Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Shortly after World Market, I checked out the nearby Pier 1 imports and found this year's third line of squishy monsters with pop-out eyeballs, similar to those from Wal Mart and Target in my previous blogs. These are smaller than others, but higher in quality and disproportionately higher in cost at an insane five dollars each. Yes, you are looking at fifteen bucks here. Priorities.
First, let's talk about the ones I passed over, since I still wasn't insane enough to spend twenty five on these stupid things. This one was some kind of freaky Rocky Horror fan, and one of three in the set with pink, fuzzy "hair" I believe represents exposed brain tissue.
The Frankenstein's monster was a rather clever one, as it opted to be one giant head instead of a big-headed body.
Getting into the ones I did buy, the mummy uses the same mold as Frank, with a huge mouth full of rottent teeth!
This little zombie-like guy is easily the cutest with his goofy, stitched up smile, and even knows a secret zombie trick:
Whereas the eyeballs of all his friends are firmly anchored to small metal springs on the inside, only the zombie has eyeballs rolling loose in their plastic bubbles, weighted on the bottom so that they usually right themselves.
Weirdest of the bunch is what I only want to describe as a Halloween chicken. A chicken with oozing brains, exploding eyes and clown makeup. The fact that its body is dipped in blood is the one specific indicator that this is some kind of scary Halloween "monster," and we are forever grateful for that. This is as far as I know the last of the Pier 1 pop eye monsters, but still not the last I found.
Not a day after Pier 1, I stopped into a Walgreens and discovered a brand new item on their Halloween shelves; eye popping monster heads! These are bigger and nicer sculpted than any of the others thus far, but for the very reasonable price of $1.99. I'm assuming wherever Pier 1 "imports" their eye poppers from, people somehow die in the process.
The monster heads are perfectly but perhaps accidentally sculpted to stack on top of one another, the skull's teeth holding it neatly in place on Frank's flat-top.
While at Walgreens I also picked up these pens topped by little sculptures of the Grim Reaper and "Ghost Face." It really fascinates me how the latter began as a mere Halloween mask, found its way onto the lead villain in Scream and skyrocketed to stardom from there...not as an actual ghost costume, but as a costume of a murderer wearing a ghost costume. Now widely imitated, the howling ghoul is still recognized primarily as a guy in a costume rather than an actual "monster" character, and while actual monsters are usually my favorite kind, I make an exception for the convoluted silliness of Ghost Face.
Meta ghost pens aside, has anyone else run into an unusual number of eye-popper toys this year? Has anyone seen any that I don't have yet?
Browse Halloween 2011:
