The Story of the HOLY Nits

A few years back hundreds of Nit figures turned up in the Chicago area. This was a great find except that every single one of them had a pin hole in it somewhere. This was a very odd sort of damage because the pinholes seemed to have been carefully placed in the figure. The reason for this, I am told, is due to a dope-smoking hippie who created "Roach Clips" out of the Nit figures.

Now I am not a person who uses drugs so I had to find out what the heck a Roach Clip was for myself. Turns out that a "Roach" is a term for a marijuana cigarette or "Joint". A Roach Clip is used to hold the "Joint" so that you don't burn your fingers trying to smoke the very final part of the marijuana in the cigarette. A Roach Clip is usually some decorated item which has an alligator clip, a piece of electrical hardware, attached to it. So anyway what I was told is that all of these hundreds of Nits were converted into "Roach Clips" by some dope-smoking hippie by carefully melting the alligator clip into the figure. (It would seem that the "Munchies" and Cracker Jack go together.)

My first set of Nits that I acquired in 1993 was comprised of 16 of the 20 figures with these Roach Clip holes in them. The holed Nits were and are fairly inexpensive compared to a NM condition figure. Some of the holed Nits look just perfect when viewed from the front because the hole is in the backside of the figure. Since the holes do not go all the way through the figure at least one side looks fine and undamaged. If your looking for a display set of Nits this might be the best way to go since they tend to be very cheep and if you don't turn them around it doesn't look like anything is the matter.

There is one particular anomaly about the holy Nits that I can only hypothesize an answer for. Holed Nits can be found in the entire standard Cracker Jack colors but you can only get 19 of them from the set of 20. Seems that Laugh-Nit cannot be found in a "holed" variety. The only reason I can come up with for this variance is maybe because Laugh-Nit is such a thin figure that you could not get an alligator clip to stay in the plastic.

Below is a picture of three Holed Nits. They are:

Clown-Nit (back side)

Flip-Nit

Spy-Nit (back side)

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