It's Ludo from Labyrinth!

Jim Henson's gentle beast named Ludo, rendered as a (much-too-hairy) plush toy.  And just as in the 1986 film Labyrinth, Ludo is still laconic as ever.

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Honestly, I haven't seen the film yet, though we (still) have the Famicom game cartridge (sent by my uncle from Japan) and have played it hundreds of times but just got helplessly lost in the maze, forever stunned by a swarm of evil fairies.  Maybe you're supposed to watch the film first so you know what you're doing, or you'll just end up going in circles.  The Japanese characters in the video game weren't any help either (Apparently, Labyrinth the video game was released only in Japan).  

I remember playing the game back in the late 80's/early 90's and thinking to myself, golly, I'd like to be in a real, actual maze too, and see if I can find my way out in time.  I didn't really say golly in my head, but there you go.


Thankfully, like all good game titles with stand-alone appeal, Labyrinth is frustratingly itchy fun in its own right, and so watching the film isn't exactly a prerequisite for enjoying the game, because hey, I enjoyed it.


Oh, I have an idea.  Maybe they can make a sequel to Labyrinth, and cast Jennifer Connelly again.  An older Sarah, with her younger brother, both grown up now.  Let's keep the Goblin King ageless and still androgynous though in the hands of David Bowie.  I hope they kept the puppets dust-free all these years.  But with Jim Henson long departed, who's going to direct it as beautifully (I've been told) as he did?  I'm lost.

Soft and Mental

So we already got stuffed toys in the shape of bacteria and subatomic particles plushies.  

Next up, stuffed toys with mental illnesses.

Meet Lilo, for instance, the blue hippo diagnosed with OCD.  How do we know he has OCD, apart from his insatiable obsession with his jigsaw puzzle?  I'm not really sure.  I'm guessing Lilo also washes his hands thirty times a day and folds the blanket ever so neatly and perfectly.

And there's Dolly, the split-personality sheep can't decide whether she's really a sheep or a wolf in sheep's clothing.  (Actually, she's cloned, but let's not tell her.)

These sick-in-the-head plushies are from German toy company Paraplush--which also felt it their mission to throw in the mix a severely-depressed turtle, a hallucinating snake (fixated on his rattle), a paranoid hydrophobic croc, and a megalomaniac raven named Dr. Wood.  Hmmmm.


Each stuffed toy comes with a medical history and a prescribed treatment plan.  A nice harmless toy, if you can take a joke, but apparently there are some who aren't amused and instead offended.

Of course we all know psychiatry is chock-a-block with other mental disorders--some too morbid to objectify and immortalize in a stuffed toy.  There's exhibitionism, narcissism, catatonia, kleptomania, anorexia nervosa, Munchausen syndrome, psychopathy, and necrophilia--to name a few.  So we're guessing Paraplush has a few more stitching and controversial stuffing to do.

Subatomically Yours

So they've made plush toys in the shape of microbes and pathogens.  Cool.  Next they're going to commercialize on subatomic particles (since no one holds the patent on them) and turn them into stuffed toys too.

Wait, someone has already done that.

Welcome to Particle Zoo.  They're--according to the website--hand-made subatomic particle plushies from the standard model of physics and beyond.  Beyond, meaning you don't just get the usual electron, proton, neutron, for that will be terribly boring.

Apparently there are other subatomic particles out there which you may have heard during your college physics classes, assuming you didn't doze off from the aircon and the nice comfortable chairs and the fact that there's 300 of you in the auditorium so how can the professor single you out?

But back to the Particle Zoo stuffed toys.  There's dark matter, tachyon, quarks (bottom, top, strange, charm, up--their differences, I don't know), higgs boson, tau-neutrino, muon, tau, etc--all turned into cute, not to mention geeky plush toys. 

Particle Zoo obviously look nothing like the real subatomic particles they're supposed to be imitating (unlike the GIANTmicrobes plush toys), but they make up for it in the weight department.  Particle Zoos plushies have weights according to their real counterpart's mass--so you can line them from lightest to heaviest (after you arrange the GIANTmicrobes from trifling bother to lethal).

There's Romance and Microbes in the Air

Deadly is the New Cute?

The 5-second Rule states that it's OK to eat food that has fallen to the floor because bacteria still haven't contaminated it.  A scientific study on the 5-second Rule (or 7-second or 10-second, depending on your cowboy tendencies ) was even awarded by the Ig Nobel Prize.  The findings: you're safe from E. coli, so go ahead and pick up and eat that fallen food.


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Microbes--now there's a nice stuffed toy for kids.  They're cute and morbid, cuddly and gory, and very, very educational--all at the same time.  And now that Valentine's day is around the corner, we all could use a stuffed toy that, for a change, is NOT corny, sappy, or too effing adorable.

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Common cold virus

From the sick mind of ex-lawyer-turned toy entrepreneur Drew Oliver, these GIANTmicrobes plush toys are, well, inspired by viruses and bacteria, albeit magnified a million times.  (For illustrative purposes, each stuffed toy comes with a tag of the photomicrograph from which their appearance is based, and some clinical facts about the pathogen in question--the educational bit.)

From the common cold virus to something as icky as Chlamydia or  Herpes to something as gruesome as the Black Death to something as romantic as the Kissing Disease (Epstein Barr)--GIANTmicrobes has it.  (BTW, All caps GIANT, lowercase microbes.)  And there's even Mad Cow Disease.


Now, why would you want to give/receive a plush toy in the shape of a deadly virus?  

I suppose this poses a problem for people still in courtship stage.  If a guy forgoes the usual teddy bear and instead gives the girl a stuffed toy resembling a bacteria, should she take offense?

Call it exposure therapy, call it our undying fascination with death, call it just another ironic product of Generation Irony.  Call it whatever you want, but there's a certain endearing quality about viruses rendered all hairy and soft and harmless.  Personally, I wouldn't mind having my own cholera virus sitting on my desk, lovable and fatal.




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Don't know what your favorite pathogen is?  Flip open your Merck medical textbook; there's always a handsome bacteria you might like in there.