Calvin And Hobbes: Calvin’s 10 Best Creations
Calvin and Hobbes is beloved by people all over the world. Even though the strip only ran for 10 years, it gained a massive following and many remember it with childlike wonder and amazement.
As seen in many of the strips, Calvin is an imaginative genius, and many of his fantasies revolve around his various creations and inventions. Over the course of the comic’s run, he has created multiple different things for his adventures with Hobbes. But some are better than others, and these are 10 of the best and most memorable.
Magic Carpet
One of Calvin’s lesser-known creations wasn’t really an invention technically. But with Calvin’s imagination, the rug that he pulls out quickly becomes a magic carpet.
Calvin and Hobbes don’t really do much with the carpet; all they do is fly it downtown to try to say hello to Calvin’s Dad. Unfortunately, Dad doesn’t notice them despite them being right outside the window, forcing Calvin and Hobbes to return home in defeat. The magic carpet doesn’t appear again in the strip, but it’s still quite a memorable arc easily showing Calvin’s massive imagination.
Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons
Far from the usual funny snowman strips in Calvin and Hobbes, the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons was an attempt by Calvin to bring a snowman to life. An attempt that, of course, went horribly wrong.
After one came to life, it began to make more of them until there were over a dozen of them, all of whom were created with the murderous intent to kill their creator. This forces Calvin to go on the offensive, eliminating the Snow Goons by spraying them down with the hose in the middle of the night and freezing them solid. A quick end to one of Calvin’s deadliest creations.
G.R.O.S.S.
One of the strip’s funniest running gags is Calvin’s attempts to bug and annoy Suzie. His best way of doing that was creating the Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS club, or G.R.O.S.S.
Calvin’s creation of this club shows just how much a 6-year-old like himself doesn’t like girls, as he’s made it his mission to bug them, particularly Suzie. However, many plans that Calvin comes up with for G.R.O.S.S. often end up backfiring on him, mostly due to poor planning or Hobbes turning against him. Still, it’s a hilarious sight to see Calvin come up with a “secret” club with only one goal that always seems to fail in the end.
Ultimate Baseball
Calvin doesn’t like sports with a lot of strict rules, which is why he only plays sports like baseball with Hobbes. However, Calvin’s version of baseball has vastly different rules.
In some of the funniest strips in the series, Calvin and Hobbes play baseball, but with multiple changes to the rules. For example, they often play with several dozen bases, and many of them are random things like turtles. Hobbes often adds in his own fun by pouncing on Calvin when he’s close to scoring. All these rules are crazy and insane, but still wonderful to see Calvin create such drastic changes to a sport he would otherwise avoid.
Thinking Cap
Calvin often doesn’t do well in school, leading him to take measures to try to improve his scores from time to time. His most memorable of these attempts was making a literal thinking cap.
Being forced to write a paper for class, Calvin creates the thinking cap to boost his intelligence to help him come up with a topic. While the process was successful and caused his head to swell, the process is only temporary, and it wears off before Calvin can complete the paper. Due to this, Calvin fails the assignment, and the thinking cap is never seen following this unfortunate incident.
Transmogrifier Gun
Using his previous transmogrifier technology, Calvin eventually created a portable version of the device. While it looked like an ordinary water pistol, it was, in fact, the transmogrifier gun.
Calvin planned on using this to turn himself into a pterodactyl to terrorize the town, but unfortunately, due to conflict with Hobbes, he ends up as an owl before the gun stops working. Luckily, nobody notices this change, and it wears off by the next day. Unlike most of Calvin’s other portable inventions, the transmogrifier gun makes another appearance later on, when Calvin uses it while falling from high up in the sky to save himself.
Duplicator
Calvin’s cardboard box often leads him to no end of trouble, and one of the biggest things he’s made with it that has gotten him into trouble is the duplicator.
With the duplicator, Calvin makes a perfect duplicate of himself to try to force the duplicate to clean his room. Unfortunately, the duplicate is as lazy and unwilling to work as the original and ends up making even more duplicates, who cause no end of trouble for Calvin. The duplicator is the only one of Calvin’s devices that has gotten Calvin into trouble, and even when Calvin manages to outsmart the duplicates and transmogrify them into worms, his mom still has a massive freakout.
Time Machine
There is apparently nothing that Calvin can’t create out of his signature cardboard box. One of the craziest things that he’s done with it is turning it into a time machine to travel through time.
Many of Calvin’s plans with the time machine involve getting rich. First, he tries to go to the future to steal technology and sell it in the present. Then, he tries going to the past to take pictures of dinosaurs. Both of these attempts end in failure. In fact, the time machine was only helpful when Calvin used it to get a completed paper from his future self. Of course, the paper was written by present and future Hobbes and was all about the time-traveling adventure, but it still got Calvin a very rare A+ on the assignment in the end.
Transmogrifier
The very first thing that Calvin made with his cardboard box was his transmogrifier, which has since become his most iconic invention.
While in the device, a person can be transformed into anything they want as long as it’s written on the side of the box. Calvin uses this to turn himself into a tiger in its first appearance, but it has other appearances throughout the strip’s run, once to defeat his duplicates, and once again to turn himself into an elephant so he can remember his vocabulary words. With the device being able to turn anyone into anything, it truly is one of Calvin’s greatest inventions.
Calvinball
Due to Calvin hating organized sports, he created a game that is anything but organized. That sport’s name is Calvinball.
The rules of Calvinball are simple: just make it up as the game goes on. There are no official rules, other than that Calvin and Hobbes can’t play it the same way twice, and they have to wear masks while they play. It’s unorganized and absolute chaos most of the time, but also a lot of fun. Even Rosalyn, one of Calvin’s biggest enemies, has fun playing it once she realizes how the game works.
