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The Beastie Boys designed an egg gun for kids
04.01.2016
08:58 am
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MCA in costume as a deviled egg
 
The Beastie Boys had a thing for eggs. Their first release, 1982’s Polly Wog Stew EP, concluded with “Egg Raid on Mojo,” a hardcore blast about getting revenge on the doorman at a NYC club by unloading a few cartons of eggs on his person. But as the Reagan/Bush years wore on and anomie set in, the Beasties’ use of eggs became less judicious. During the sessions for Paul’s Boutique, the trio egged hapless pedestrians from windows: those of Ad-Rock’s Manhattan apartment, their rooms at LA’s Mondrian Hotel, and MCA’s “macked-out” car. They also infamously egged the heavily-hyped British “supergroup” Sigue Sigue Sputnik during their big US debut on Halloween night of 1986. (Mike D: “We threw eggs at them when they were at the New York Palladium, it was the least we could do.”)

If you think the Beasties’ random eggings were bad, they were nothing compared to the doomsday device of mischief the band was sitting on which, had they unleashed it, would have made childhood and adolescence a lot more interesting for me and a number of DM’s readers. The line “Put him in check correct with my egg gun,” from “Egg Man,” described a Beastie Boys business venture that could have turned the world’s major cities into slimy, shell-specked hellscapes. From Dan LeRoy’s excellent 33⅓ book on Paul’s Boutique, which just reached its tenth anniversary (and spawned a worthy sequel):

[T]he egg gun mentioned in the song was more than just a rhetorical device. [Dust Brother] Mike Simpson recalls the band “actually employed some toy designers—maybe they were from Hasbro?—to come up with a Beastie Boys egg gun. And I believe there were a couple of prototypes, which Yauch probably still has.”

[Mike D], however, says the prototypes came tantalizingly close to being developed, yet were never completed. “But imagine if we had,” he muses. “The egg business would have blown up. Chicken farmers would be like oilmen today.”

 

 
But Simpson, who mentioned the egg gun in an interview about Paul’s Boutique with Seattle’s KEXP recorded last July, maintains the designers did make some kind of visual representation of the finished product:

Yauch took it so far as to hire toy designers from Mattel to come up with prototypes for the Beastie Boys Egg Gun. Somewhere in the world, there are these amazing renderings of these potential egg guns with the Beastie Boys brand on it, which is hilarious.

Can we get the Beastie Boys Egg Gun in stores, please, or at least in my hands? Isn’t this what crowdfunding was invented for?

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.01.2016
08:58 am
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