Lawrence Person's Futuramen

Ah, Communism! The political system of the deadly controlling the deluded and disillusioned. As the system decayed, Communism would frequently produce funhouse-mirror versions of Western goods, virtually identical except the communist versions were produced by people who didn’t care and couldn’t be fired and thus sucked liked a Communist vacuum cleaner didn’t. Take, for example, these nightmare-inducing playground sculptures from Dark Roasted Blend (and here’s pages 2 and 3). Though a few of their examples come from outside the Eastern Bloc, the vast majority hail from a land forgotten by taste, talent, and personal injury lawyers.

Well, this certainly isn’t going to encourage your children to visit the doctor:

Here’s some first class Nightmare Fuel:

No way would this sculpture be put up in a Western park without some kind of fence. “Child impaled on modern art sculpture, details at ten.”

“Mommy, can I play on the giant tarantula? Please? Pleaaaseeee?”

Though they seem singularly unsuited for children, some of them are decent art sculptures in their own right. I really dig the Nightmare Bears:

This is the sort of thing Posadas would do if he were an Eastern European sculptor:

And this leather Cthulhu is awesome:

(And I’d just liked to point out that “Leather Cthulhu” is a good name for a rock band.)