Five Random Action Figures, Part 32!
Here are more of my favorite spooky action figures from the ‘80s and ‘90s, photographed in a moldy forest:
Shish Kebab Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice (1989)
By far the best figure from Kenner’s Beetlejuice collection, Shish Kebab Beetlejuice also wins the award for weirdest. His “scary skewers” impale everything from chicken legs to alien rats to Beetlejuice himself, and best of all, they’re completely removable.
(If you’ve ever seen a beat-up Beetlejuice with a bunch of holes in his chest at a yard sale, that was this one.)
As a kid, I found the Beetlejuice line a little too gimmicky. With their weird features and removable heads and turning knobs and hidden buttons, they almost felt more like gadgets or puzzles than action figures. But now that I’m sitting here playing with Shish Kebab Beetlejuice and realizing that nirvana is this and it was always this close, I wanna warp back to ’89 and beat the shit out of me.
There’s just something so artful about this guy. By “artful” I’m of course referring to the fact that you can pop off his head to reveal a smaller head that’s actually just one big spinning monster eye. Everybody needs a Shish Kebab Beetlejuice. Only then will the world begin to heal. Read More…
Chocolate S’cream Twinkies!
Hot take: Hostess has quietly become the most dependable snack company of the Halloween season. Sorry, everyone else! The proof is in the literal pudding:
THOSE BOXES, THO.
They look like cheap backdrops for public access horror hosts, and I mean that in the best way. What’s really endearing is that they’re so classically gothic. You almost never see that anymore.
Can I just say how impressed I’ve been with Hostess since the post-bankruptcy buyout? It’s just been one bizarre thing after another. It’s like they’ve finally embraced the fact that what they produce is basically “edible play food.”
Why play it safe when you’re already selling oblong sponges filled with vanilla spiderwebs? Might as well get funky.
Shown above aren’t all of Hostess’s Halloween offerings, either. There are actually several more, both of the “returning” and “new” varieties. I’m grouping these three together because they’re the only ones that come dressed like Dracula’s bedroom. I like to think of them as a team. Read More…
Old Halloween Newspaper Ads, #2!
After having a blast curating that first batch of ‘80s and ‘90s newspaper ads, I couldn’t wait for Round 2. So this is it. Enjoy the show.
Oreo Halloween Treats!
(Target, 1994)
Treat-sized packs of Oreos are still around, of course, but I have immense nostalgia for the specific version pictured here.
Back before the internet turned Halloween junk food into an annual battle to create the most buzz, special editions like this were way less common. Oreos with orange filling are barely worth Instagramming by 2016 standards, but back in the mid ‘90s, they were fresh and they were exciting and they made me wanna shoop.
Confession: During my freshman year in high school, I had nothing to do for Halloween. My solution was to sit at home watching my Child’s Play 2 tape, twice in a row, devouring these Oreo treat packs the whole way through. That was on a Monday, and on Tuesday, I only half-faked sick. Read More…
2016’s Best Halloween Junk Food, Part 1!
Behold, some of 2016’s best Halloween junk food!
(Well, I don’t always mean “best.” Sometimes just “noteworthy.” I hope you can forgive me this trespass. “2016’s Most Noteworthy Halloween Junk Food” just sounded so clunky.)
This will be a multipart series, because my #1 goal each Halloween season is to eat everything and then spend November singing an a cappella version of Man in the Mirror whenever I take a shower.
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Bag of Bones!
THESE ARE PERFECT. Joining the Bag of Bones family is this all-new Flamin’ Hot version, which replaces the original’s bone white cheddar with fiery red death.
I might like this version even more. I get that the white cheddar Cheetos let us create more classically appropriate skeletons, but that’s kinda my point. Skeletons are spooky, but they have nothing on fleshy remains. With these, I feel like I’m creating the first acts for Hellraiser movies. They look so evil!
Plus, white cheddar Cheetos are good in theory and even good in practice, but they’re not so good when you’re on the couch and you have all day and you just don’t give a fuck. If I’m going to plow through fifty ounces of Cheetos, I don’t want it to feel like work. I want to do it obliviously and deal with the fallout later. I feel like I could do that with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
GRADE: A+. Read More…