October 10, 2006:
Yesterday, I introduced you to Halloween Playland, a place that spends October as a haunted kiddy amusement park and the rest of the year as a lawn & garden center. Sure, it wasn't no Knott's Berry Farm or anything, but the quaint, pumpkin-filled field stuffed with inflatable bouncy rides and crude paintings of SpongeBob with Dracula fangs helped remind me that the Halloween season should be experienced, and not just waxed happily about.
We couldn't stay for long at Halloween Playland, because the place wasn't meant for us. We weren't short enough. We weren't seven-years-old enough. I think I got as much out of it as any twenty-something could, but on the way out, I got a little bit more.
Okay, so picture a lawn & garden center. Hopefully you've been to one. Most of the "wares" are living and breathing, and as such, most of the "wares" are outside. Still, there's usually some kind of oversized shed for the stores to hock their various sprinklers, lawn ornaments and bags of grub-annihilating poisons. This place had just such an oversized shed, but to fit with the Halloween Playland theme, lawn ornaments and grub killers were replaced with giant rubber spiders and rip-off Freddy Krueger costume gloves. Hell yes, a Halloween gift shop.
Many shopping malls spend the month of October graced with a temporary "Halloween store," and while I love those to death, I also must admit that I rarely if ever actually buy anything from 'em. They're mostly costume shops, (costume shops for people who plan to dress up as things that every other goofball on the planet is planning to dress up as), but most of the stores flirt with the idea that they're a little bit more than that, offering ludicrously overpriced and ludicrously overdone/mainstream Halloween decorations that suck the gleefully low-grade charm from the holiday and replace it with 200 dollar mirrors that grow arms and sing songs when someone walks past them. I'm not saying that the evolution of the Halloween decoration is a bad thing, but it's always good to get a little old school grit with your ghoul.
Halloween Playland's gift shop had plenty of grit. Some people would say that it had too much grit.
Much of its inventory was imported directly from Chinatown, while an also-large portion of decorations were seemingly fashioned by the old lady down the block who bucks knitting conventions by painting Frankenstein's Monster over and over again instead. There were "mainstream" items too, of course, but that kind of stuff was all a few years old at the youngest, likely bought on clearance from K-Mart in early November and sold at its original retail the following year.
The outside of the gift shop featured huge baskets offering mini pumpkins and gourds in all shapes and sizes. I don't think I've ever done anything more with a gourd than hold it up and say, "Hey, I have a gourd," but fuck me if I don't end up with a bushel of 'em year after year. Halloween Playland is also apparently "in" with the supreme gourd gods, because I've never seen such a variety of the things in my life. They had gourds shaped like swans, gourds in neon colors and even gourds with suction cups and pull-strings that said "the gourds must be crazy" when activated. To that I said, "gourd oh mighty."
I'm not sure what these "Pokemon Pumpkins" were about; my best guess is that they're trying to peddle the weird pumpkin patterns as being akin to Pikachu's brown stripes, but that's so borderline. Google searches indicate that this place isn't the world's exclusive "Pokemon Pumpkin" distributor, but those who have spotted 'em elsewhere share my general confusion about the product. Whatever the case, I'm kind of regretting the fact that I didn't buy one. I'd get to say, "Hey, I have a Pokemon Pumpkin!" Oh gourd.
The inside of the gift shop was completely and totally ragtag, without any rhyme or reason to what went where or how it went or where it was or what it did. Picture a mess on the floor on the walls; that's as good as I can describe it.
I'd like to say that the stuff was reasonably priced, because surely Halloween decorations purchased from a store just one step up from a back alley should've been reasonably priced, but it wasn't. In fact, it was very, very expensive. I went to the cashier, and after getting past the fact that a place like this had a real cash register and not some hay-chewing guy with a pencil and legal pad, I couldn't believe that my measly basket full of dollar store crap totaled up to nearly sixty bucks. Outside, you could jump on as many inflatable Scooby-Doo castles as you wanted for a dollar, but in here, you couldn't get a freakin' rubber pen with a skull on top for less than 2.50. Where's the justice?
With rotted corpses hanging from the ceiling in every direction, the gift shop pulled no punches in trying to make a big, white, sunlit shed look really creepy. I appreciated this, because with so many kids drenching Halloween Playland in their saliva and intrigue, it was nice to find a spot that they were afraid to enter. I saw children run in with their sights set on pumpkin-themed water weenies only to run out three seconds later after looking up and seeing the cast of Michael Jackson's Thriller blowing in the wind from ceiling-affixed nooses. It got to the point where I kept pointing upward whenever a child entered, just to speed the process. I don't hate kids by any stretch, but gourd dammit, pumpkin patches really seem to bring the "annoying" out of them.
Halloween stores of all types have sections devoted to bloody body parts -- it's pretty much a prerequisite if you want to call what you're running a "Halloween store." The bloody body part business has boomed in recent years, to the point where we can now get virtually movie prop quality items for a decent price. Halloween Playland never got the memo -- they're still selling yesteryear's collection of cheapo crappy plastic bloody body parts, that look less like real body parts and more like birthday cakes based on real body parts.
You know the kind. Pale skin, not really to scale with any human being's arm or foot, hollow, crude, often misshapen and often reeking like bug spray in a Ziploc bag. These are not the preferred bloody body parts if you're trying to recreate a scene from Hostel on your front porch, but they are the preferred bloody body parts for webmasters who stand to score a paragraph out of how much they suck. So yes, I bought one...
"Prosthesis" may very well be the worst plastic butchered arm I've ever owned. The bloody stump at the end (not pictured) was meaty and decent enough, but why was this guy's arm tiger striped? I can't believe they went through all of the trouble of adding fingerprint detail to enhance the realism only to ruin it with tiger stripes. And don't tell me that they're supposed to represent slashes or stab wounds, because slashes and stab wounds do not look exactly like tiger stripes. I'm also pissed at the insinuation that someone found a rare species of tiger-striped homosapien and couldn't think of anything better to do with him than cut his arm off.
There were dozens of cheaper, smaller toys and novelties littering the gift shop, and though I would've been very happy to own them all, my wallet dictated otherwise. I did pick up a fair amount of stuff, though, and why I picked Product A over Product B didn't always have to do with Product A being any better than Product B. Sometimes, Product A just came in a cooler display box.
For some reason, the most generic, half-assed and/or bootleg toys always seem to have the most interesting packaging. You know those weird ass display cards with the creepy art that sit beneath the glass in most never-updated vending machines? The display boxes at Halloween Playland's gift shop were a lot like those. Take the one shown above. Rubber hearts with gushy liquid inside are generally welcome without question, but they'll get a gold foil invitation if they come from a spooky box marked "Devil's Heart." In a world where content -- both sensual and tangible -- so often becomes homogenized for mass consumption, it's nice to see a box featuring a red-cloaked grim reaper allude to Satan himself. Makes me want to go to Grandma's and turn all the wall-mounted crosses upside down.
I'm almost ashamed to admit that I paid 4.50 for this thing. That's really, really overpriced. I should've been able to buy four Devil's Hearts for that much. I like it a lot, though. It's vaguely heart-sized with all the right aortas and shit, and when you squeeze it, a big white heartworm floats towards the rubber skin and dares you to set it free. The picture above is grainy and shitty, but you should be able to decipher the wormy outline if you squint.
Even a place as off the path as Halloween Playland's gift shop couldn't avoid one of the most glorious trends of the 2006 season: Shrunken heads. I've talked about this on the blog already, but shrunken head toys have really made a name for themselves this year. They're everywhere. The gift shop had a good amount of them, and surprisingly, despite the fact that they're some of the few things sold there that could be considered both current and "official," they remained fairly priced and were ready to fight over who got to ride shotgun in my car.
The rubber shrunken heads seen above are from a single collection, one that I've seen at many different Halloween stores this year. I'm finding that no two stores sell the same exact shrunken heads. Every time I come across them, I meet new heads that want to come home with me. I picked up one pretty recently, but it kept complaining that it had nobody to play Othello with, so I bought two more...
I love the dude on the left -- kind of like the crazy but wise old grandfather character in the land of rubber shrunken heads. The kind of guy who loses an eye but gains a story to tell. The shrunken head shown on the right is more worth talking about, because it was clearly influenced by Freddy Krueger with the hat and skin tone. Come October 31st, I'll wear a hockey mask while carrying this thing around and tell everyone that I'm the ending to Freddy Vs. Jason. Even the people who get it will kick me in the nuts.
By the time I decided to buy a "Squish Squoosh Squeezeball," I knew that I was running a retail fever and needed someone to drag me out of the store. Did I really need a green pumpkin that blinked fiber optic lights when crushed? No, no I did not need such a thing. Then again, I didn't need a tub full of toy slime with a tiny Dracula figure inside it, or a pair of costume "horror teeth" that would only fit over a person's teeth if they had teeth shaped like a utility stapler, but I bought those things. Why draw the line at a Squish Squoosh Squeezeball? Who was I to offend?
By the same token, who was I to offend these cute, furry horror rats? Surely one from their family deserved to spread the clan credo to all my toys at home. I left with one of those, too.
And I left with that thing too. I still don't know what the fuck it is.
This is the only time of year that a person can get away with a "pile of that," and my "pile of that" is like Christmas morning in October. I'll post a couple of blog entries here and there about all the stuff I didn't get to in this entry, so if you're wondering what that thing that looks like a themed backscratcher for an Oompaloompa is, stay tuned.
I had fun at Halloween Playland's gift shop. It smelled like fertilizer. Halloween decorations and doodads have become almost like a competition between the like-minded. When I write about all the shit I find at Target or wherever, my sails lose some wind when I notice that everyone else is finding the same stuff. I want to be special, and this dilapidated, screwy shed helped me feel special. You can't find a Devil's Heart, tiger-striped arm or fiber optic stress-relieving green pumpkin just anywhere.
Halloween Playland will cease to exist as of November 1st. Not long after, there will be sheep and goats and Virgin Marys where the jack o' lanterns once stood. I'm cool with that.
