Narrowly avoiding death for cluttering our apartment with a seven foot Jason Voorhees statue, I return to you while something much, much cuter: A Snoopy-O’-Lantern!
It appears as though licensing rights for Peanuts-related tomfoolery can be purchased for a buck fifty and a compliment, because there are a lot of junky companies making a lot of junky Peanuts stuff. Ten-page activity books, cheap window clings, you name it.
But in that sea of Snoopy shit, there are plenty of treasures — like this one. From East West Distributing, it’s the official “Light-Up Snoopy,” or in more descriptive terms, the official “Light-Up Pumpkin Shaped Like Snoopy’s Head.”
Innocuous and adorable, it’s easy to overlook the sheer insanity of this thirteen-dollar decoration. How a product that could only be described as a “light-up pumpkin shaped like Snoopy’s head” got off the drawing board, into pitch meetings and ultimately into mass production is probably worthy of a documentary in of itself, but for those of us who like to keep things simple: Yay, it’s a Snoopy-O’-Lantern!
I found this at Walgreens, where it was kept on one of the top shelves. You know the kind. They’re sort of within reach, but not exactly, so you really have to appreciate the item if you’re going to go through the trouble of doing the damned fool tippy-toe dance to get it down. Snoopy should be proud; I don’t make such concessions for just any pumpkin-shaped-like-somebody’s-head.
Once you plug Snoopy in, a small bulb on the inside beams light to the outside, enveloping the plastic head with a spooky and subtle glow. I love it. It’s so lo-fi. It’s a brand new item, but it feels like something that could’ve been sold 25-30 years ago, totally unchanged. No overblown gimmicks, no major theatrics — just a sweet little Halloween nite-lite that just happens to look like a pumpkin version of Snoopy’s disembodied head.
Ten bucks would’ve been a fairer price for what amounts to a hunk of low-grade plastic with a Christmas light inside, but in a world filled with so many awesome things to complain about, griping about paying three dollars too much for a light-up head just seems frivolous.
Oh, and if you can’t rally behind Snoopy, note that Walgreens was also selling Mickey Mouse versions of this, too. There may have been other Disney characters as well, but I had Snoopy tunnel vision and wasn’t paying attention to anything else. Besides, Disney characters get to enjoy relevance all year. Let the dog have his holiday seasons.
Posted by Matt. E-mail me!
Ghosted by 
The first thing I saw was a giant orange boob.
Then again, that’s often the first thing I see.