Comments: Created by unknown Toy Biz employees.

The Arachniphobia (sic) line was less an attempt to make toys of any particular Marvel characters as it was to introduce a larger price point and take advantage of children's enthusiasm for monsters. (The corresponding X-Men line, Mutant Monsters, meanwhile, took advantage of the ensemble nature of that property, and thus consisted of Dark Beast, Sugar Man, and...Wolverine as a giant werewolf. Well, two out of three ain't bad.) A possible inspiration for the line can be found in Fleer's 1995 Spider-Man trading cards, which featured a subset called Arachnophobias (spelled correctly) that depicted a number of merged Spider-Man enemies.

The Hobgoblin forming part of Spider-Goblin, although not explicitly identified, can be assumed to be Macendale because Spider-Goblin is clearly part demon from his fairly grotesque anatomy. Obviously this story probably did not happen in the 616, although if either the Spider-Goblin or Man-Lizard was returned to normal, it could have happened on an Earth-Arachniphobia. In fact, it's not impossible that all the Arachniphobia/Arachnaphobias characters share a single continuity.

Early images of Spider-Goblin show him riding his giant "Crawling Techno-Spider", but when the toy was actually released, the spider was nowhere to be seen. Similarly, Vampider was originally going to be a conventional Venom black instead of the toy's final reddish color, and Man-Lizard had four large and two small arms instead of the reverse. The changes to Spider-Goblin and Man-Lizard can obviously be explained as cost issues, but Vampider's color change is a bit more inexplicable. (The image at left is probably a scan of earlt Toy Biz retailer material, but I don't know where I got it originally - if it's yours, please let us know.)

The photo of Spider-Goblin was taken by David Willis.