Roadkill toys

Creative carnage is taking the designer toy world by storm and it all started on a butcher’s block in Portobello.
ELINOR MALCOLM meets Adam Arbor, inventor of Roadkill Toys

Above: Roadkill bunny

The weird thing is, Adam Arbor seems such a nice guy. Gently spoken, quietly humorous, manifestly modest. Yet here we are in the 12th House on Pembridge Road, animatedly discussing the myriad ways in which cute critters can meet untimely deaths under the wheels of speeding vehicles. And this fascination with mangled mayhem is how Adam has become Notting Hill’s latest and definitely quirkiest entrepreneur: the driving force behind the phenomenon of Roadkill Toys.
Roadkill is the self-proclaimed pioneer of ‘Squash-Plush’: designer toys with a deadly difference. As the website succinctly explains: ‘We make toys with a twist. Toys as dark as the inside of a heifer. And they all have one thing in common. They’ve been run over.’ What originally started as a darkly humorous doodle has seen Adam and his partners in cuddly toy crime, Mike Velcro and Charlie Bradshaw, launched into business and fielding press enquiries and orders from around the globe. Barely was the website up in November 2007 when Metro seized on the story – the site crashed under the weight of hits. The phones went wild; everyone from Sky News to Graham Norton wanted a slice of ‘Squash-Plush’. Thousands viewed the blackly comic Roadkill video on YouTube. Just recently the first victim off the slab – Twitch the Raccoon – joined Goldie Hawn on the celebrity guest list of Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. From Oz to LA, middle Europe to Mexico, the world’s going crazy for cuddly roadkill.
Adam seems faintly bemused, though quietly delighted, by the furore. ‘It did take us all by surprise – how quickly everything happened. But really it’s just been inspiring growing an idea into a living thing.’ And then killing it off in countless grisly ways, it seems. Each critter in the Roadkill mortuary has a fully detailed life story right up until Fate (in the shape of everything from a 16-wheeler juggernaut on the A34 to a sky-blue Robin Reliant just outside Scunthorpe) catches up with them. ‘It was the pathos of lost lives that appealed,’ explains Adam. ‘We wanted to give all of them a back-story. So each one of our first limited edition of 1000 has its own handwritten toe tag.’ Limited edition Twitches have sold out; his next splattered pal, Grind the Rabbit, is already going like hot cakes. Or perhaps cold bunnies. If you want your handwritten toe tag, order fast; doing 1000 labels left Adam with tendonitis and no option but to revert to pragmatic printed ones.
So how did a dodgy doodle progress to big business in flattened fauna? ‘We were attracted by the new wave of toy designing – things like Urban Vinyl and Street Plush, from Japan and San Francisco – the kind of thing you get in Play Lounge. We’d been collecting them for ages. I suppose we’re just big kids who never grew out of playing with toys!’ Adam’s inspirations – Gerald Scarfe, Ronald Searle, comic artists such as Simon Bisley and Carlos Esquerra – are evident in his designs. A career in advertising honed his creative and technical skills and after the idea for Twitch the Raccoon germinated (‘in a dingy basement in Shepherd’s Bush’) he decided to have a crack at bringing his creation to life. In a manner of speaking.
‘We asked the Crafts Council if they could recommend anyone to help with making a prototype. They gave us the name of an elderly lady in Derbyshire and we were a bit worried she’d be offended. She loved it.’ Twitch progressed through several incarnations, acquiring tyre treads across his furry back, soft, squidgy innards that may be zipped up neatly or, for maximum effect, left free to splurge, and one bulging, bloodshot eye. All presented in an opaque plastic body bag. Plus, of course, toe tag. Indeed very plush and strangely cute, in a car crash kind of way. As its creators say: ‘Unlike real roadkill, it’s something you’ll want to take home and arrange on your bed.’
Twitch is a local success story, having undergone his first photoshoots on location here. ‘We took the teddies to the Edwardian Butchers on Portobello Road and photographed them on the chopping block. Then we found a wonderful old wedding car parked in Powis Square and the chauffeur let us put a teddy under the wheels and take a shot.’ Market research (a demographic range covering primary school kids to pensioners) proved that hilarity outweighed horror and the green button was pressed on the Roadkill production line.
The rest, like Twitch and his furry friends, is history. Adam’s now fielding requests for pulped possums from Oz and dreaming up roadkill options for the enthusiastic Russians. South American fauna present some tempting possibilities. ‘I could go into the armadillo arena,’ he muses thoughtfully. ‘A vinyl plastic range for the little armoured fellers. Vinyl toys are big these days. Very trendy.’
Indeed, there seems no limit to Adam’s dark imagination. When he’s not writing toe tags, he’s penning and illustrating fairy tales – ‘rather inspiring in a black but moral way’ – that I’ll bet will beat the Brothers Grimm into a cocked hat. And many more cute corpses lurk in the Roadkill morgue, awaiting rebirth as useful household objects. A Splodge the Hedgehog mousemat (‘we’re calling it Mousesplat’). A Smudge the Squirrel hot water bottle ‘with elegant tyre track motif’. A rubber Pop the Weasel door wedge: ‘Jam the door on top of Pop and watch his jelly eye pop out through its socket.’ Adam’s macabre wit might get plenty more eyeballs popping meantime amongst the PC Brigade. For the rest of us, the flattened fruits of his macabre imagination are refreshingly, killingly funny. l

www.roadkilltoys.com