Shipped by ITP Imports, the bag contains various bits of ephemeral shite, all
of it polymer but a mix of types; still, it was only a pound! The skeleton was
so poor he went to recycling without a curtain-call!
The best bits? Finger-puppets of typical
Halloween subjects; I think I've said before - because this was a US 'festival'
for the longest time they've had loads of this stuff over the years and small
figurals do appear on evilBay from time to time, a lot of them with some merit
for collectors, but in the UK I haven't previously found much of this type of
stuff, this year - as we shall see in the coming days - there has been a fair
bit, but mostly insects and spiders, not witches and ghosts, I want more
witches and ghosts!
They are in a softish PVC and with the orange
proved a bit of a bugger to shoot, if you think these are bad images, you
should see what I've chucked-out! Sometimes the mojo just breaks and you can't
'get it right'!
Far from being even remotely "spine-chilling", they look like
they are dancing-together at a school-disco and yes, I know 'it's a bit of fun
for the kids', but the hyperbole annoys me, they're not "extracted from the dead" and
there's no "terror"
involved, to misquote Monty Python,
they're just slightly naughty toys!
There was also a larger spider in the same
PVC as the 'finger bobs' and smaller spider rings in a tinny polyethylene which
only fit very small fingers, but even then - not comfortably I suspect; so I
cut the rings off two each of the two colours and chucked the rest straight in
the recycling!
Interestingly; the novelty retailer Tiger carried small bags of the rings in
the same colours (orange and black) but close inspection showed them to be
slightly poorer copies and at £2 a bag (one colour per bag) common sense
carried the day, rare for me I know, but I left them in situ, with just the
mental note made! If I remember to get a shelfie, if I pass Tiger again, if it's before the 31st -
I'll shoot them!
This was a semi-rigid PVC (or semi-soft
ethylene, it's not clear!), and as rubber bats through the ages go; was a
pretty poor example, but as far as Halloween poly-tat goes, an improvement on
whatever/what little I've seen the last few years!
2 comments:
Being from the US, this kind of offering (small package with "scary" items) is EVERYWHERE around Halloween.
Honestly Halloween has become out of control in the US since I was a kid. I probably sound old (50 years old) saying this, but it has become a marketing explosion that lasts from late August to October 31st.
People even decorate their houses with lights that look like Christmas lights, but are orange.
Don't know how it is in the UK, but crazy here!
JR
It's almost worse here John, twenty years ago we didn't, period! It was a US thing - we had Guy Fawkes Night on the 5th and that was it, but in the last few years it has accelerated to epic proportions and even in the last 12-months (see forthcoming 'News Views'), there was a woman on Radio 4 last night (our main speech channel) who was saying in the last three years it has become second only to Christmas in revenue for toy/gift companies, and an 80% urban dress-up rate last year is looking to be 92% this year, with 2/3 of all kids in city's, that's some 14 million costumes going to landfill (recent report in the news), it's a sign that we don't 'get it', and if we don't get it soon, that'll be the end of it!
I'll buy it while it's there, which makes me part of the problem, but if it wasn't there I wouldn't buy it!
H
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