The Mausoleum of Madness, Part II!
Welcome to Dinosaur Dracula’s MAUSOLEUM OF MADNESS, PART II! This is a multipage feature. Page links are are at the bottom, or you can visit the starting page over here. Enjoy your stay at the Mausoleum, and pay no attention to the harmless rats.
#5: The Pumpkin Light! (1986)
It’s a you-had-to-be-there thing. Some will just see a plastic pumpkin in a cool package, but if you were there, you’d know that these were all over the Halloween season for at least five years straight, building a cult of devotees who wouldn’t be caught dead without a three-inch pumpkin that lit up like the friggin’ Christmas star.
The Pumpkin Light was a battery-operated gizmo that could be placed inside jack-o’-lanterns instead of candles, or worn as a gaudy necklace while trick-or-treating to alert dumbass cars to your presence.
This was an As Seen on TV product, which drew pharmacy chains and department stores like flies on shit. For a while, everybody was selling Pumpkin Lights. Even if you didn’t own one, you’d encounter them dozens of times a day. Okay, maybe three times in a month, but that’s not nothing.
#4: Lisa Frank Halloween Erasers! (1995)
Lisa Frank did her best work around Halloween, and that’s the hot pink hill I’ll die on. I can’t fathom anyone looking at this blinding blitz of Halloween erasers and not loving them. If I had any critiques at all, it’s that they should’ve included more penguin-shaped blue-haired Dracula heads.
Seems many agree with me, because Lisa Frank Halloween trash isn’t cheap. In fact, the prices are what normal people might term “God that’s so stupid.” Families of five have eaten at Sizzler for less than I paid for these 12 erasers.
I took the plunge anyway. You can decide if it was because I wanted to sacrifice for your entertainment, or because I needed toxic green twin skulls to make earrings out of.
#3: Gremlins 2 Candy Containers! (1990)
What can I say about Gremlins 2 candy containers that hasn’t already been said? Just about anything, I bet. I’ll be halfway done and still shatter the record for Most Amount of Thought Ever Given to Gremlins 2 Candy Containers. (Besides, the current record holder is already me, under a pseudonym.)
One mostly-forgotten super-awesome thing about Gremlins 2 is that for the corresponding merchandise – stickers, coloring books and the like – a new style guide was developed, and certain Gremlins were given distinct colors. George was green, Lenny was brown, and Mohawk was blue.
It was smart! I mean, nobody ever bought the full complement of Huey, Dewey and Louie dolls until they stopped wearing the same hat color, you know? Making Mohawk slate blue was not crazy – it was the smartest thing anyone has ever done.
Anyway, you know the deal with these. Unremarkable candy trapped inside very remarkable severed heads, which could later be used as finger puppets.
#2: PAAS Halloween Makeup Kit! (1986)
Known chiefly for Easter egg dyes, PAAS used to be a heavyweight in the Halloween division, too. This makeup kit is from 1986, and boy does it look it, what with all of those neon touches on the box, plus the fact that the back says “copyright 1986.”
Part of a larger series of similarly-packaged sets, you’d get a few random colors of face paint, plus suggestions on what terrible creatures to create with them. In this case, we got Captain Future and Sarcophagor, who went on to become WCW tag champs in 1994.
I came into this believing Captain Future was the cooler of the two, but naming a fairly generic mummy “Sarcophagor” is the sort of Hail Mary pass that must be respected. I’ll call it a tie.
#1: Hallmark Muppets Decoration! (1980s)
I don’t know every detail, but for a stretch of time in the ‘80s, Hallmark teamed with the Muppets for what we in the biz call “Halloween hijinx.” This die-cut decoration was among the fruits of that.
It’s a little out there by 2025 standards, given that it depicts Miss Piggy spiking punch with stuff that will make Kermit love her. No, this particular decoration would not enter today’s seasonal aisle without quarrel.
Perhaps I’ll be generous and assume the bottle was just a clever rebrand of some existing type of fruit syrup, akin to how Bath & Body Works can start calling strawberry hand soap “Blood Butcher’s Rebirth” and make half the planet lose their minds.
