I was working in the lab… Halloween is about three weeks away, so this is a great time to break out all your Mego Monsters — new and old — as well as all those colorful creatures produced by other companies. It’s also a great time to break them out because customizing king Anthony Durso of The Toyroom has a groovy new “displayset” for all your 8-inch figure needs: a Monster Castle (not to be confused with the Mego version from the ’70s.) Dig this INSIDE LOOK, along with Anthony’s commentary: “Much like the infamous Famous Monsters of Filmland, this playset went through many incarnations over the last year and a half,” Anthony, who is also a 13th Dimension contributor, said. “Originally, this was one of the first playsets I started when the pandemic hit. At the time I had envisioned a Universal Monsters castle, but I never seemed to quite get a handle on what I thought I wanted to accomplish. So periodically I would go back to the drawing board and dust off this project, never really clicking with it. “What finally worked for me was realizing I didn’t want to replicate the drab black and white laboratory as seen in films like Bride of Frankenstein,” he added. “That’s fine for an old horror movie but a playset needs color. I was inspired by the old Ideal Toys Monster Lab and used that as the basis for my lab equipment for the Frankenstein Monster. After figuring out that component, the rest fell into place. I wanted to go bright and colorful, which is the exact opposite of monsters usually attired in blacks and grays.” “I should back track a bit,” he continued. “What I’ve always liked about the Universal Monsters is how they’ve always had a core group. My first introduction to them was probably Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (featuring Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman) on the Sunday Morning Movie on WPIX in New York. In a later film, A&C encountered the Mummy. Those four are usually seen as the core of the Universal Monsters, with others such as the Bride of Frankenstein, the Invisible Man or the Creature From the Black Lagoon added (or subtracted) over the years. “Almost like a super-hero team that has various incarnations throughout the multiverse, the monsters have been interpreted...