We went to Altantic City for an overnight visit this past Friday, and for the first time in history, I actually won. After spending several hours getting violated by every slot and table game in the Tropicana casino, the trip was shaping up to be just another in a long series of colossal failures. And then, it happened. During a late night game of Let-It-Ride poker, I nailed four sixes with two fifteen dollar bets in. That's $30 x 50, plus a $400 bonus bet payout. Jibberish poker lingo, but the short version is: Happy Matt.

The win was worth almost two grand, and even with my many follies earlier in the evening, I came home more than a thousand bucks up. So marked the only time that the ride back from Atlantic City wasn't footnoted by the foul ambiance of regret and guilt. I have no solid plans for this modest fortune, but since I'm speaking of a financial gain on the Internet, I obviously plan to donate everything to starving children with baaaad diseases.

We headed out to the boardwalk on Saturday, ultimately landing at one of the many 99 cent shops that I've covered in past Altantic City-related articles. For the most part, it was just the usual gamut of generic foodstuffs, obsolete soap brands, shell-themed ashtrays and breast-shaped coffee mugs.

I wanted to tie a bow around the weekend by coming home with something worth writing about, but there are only so many times a person can scribble about odd soap and titty cups before they bore everyone around them. Fortunately, at the last moment, I found a certain something that's totally worth paying a backwards tribute to...

At first glance, this Animal Playset just seems like your everyday, run-of-the-mill, cheapo set of plastic animal toys. And while that's technically a correct description, it's also a description akin to calling the tip of the Sistine Chapel "a ceiling," or the moai statues peppered throughout Easter Island "rocks."

The oddity seemed only rudimentary at first: Why were cat and dog figurines packaged with a plastic palm tree? We could fry many robot brains trying to conjure an answer, but the truth is, that alone wasn't enough to make the Animal Playset worth writing about. I looked closer.

"Wait a second...those aren't cat and dog figurines....they're dog-faced cat figurines!" I was elated! We were getting closer to a shitty toy worthy of archiving. I inspected the still-packaged playset some more, hoping to find additional graces. The next thing I noticed were the odd pair of toy rocks that came packaged along with the dog-faced cats and palm tree. What significance these rocks hold will be forever lost on me, but at the same time, I knew that I couldn't genuinely point to them as the piece (pieces?) de résistance. If the Animal Playset was to go down in history as one of the worst dollar store toys ever, it needed to blow my mind without even trying.

That's when my friend pointed out that the included plastic playmat, which seemed to detail a simple grassy area for the dog-faced cats to march around the palm tree on top off, was actually the biggest mindfuck at all. As my friend took an inquisitive hand to his chin, he turned to me and spoke softly: "Hey, why the fuck is there a pterodactyl on this thing?"

No longer forced to string dog-faced cats and palms trees into cohesive incohesiveness, this final feature took the Animal Playset to a previously unreached echelon of oddball royalty. The playmat not only features a pterodactyl, but also a brontosaurus, along with a hippopotamus, lion and various farm animals, roaming together through a series of fenced-off grassy lands. Either Hammond had a hand in this, or the Animal Playset is an entity for which the rules of time and science do not apply.

Let's review: Dog-faced cat figures tugging a palm tree across a countryside filled with cows and dinosaurs, with free bonus rocks. It's the kind of catalog description that means more than a photo ever could. I love the Animal Playset, and I have every reason to. It's successfully mutated cats, it's pushed palm trees to a higher level of grandeur, and it's given me ammunition for nights filled with dreams of brontosaurs and lions playing freeze tag together.

The fact that the playset's shelfmates consisted of porn-themed playing cards and last year's assortment of Marshmallow Peeps notwithstanding, this was the absolute best way to bookend my most successful Altantic City to date.

Before heading home, we sat out on a boardwalk bench, soaking up the cool breezes and reflecting on the weekend that was. Then some random guy waltzed over with a giant bag of buttered popcorn and poured it on the ground, inviting a nearby flock of seagulls to turn murderous. We ran. We ran so far away-ye-yay.

Posted by Matt on 03/02/2008. E-mail me!