Dino Drac’s 2019 Halloween Funpack!
And here we go! Time to debut Dino Drac’s 2019 Halloween Funpack!
If you’re already a subscriber, good news: I can’t take on any more right now, so you guys are the only ones who are LOCKED IN.
I do have some spares that I can offer on an individual basis. Quantities on those are very limited, so if you know you want one, I’d advise skipping straight to the bottom and placing an order before someone beats you to it.
For those who’ve asked, I expect that official subscriptions will open back up next month!
UNITED STATES ONLY!
The October 2019 Funpack is a Halloween party in a box. There are over ten items inside, and they’ll help you close out the season in spooky style. It’s a total you-on-the-couch situation, reading, rummaging and eating Cracker Jack. (No, seriously, you can do all of those things with this Funpack.)
Let’s run through the contents! Read More…
2019’s Best Halloween Junk Food, Part 2!
Okay, I’m ready to upgrade my opinion. This hasn’t just been a “pretty good year” on the Halloween junk food front. It’s become absolutely stellar. In terms of sheer volume, it’s certainly one of the better seasons of the past decade. I’m digging it, and I’m gaining dozens of pounds because of it.
Last week, I gushed about six things that y’all need to eat before Halloween. Tonight, we’re gonna run through another six, and this batch is even stronger than the last one!
Slime Shake!
(Available at Carvel)
My sympathies to those who don’t live near a Carvel, because nobody deserves to miss this. In a cross-promotion with Freeform’s 31 Nights of Halloween (aka Hocus Pocus ALL DAY EVERY DAY), Carvel has unleashed the SLIME SHAKE.
It’s a cookies-and-cream milkshake made with soft serve ice cream, Oreo cookies and EDIBLE SLIME. The slime is comparable to decorating gel, and obviously, it’s why you’ll want this. Milkshakes aren’t normally my thing, but this monster was delicious. As an added bonus, eating it made me feel like a victim from Troll 2.
GRADE: B+. The only reason I’m not going higher is because it’s so dependent on your local parlor’s execution. If they overmix it, it’ll just look like a Shamrock Shake. If yours is made correctly, I’ll bump to an A. Read More…
2019’s Best Halloween Junk Food, Part 1!
For a minute there, it looked like the 2019 Halloween season was going to be pretty weak on the junk food front. There were some new cool things, but not many, and people were feeling it. I don’t know why we correlate with the quality of a Halloween season with the quality of its junk food, but it’s a thing.
Fortunately, business picked up in a big way. What’s making this season uniquely special is that so many restaurants and other “dine-out” locations have gotten in on the fun, with everything from spooky cocktails to slimy milkshakes.
So like, it’s not a great year if you just keep going to Target a thousand times in a row, but if you really explore, there’s so much great garbage waiting to be devoured.
With that, below are six of this year’s best Halloween junk foods. (I already have enough for a sequel article, too!)
The $1 Vampire!
(Available at Applebee’s)
This is one of my very favorite things about the 2019 season. What’s not to love? It’s a purple cocktail that has plastic Dracula fangs swimming on top of it. AND there’s a maraschino cherry!
Best of all, there’s no fine print. This really is just one dollar, with no asterisk. You don’t have to order a meal to get it at that price, or any other bullshit. (Me and Jay did a Halloween bar crawl last week, and our grand total for two of these was $2.14.)
As for the flavor, Jay compared it to a grape Fla-Vor-Ice. He was right. That’s exactly what these taste like. Melted grape Fla-Vor-Ice. Applebee’s insists that it’s a blend of rum and tropical fruit juices, but all you’re gonna taste is grape Fla-Vor-Ice.
GRADE: A+. Ordering ridiculous cocktails from chain restaurants in shopping malls is one of the lowkey must-do experiences of the 2019 Halloween season. Just don’t expect to get drunk — you could chug ten of them, and all you’d feel is a stomach ache. Read More…
Trick-or-Treating Memories. In Crayon.
You know that thing I do every Christmas season, where I write about holiday memories but also draw them with crayons? I’ve done it for Thanksgiving, too. I am so bad at going viral.
Here’s the Halloween version, which will specifically deal with trick-or-treating. Below are five memories of my childhood candy-hunting adventures, badly drawn with a Sharpie and then colored with crayons that are still all over my office floor.
Hodgepodge Haunter!
Only rarely was I determined to be any specific character for Halloween. It was Dracula in kindergarten, then ALF a few years later, and… I think that’s it?
Most of my costumes were just mixes of whatever could be found at local pharmacies on like, October 29th. That became a tradition in of itself. My old best friend lived right across the street, and just before Halloween, our mothers would take us to CVS or Rite-Aid to rummage through Aisle 7.
Pharmacies carried more costumes in the late ‘80s than they do now, but when you went that close to Halloween, there wasn’t much left. Actually, there was hardly anything left, and certainly no “complete” costumes that self-respecting kids would’ve wanted to wear.
We’d instead cobble our costumes together from various accessories. In the example illustrated above, one year I wore a Jason mask, a cheap Freddy glove and a nylon vampire cape. Add in a plastic scythe, and I gotta say, I probably liked that costume better than any “real” one I might’ve found two weeks prior. Read More…