all of this readily available online. Before Kelly started her dig there were no blog posts or website articles trying to figure out the origins of Phoebe’s plush dog from the Monster Squad. Though the film was certainly a cult classic, it was rare to see articles about the movie (outside of the junk I was writing for over a decade at that point) that weren’t just love letters to the flick. But after Andre Gower’s Wolfman’s Got Nards documentary hit, the conversation online started to change a bit. But even for that, no one was publicly digging into the esoteric bits like identifying the specific T&C shirts Horace wore, the brand of the compound bow that Rudy steals and uses to slay Dracula’s brides, or what brand and style of plush dog Phoebe was carrying around the entire film (until she chucks it at Frank when he’s getting sucked into limbo.) Nobody was talking about Scraps in this way online until Kelly solved the mystery and then I wrote about it. I was all ready to write off this new auction as a grift. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I looked a bit deeper in the photos and something caught my eye. It’s one thing to print up a Monster Squad paper tag and use one of those little plastic clothing tags to affix it, but it’s a completely different thing to embroider a fabric tag to sew into the butt of the plush, and this one was very clearly labeled as Scraps and not Puddles.
Taking a closer look at that fabric tag in the new auction was damn convincing. Here’s the Puddles tag up next to the “Scraps” tag from the auction…
The phrasing was all correct, the patent number was right, placement of the item numbers, etc. But there was one small detail that’s off. The Russ logo butterfly seemed too high and a bit too large. Here’s some other Russ tags from around 1986 for comparison, including my Puddles tag…
Still, there are a couple of explanations for this. There are some variation in the official fabric tags for one, but there’s also this story from Monster Squad director Fred Dekker, who reached out to me when I initially wrote about the plush toy back in 2020…
The prop department (someone in Stan Winston’s shop?) had mocked up some prototype Scraps plush dolls. He mentions that they were two, and that they were not brown like the Puddles used in the shooting of the film. If the prop department made the fabric tags it could explain the flub. But my next clue about whether or not this auction was a fake was the paper tag, the one declaring this toy to be a Mascot of the Monster Squad. My first takeaway here was the use of a rare version of the Monster Squad logo on the tag, specifically the color scheme. Only a super nerd like me would know that this version of the logo (in this color scheme) was only used once before the poster and movie was finished in a rare project announcement advertisement from 1986. I mean, this had to lend some legitimacy to this plush because that is such a wildly niche design pull.
At the time I had to wonder, was the use of this color scheme because the crafty seller (who possibly faked the tag) paying that much attention to my Monster Squad shares on social media, or was this in fact a very real piece of rare Russ Berrie Monster Squad merchandise? My brain was still wired to think that this was a fake, probably because I’d just been made aware of the existence of the Puddles plush a couple years prior, and because I assumed that if this Scraps plush was real, it had to have popped up somewhere before, discovered by some enterprising horror fan who already had it in a shrine. Though I consider myself a very knowledgeable fan, I’m in no way arrogant enough to think that I know everything there is to know about the film. So what in the hell was going on.
Of course, after writing a huge thread on socail media in the midst of my excitement, the last thing I did to try and solve this mystery was just searching “Russ Berrie Scraps Plush” on eBay. It should have been the first thing I did, because there were upwards of twenty other listings for the toy, all with the same intact Scraps sewn-in tag on the butts. At this time, the only thing that was rare about the $5k auction was that it had that Monster Squad paper tag. So I found the cheapest, cleanest looking version of an Official Scraps plush and convinced this was a real rare promotional item, bought one. And when it arrived I quote-tweeted my original thread about the crazy auction to show that I had a Scraps plush in hand.
Mystery solved!
Or was it? Two things happened after I bought my very own Scraps Plush. First, another mutual private messaged me to let me know that right after I shared that I found my own Scraps, they also bought one, and theirs had the Monster Squad paper tag too! I hadn’t looked through all of the available auctions thoroughly enough and I missed a fully complete one. The second thing hat happened was that I created a couple new saved searches, one for “Russ Plush Scraps” and one for “Russ Plush Scraps Tag”, in the hopes that at some point I might finally find another version of the toy that still had the Monster Squad paper tag.
For the past four years I’ve been more than happy with my Scraps purchase, and had made a collector’s peace with missing an affordable version that still had the paper tag intact. I was lucky enough to finally meet both Ashley Bank (who played Phoebe in the film) and Tom Noonan (who was Frankenstein’s Monster) at a horror convention and I even brought Scraps for some photo ops with both of these lovely people.
Ultimately, the tag is not that important. It’s just a piece of paper that only counts as some sort of validation for the most hardcore of hardcore fans. Would I buy another Scraps if I stumble on one that’s less than $100 and it has the tag? Fuck yeah I would. But it’s not something I need in my life. And I’m cool with that. Cool enough that as part of a process of getting to a point as a collector where I’m trying to actively deescalate the need to buy stuff all the time, I deleted all of my weird, niche-y saved searches on eBay. I still follow the blanket “Monster Squad” search, but I’m not actively hunting for anything specifically.
Then, this past week, a friend alerted me to another social account where the owner shared their new acquisition of a tagged Scraps plush. The collector inside was nudged and my first thought was “GODDAMIT I MISSED ANOTHER TAGGED SCRAPS!!!” But I calmed down, felt happy for a fellow collector that snagged something cool and was going to move on with my life. Except that there was something annoying about the description that this person had put on their social media share. They way they framed their find was kind of annoying and pretty arrogant. Paraphrasing, but it basically said “this is mine, it’s awesome, and you will never be cool enough to have one because it’s super rare and blah blah blah, <insert assumption about the history of the piece, that it was an unreleased movie tie-in sample>, blah blah blah”. My hackles were raised, but I was also curious and it awakened the Monster Squad Mystery of Scraps™ a bit. I was curious why they made the assertion that it was an “unreleased movie tie-in sample”, because I’ve seen a ton of Scraps plush toys pop up on eBay over the years. I have no definitive proof or knowledge of how these Scraps came to be, or how they apparently showed up in stores at some point and eventually made their way to homes all across the country (based on auction locations, I do know that these are not being sold only regionally or by the same folks.) So what did I miss that this guy found out?
I asked a few questions, and made an assertion that I didn’t think that the toys were samples (based on the sheer amount on the secondary market.) The dude was nice, but firm in his stance (on it being a super rare sample) and now I have a bunch of questions again. He stated that the tagged ones were samples, and that all of the others (with the Scraps butt tags) were just released in Russ’ soft toys assortments. I tried to get him to clarify this information, but he basically said that he got the information from a facebook post that Fred Dekker made about the plush being a sample, and then he did provide his tracking (date-wise) of all sales of the Scraps plush with the Monster Squad tag over the years. By the by, the one he bought himself was the aforementioned $5k one on eBay. Now I’m not dunking on this dude, we’re both fans getting whatever scraps (har har) of information we can with the online sources we have. He clearly subscribes to Worthpoint (he’s a pretty prolific 80s/90s toy seller) and the sales dates of all eBay auctions for the past decade and a half are available there (as opposed to eBay itself which purges that info, even though they sell it to Worthpoint.) And on the face of it, Dekker’s facebook post seems like a pretty solid bit of data. I will add, that I’ve actually talked to Fred a bunch over the years, and a lot of his memory of the specifics of the films, particularly when it gets to the nitty gritty of the marketing and promotion, is not the greatest. Again, not a dunk on Dekker, it’s just the reality that he isn’t a fan of his own film the way that folks like me are. His perspective is vastly different and more emotional (just watch his bits in the Wolfman’s Got Nards doc to see his complicated relationship with the movie.) This was a project/job that he did 40 years ago. And it failed on a lot of levels. He didn’t squirrel away a room full of file boxes of information and ephemera. Hell, at one point he reached out to me to get a copy of the script for the film because he no longer had one at the time (or at least didn’t want to scan his hard-copy if he still had one.) When I broke down and asked him about the Scarps plush stuff, way back in 2020, he only had vague memories.
So this brings me back to the Monster Squad Mystery of Scraps™ and how it would be possible to get more definitive information on the release of the toy, and the relative rarity of that silly paper tag. Is it rare because only a few tags were made as samples, and these samples somehow made it out into the world (but not to folks like Dekker or Ashley Bank)? Or are they rare because all of the Scraps plush toys had them, and they were a smallish batch of toys released as a re-branding of the existing Puddles plush and most folks/kids ripped that tag off and threw it away as any of us WOULD DO with a plush toy we bought at retail for our kids? This is what I’m talking about when I get to the niche of collecting. Like, who the fuck actually cares enough about this ridiculous detail except me and maybe a few other people? The normal person inside of me is screaming “It’s rare, no matter the reason, and if you keep obsessing over these details they will become a cancer that eats you from the inside.” The collector inside is screaming back “THIS MATTERS!!!” as he molds a flat-top mountain out of mashed potatoes.
Of course I want to know the definitive answer to this mystery,but it’s probably not out there.
My last clue, the last possible thing I could think of that might shine some light on this query is, has there ever been plush of this dog, with the Scraps butt tag, that has had a standard Russ Berrie tag (instead of a Monster Squad tag) sold on eBay? I ask this because I’ve seen complete Puddles plush toys that have the two Russ tags (the plastic brand logo tag that both Puddles and Scraps tend to have) and the description paper tag, but I have yet to find a Scraps with a basic Russ paper tag. I looked and I’ve only found one auction on Worthpoint that might have one, but the pictures of the auction do not showcase the actual Scraps sewn-in butt tag (it only lists Scraps in the title of the auction.) So was the seller of this auction a Monster Squad fan that knew to call a Puddles Scraps, or was this a legit Scraps with a standard Russ paper tag? According to the dude who bought the $5k Scraps on eBay, there are only 5ish confirmed Scarps with Monster Squad paper tags out there. But I’ve yet to confirm a single Scraps with a regular Russ tag. So which is the rarer item? Which one of these points to or supports a side of the sample vs. small retail release debate?
Who knows.
Who cares?
Sigh. I do.
