| abstract | - The Op-Yop was a toy marketed in the 1960's by a company based in Royal Oak, Michigan called Kramer Designs. The company's original location was an office on Adams in the neighboring community of Birmingham. The history we could find was based on a Time Magazine article in 1968 where it was stated that a million of the Op-Yops had been sold and another million were expected to sell by Christmas. In my travels, I have found some additional information including an internal memo relating to some six months worth of advertising that was done on the Soupy Sales Show with Soupy doing the commercials shot in Detroit. There were also memo's to retailers advising them to stock up on the toy to be in sync with the Soupy Sales ads. I tracked down the original molder who made the parts and talked to some home workers who assembled them at their homes from 1967 through 1968. The toy was labeled as a psychedelic sensation and was skin packaged on 4-1/4 inch by 14 inch printed chipboard. More can be found out about the recent reincarnation of the op-yop at WWW.op-yop.com a series featuring a Goth and her pet squirrel
- Neurotically Yours is a comic book and Flash animated series created by Jonathan Ian Mathers, depicting a squirrel named Foamy (voiced by Jonathan Ian Mathers), who is the pet of a neurotic goth woman named Germaine (voiced by Dawn Bennett). The series began as an independent comic book series that was sold in the "village streets of New York City" (much like all of Jonathan Ian Mathers's comics at the time). In this incarnation, Germaine was the main character while Foamy mostly stayed in the background or off to the side whilst making random comments pertaining to the current situation (or perhaps not). When the animated series began, Foamy was the only character who spoke (beginning with the episode Foamy Thoughts), so he gained prominence over Germaine and eventually usurped the main character position (even though Germaine gained a voice in Hypnotic Foamy). The animated series is mainly located on the Ill Will Press homepage (in addition to numerous external websites), while the comic book series is being sold in the Ill Will Press shop (in issue and paperback form) through stores such as CafePress and Amazon. When Mathers began hosting the videos on YouTube he titled the episodes Foamy the Squirrel rather than Neurotically Yours, though this title is still retained on the Ill Will Press website. A new episode of Neurotically Yours is posted approximately every two weeks on Thursdays. Jonathan Ian Mathers has used the character of Foamy the squirrel to request that people help the victims of certain disasters that are present at the time of the video, such as Hurricane Katrina (whilst condemning the looters and news reporters, whom he declared should be helping the victims and not merely reporting on them), and the tsunami/radioactive meltdowns in Japan (whilst praising the Japanese common decency in a situation such as this, and also condemning the reporters for not helping) To date, there are 222 official episodes of Foamy and his shenanigans. There are also a number of (terrible) fan-produced episodes circulated among various fansites on the Internet. There are also 38 topical rants, which are audio-based rants in which Foamy is talking about a particular topic. There are even several Foamy albums that contain topical rants, squirrel songs, audio tracks from animated episodes, and unused audio tracks.
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