The five worst movie toy tie-ins of all time

Sony Pictures are said to be fuming after the first image of Rhys Ifan's villainous Lizard role for next summer's The Amazing Spider-Man has come from a tie-in Pez dispenser. In fact, that's not even the worst of the worst when it comes to ill-fated movie tie-ins.

By Emmet Purcell

With a $150 million budget and the prospect of revitalising the highly lucrative Spider-Man film franchise, Sony are clearly keen on keeping all elements of The Amazing Spider-Man under a closely-guarded and highly coordinated PR campaign. With that in mind, what's the worst that could happen?

If you ask us, the worst that could happen is that Rhys Ifan's CGI-heavy villain role, Lizard, has been shown to the public not through a world exclusive magazine deal or highly awaited trailer, but atop a cheap Pez dispenser. Yes, that actually just happened.

As you can see above, the sweets company's plans to accompany next year's film have been released and with that news comes our first, underwhelming glimpse of Lizard. Don't worry; we're sure that both star and villain will look a little more impressive next summer.

As crazy as it sounds, the above Pez dispensers aren't the worst form of movie tie-ins imaginable, as we've found five even bigger mistakes in the realm of film merchandise.

The Star Wars 'Early Bird Certificate Package'

So it's the late 1970s and your mind has just been blown by George Lucas' Star Wars: A New Hope - what's a boy to do? Obviously, you'll want to snap up the action figures of Obi-Wan, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca ASAP but since nobody in the movie industry, nor toy maker Kenner, had quite any idea what kind of money-printing phenomenon they had stumbled upon, the toys hadn't even been built.

Merry Christmas! Here's some painted cardboard

Instead, maybe children awoke on Christmas day in 1977 to find their own 'Early Bird Certificate Package', or as it is more commonly known, an empty box. Not just any empty box, however - this empty box was a "postage paid order card good for four authentically detailed action figures". Once Kenner got around to making them, of course.

Despite the fact that the gift was an odd form of an IOU, not to mention that many kids accidentally ripped the box when ripping their presents open, the 'Early Bird Certificate Package, as with all Star Wars merchandise afterwards, was tremendously popular.

The E.T video game that buried Atari

After E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial became the-then highest grossing movie of all time in 1982, Atari had the bright idea to garner the rights to the no-doubt incredibly lucrative video game adaptation. However, in their haste Atari decided to give developer Howard Scott Warshaw just five weeks to complete the game before it launched, just in time for the 1982 Christmas rush.

The experience only got worse after this title screen...

Not only was the eventual product incredibly awful, setting a standard for subpar video game adaptations that only Goldeneye 007 on the Nintendo 64 ever confounded, Atari reported a $536m loss in 1983. Even worse, the game was dubbed the largest video game financial failure in history and in a story that's hopefully not too good to be true, 10-20 truckloads of Atari cartridges of the game were reportedly dumped and buried one night in a New Mexico landfill in September 1983.

Clearly however, E.T's fate didn't deter future developers from mining film franchises for god-awful video games over the next thirty years.

G.I. Joe shampoo for the best helmet-covered hair

Considering that every character in the G.I. Joe 1980s TV show and 1987 film wore a helmet, including the guy's on this tie-in's packaging, we can't think of any reason for a fan of the military show to want to experience the pleasure of a bouncy, volume-heavy head of hair. Clearly, we are completely in the wrong.

'The Meat' from Rocky gets its own action figure

Does your child have an overwhelming desire to beat Rocky Balboa's meat? Then you'll have to get them everyone's favourite action figure from the Rocky franchise - not the titular boxer, not Apollo Creed, not even Burgess Meredith's croaky 'Mickey' character; we're talking about 'The Meat' that Rocky wails on in the first film's iconic training montage.

Kill Spider-Man with the Raid insecticide spray

Here is a far, far worse movie tie-in than the PR campaign-botching Pez dispenser. Although the idea of an insecticide company such as US brand Raid using the death of Spider-Man in a print advert is actually a pretty clever humour idea, we doubt that Sony Pictures were too happy that their iconic web-slinger and kid's favourite was stiff as a board not from a taxing super villain battle, but rather from a household pest-bothering spray.