`Browsers gobble up Mercer native’s bogus site`

By Joe Pinchot
Herald Staff Writer

When Americans were blasting off to the moon, all the kids on my block were begging and pleading for their parents to buy them Rocket Head, a helmet with a liquid fuel rocket on it.

Gobler Toys made a fortune off the toy — it was the Tickle-Me Elmo of its day. Or, at least, it would have been, if it had existed. But Rocket Head, Stinky Skunk Raygun, Play Dead Coffins, Louie the Cheese Shark and other Gobler Toys creations exist only in cyberspace. Steve Casino, a Mercer native, and his buddy, Steven Fink, masterminded Gobler Toys, which is detailed at the Web site: goblertoys.com

The site’s been up for about a year and has won favor from Entertainment Weekly, Yahoo magazine and MSNBC. Noah Robischon of Entertainment Weekly included it in the list “Best of the Internet.” “In a year of great Web spoofs, this is the one that completely transported me to another, less sane reality,” Robischon wrote, calling the site “a virtual funhouse.”

“We guarantee you’ll find something vaguely disturbing here,” Yahoo Internet Life magazine said. Casino said the Web site sprang from his personal and professional interests. He’s a toy inventor, vintage toy collector, humor writer and illustrator for Cracked magazine and a Web site designer.

“I wanted to start coming up with my own fake toys,” said the 1984 graduate of Mercer High School.

He and Fink also fashioned a fake corporate biography, profile of Gobler Toys founder Ira Gobler, news stories and television commercials.

The man used for the Gobler pictures is Fink’s grandfather. “The name Gobler came because he had a big wad of flesh under his neck,” Casino said.

In the last year, the Web site has registered 300,000 hits. “It’s like a snowball effect,” he said of the Web site’s popularity. “People see it and they tell 10 friends. Pretty soon you get a lot of hits.”

The most popular toy, so deemed by the number of hits, is Kiki the Fashion Tiki. Possibly the ugliest doll you’ve ever seen, it’s a Tiki doll with blond, puffy hair wearing a floral print dress.

“It’s a fact: bad things happen to good girls every day,” according to the promotional spot. Protect your child against “unseen forces” by kissing the doll once a day, and then playing with it.

“Some stuff is kind of bizarre, like Marble Mouth,” Casino said. “But it (Web site) got Rated G. I won’t link up with anyone who has any wild, racy sites.”

Marble Mouth is a game in which the objective is to recite tongue twisters with marbles in your mouth. Gobler was cleared of a wrongful death suit filed by the family of someone who died playing the game.

In the spring, Black Swamp Press will publish a 25th anniversary catalog of Gobler Toys, Casino said, adding that he has been approached about writing the life story of Ira Gobler. Casino said he’s not sure how long he’ll stick with goblertoys.com which he updates regularly with new toys.

“It will keep going for the foreseeable future,” he said. “But I don’t know how much time I’ll have for it with all the other stuff I’m working on.”

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