But come on, the Halloween masks are the best. When it comes to ridiculous cross merchandising, nobody does it like Kiss. I think that probably goes without saying. Even if Social Distortion and The Misfits sell more t-shirts and posters than CDs, Kiss has more weird merchandise than any other band. I just did a google search for ‘kiss silverware’ and didn’t come up with anything about the band on forks, so I guess that shoots my theory down.
I was inspired to do this post a second ago when I checked out the pictures on my phone, and found a picture of the Kiss Slurpee machine I saw at a 7Eleven recently.
I still think the weirdest Kiss merch thing has to be Kiss: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child. It’s a video game, based on a comic book, based on Kiss’ 1998 album Psycho Circus, which had an awesome hologram cover that only sort of worked.
I would say the effect is lost when you try to view the cover on your computer, but honestly, that’s sort of what the cover would look like when you tried to view position the CD case just right for the lenticular to work.
Anyway, here’s a video of a guy playing the video game (and really kicking butt at it) and swearing at batwings.
I think video games based on bands are a really weird (and bad) idea. Now that musical instrument games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are available, it sort of makes sense, but before then, you had to play a guy with a giant battle ax killing arachnoclowns and searching for Gene Simmons’ mask. As it turns out, Kiss was far from the first band to be given a video game crossover. Cracked.com released an article about how all sorts of crazy band video games have been created over the years.
Still, Kiss has some weird ass memorabilia.