Upsetting Day: FROYD

I see the creature everywhere. It has big teeth and hair. They tell me it is called Labubu. People lust for it, crave it. But I have lived long enough to see its kind come and go. Labubu is just Webkinz is just Beanie Babies is just Cabbage Patch Kids, the freak success stories sailing on an ocean of also-rans. For now they float atop this dark sea, but in time they too will sink beneath its surface. They are the lucky ones. Most never see the sun. Some breach for but a moment before plummeting to the depths of obscurity, like this one.

For decades the image of this doll would flash into my mind, unbidden. I recalled my best friend receiving one from his parents sometime in the early '90s and both of us being utterly baffled by it. Maybe, I thought, it had been a short-lived mascot for my hometown's CFL team, whose colors were also yellow and black? The name "Floyd" lingered in my memory, but searches on the increasingly-broken Google didn't turn anything up. And then, a week ago, providence. I had been a single letter off the truth — it wasn't "Floyd." It was Froyd. Sorry, F.R.O.Y.D.

It stands for "For Reality Of Your Dreams," which is the worst backronym I've heard since "Central Organization of Police Specialists." I'm just going to call him FROYD, to spare myself all those periods — which, incidentally, is what God was thinking when He invented me. Thanks, dude! Almost makes up for letting this thing come into existence. I guess I can't really lay that one on God, though. Free will, and all. This is jewelry designer turned toy entrepreneur Carolyne Greene's doing.

So what does FROYD do? He, uh, believes in you. That's pretty much it. He's a sick little freak who looks like a mascot for a recalled nasal decongestant or a chibi version of Frank Miller's Yellow Bastard. He also came in a few different colors — that is, wearing different shirts.

And this just in: a fifth FROYD has hit the internet.

Ok, so he's a doll with no action features who doesn't even talk, cry, or piss himself. He's a glob of hard plastic mounted on a plush body and his nose comprises 85% of his weight. What's his deal? Let's take a look at the back of his box to learn more.

Jesus. I was joking about the Frank Miller thing but with the yellow on black and white I'm starting to believe he actually may have gotten the idea for the Sin City rapist/murderer from this doll. Believe in your dreams, kids, but if you dream about drawing Batman killing terrorists to get revenge for 9/11, maybe lay off the melatonin for a while.

In creating FROYD, Carolyne Greene claimed — and may have even deluded herself into believing — that she was helping children. But let's be real, if you want to help kids you get into teaching or social services or working your way down the list of names in Epstein's little black book with piano wire. What you don't do is invent a mutant Kilroy/Ziggy hybrid with some weak-ass branding about self-esteem. No, Carolyne was chasing that most American of dreams: selling greeting cards, lunchboxes, and underwear featuring a character you wished into mass popularity.

The landscape of American popular culture is dotted with hundreds, if not thousands of these failure-to-launch mascot empires. But few dreamers have put as little effort into their ventures as Carolyne Greene did. Craig Stormon cancelled every one of his series before they hit double digits, but at least he went to the effort of making the comics he imagined would be the basis of the most popular action figures since He-Man. Tony DiIoia managed to make a Balloonatiks cartoon special to go out alongside his push of branded bedsheets and keychains. But Carolyne didn't do any of that. She saw the rise of Garfield and wanted to skip the part where she was writing a stupid comic strip nobody liked about a cartoonist's terrible life and jump straight to FROYD suction cup car window dolls.

This is nothing. It's an ugly doll based on a zeroth-drafth sketch, manufactured in China to supply the demand of no children. But nonetheless, as Carolyne gazed into the future with big cartoon dollar signs in her eyes, she saw a world where a yet-unborn Canadian lunatic would purchase a license to create a restaurant titled FROYD Eats before losing what was left of his mind, creating his own character named NathOYD when the deal expired.

You see, by associating her product with the concept of "dreams," Carolyne hoped to corner the market on aspirations and belief in oneself. She seriously thought that FROYD would come to loom as large in the cultural imagination as a botanical mutation that has been a symbol of good luck for over a century. She was building a great pyramid in which she would be buried, surrounded by her yellow-skinned monsters and made incalculably wealthy through ownership of the commercial rights to dreams themselves.

Maybe it's apt that Carolyne's effort to take a shortcut into wealth and cultural omnipresence was all about self-confidence, because that's one quality she didn't seem to lack in. I almost envy this level of deranged sureness in oneself. Almost. Because, of course, the vast majority of these specimens of American get-rich-quickism inevitably fail, as Carolyne did.

The INC article I've been quoting from was published in August 1991, at which point Carolyne had already produced the FROYD doll and was hawking it personally at Bloomingdale's in Manhattan. She thought her competition was Ninja Turtles and Care Bears. But her fate had in fact been sealed by the advent of another bright yellow character: the kiki to FROYD's bouba.

"Do the Bartman" appeared on the 1990 album The Simpsons Sing the Blues. Its video, released shortly afterwards, transformed society almost overnight. Bartmania swept America as the country experienced a love affair with the rambunctious little troublemaker/strangling victim. Today, The Simpsons is mostly cultural background noise, the kind of thing you might catch a glimpse of a seatmate watching on a long-haul flight after they've exhausted the blockbusters. It also remains a pop cultural touchstone for increasingly out-of-touch millennial adjuncts and teaching assistants who find themselves confronted with a sea of blank stares whenever they reference it, slowly realizing that they themselves have become Abe Simpson tying an onion to his belt.

But I can't overstate how huge The Simpsons in general, and Bart in particular were in the early '90s. Bart was fucking everywhere. I had one of the famous "underachiever and proud of it, man," t-shirts, and my mom made me black out the first five letters with a Sharpie. I don't expect anyone under the age of 30 to believe this, but Bart Simpson was considered a legitimate threat to the social order back then. The President called out The Simpsons specifically as a bad model for American families! All of this, of course only made Bart a more attractive figure to children in the ironically rebellious, vaguely antisocial chaos of the decade he was helping to usher in.

Here's the fucked-up part, though: I think FROYD still could have made it if it had leaned into the other dominant obsession of the 1990s: collectibles. It was sort of a dry run for our modern era of speculation, as people bought up Beanie Babies, variant comic books, baseball cards, and anything else they were told by the people selling it "would be worth a lot of money someday." FROYD couldn't compete with My Pet Monster or Boglins, but if Carolyne had done small production runs or just printed "Limited Edition" on the box or made a Princess Diana FROYD, it probably would have improved sales.

Hell, she could have done FROYD blind boxes! Gambling hadn't yet become the defining feature of our economy in the early 90s, but Magic: The Gathering, POGs, Crazy Bones, and more were all prepping kids for a reality where making a purchase only ever offered up the chance of satisfaction. FROYD could have been the Labubu of the 90s, except of course that he looked like a melting sex offender.

With the exception of a handful of dolls and pins available on Etsy and eBay, FROYD has almost entirely disappeared from our reality. There are barely two pages of search results for him, and you have to put the name in quotes or else the internet just thinks you don't know how to spell the name of the guy who invented psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, there are people other than me who remember this thing.

Like five people. r/froyd hasn't seen a new post in over a year. A handful of twisted individuals have posted asking where they can find a FROYD of their own.

They love FROYD! Against all odds, they really love him!

What's odd, though, is I'm not getting "nostalgic millennial looking to recapture their distant youth" from this subreddit so much as I am "Gen Z rehabilitating a discarded figure from before their time."

I checked that user's page and I was fucking dead on. She's twenty four. One of these nu-gen FROYD-heads even sought out Carolyne Greene herself and attempted to secure an interview for a video retrospective on FROYD. She gave an interview, then disappeared immediately afterwards.

Plans for the TV series supposedly exist, as does a recording of a "FROYD rap" and an episode of a Canadian daytime talk show on which Carolyne Greene appeared, but the latter exists only in the archives of York University, and fuck me if I'm taking a commuter bus to watch a low-resolution video of a desperate toy designer who managed to book a spot on a show about teen coke addicts.

What happened to Carolyne Greene? Maybe one day that redditor's video will go up and we'll find out. But the truth is that she's just one of many Americans since the earliest days of the nation who dreamed of doing something fantastic that makes them ultra-wealthy and successful without having a clear idea of what that thing might be. That impulse has only become stronger with the rise of income inequality and the advent of generative AI, home sports betting, and the tantalizing possibility that one might become an instant superstar by making oral sex noises when accosted on the street for someone else's TikTok video.

I don't know, gang. Maybe those three zoomers are right. Maybe FROYD is beautiful. Maybe he was too beautiful for this world. Maybe we should all start learning to love FROYD and each other, because when the gasoline runs out and the Amazon killbots start hunting us down for our precious lifeblood to keep the billionaires young, we're all going to wish we had someone who believed in us like FROYD did.

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