By coincidence, this Christmas, three of my family members gave each other electronic noise-making creatures. My Mom gave Patrick a Crazy Cluck The Wacky Chicken, Patrick gave me a 6 Foot Spooky Skeleton, and Patrick gave Steve a Laffun Head. More on each of these in a moment, but here's a video of them frolicking together in front of the Christmas tree:
Unfortunately you can't really make out what the Spooky Skeleton is saying
because the video camera in my Treo 700p cellphone / PDA does a horrible job
with audio. On the other hand, the grungy audio quality makes this sound
more like something out of a horror movie.
You may also notice that very wide pillarboxing is being done on the video. There's some pillarboxing on all of the Treo 700p video clips I upload to YouTube because the 700p's video camera application uses a 1.2 aspect ratio (352x288) vs. YouTube's 1.3 (320x240). (It's necessary to force the pillarboxing by prerendering to 320x240 in a video editor, BTW — otherwise YouTube will just stretch / squash non-1.3-ratio clips to fill up the frame.)
But again, wider than usual pillarboxing is being done here. The reason is that before shooting this, I had just spent a long time taking still photos of the tall skeleton with my Treo on its side for portrait format, it was very late, I was very tired (very little sleep the night before), and I made the stupid mistake of filming the video clips with the camera in portrait format too. This wouldn't be a problem if I were outputting to a QuickTime clip, which can have arbitrary resolutions, but since I'm hosting my site off a DSL line and don't really have sufficient upstream bandwidth to host video files and am thus using YouTube, I had to rotate the footage in my video editor.
But back to the creatures. The big guy is a 6 Foot Spooky Skeleton from Gemmy. I don't see him in their Halloween section, and a search on their site for "skeleton" gives "Your search returned 2 product(s) out of 666 searched", but no Mr. 6 Foot, so it would seem they're not making him anymore. Here's the label on his box:
It's pretty neat — his legs are telescoping (and locking), allowing his vaunted 6 Foot height to fit in his 17" box. His head snaps off and goes in the corner of the box:
As the box says, he's Sound and Motion Activated. I had him set up near where we were opening our presents, and every time someone would laugh too loudly or something, he would instantly start cackling along and shouting out his Crypt-Keeper-esque posturing lines, which was really cracking us up.
The chicken that Mr. Skeleton is, uh, choking is Crazy Cluck The Wacky Chicken from Westminster Inc., who clucks, waddles, and flaps his wings to the Chicken Dance song, then struggles and makes gasping and choking noises if you pick him up by his neck. There's a good demo video of him on the Cloud Nine Toys site. Here's his box:
Definitely the spiritual descendent of one of my favorite birthday presents from the early '80s, I Took a Lickin' From a Chicken.
The bizarre head the skeleton is holding in his left hand is the most interesting of the bunch. It's a Laffun Head, a late '60s (?) / '70s novelty item meant to be mounted on your wall. Unfortunately this one (which Patrick found in a thrift shop in Arizona) was no longer working, but originally, if you pulled down the tie, the head would start laughing while opening and closing its eyes and wagging its tongue, and then it'd spit water out of its mouth at you. I neglected to take any close-up photos of the Laffun Head, but here are some stills from the video (at their original resolution):
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When we first put in a C battery and pulled the tie, nothing happened. I
unscrewed the head and took it apart, and found a disintegrated black rubber
thing inside. This was apparently the bladder for the water the head would
squirt. I wonder if any Laffun Heads are in existence that can still squirt,
or if all the bladders will have disintegrated by now, regardless of whether
they were ever used. Update, 2007-06-15: A visitor to this page, who
has the Marine model (with its
incongruous long hair ), emailed me to say that the bladder in
his had also dried out, and that he'd been unsuccessful so far in finding a
source for a replacement.
I did manage to get the electric motor running, but it was just spinning freely and not driving anything — not sure what parts were missing or how they had made their way out of the head. The internals did seem to be kind of an engineering marvel, though. It was amazing how they could get the eye movements, tongue movements, laughing, and squirting done with what looked like a very simple mechanism. I turned the crank manually so we could hear the laughing (and to get the eyes into a permanently open rather than permanently closed position), and it was very creepy. The thing used a Victrola-type mechanism with a plastic amplifying dome. I couldn't see if the recorded medium was a cylinder, or a disc, or what.
Actually we didn't know it was called a Laffun Head until I later did some web searching to try to identify it. On the back of the head was the following text:
Original Peter Figuren
Manufactured by the crazy guys at
Bibi Products Co., Inc.
Culver City, CA. 90230
Searching for portions of that text led me to this SWAPATORIUM blog page. Further research indicated that their model is a Tyrolean Yodeler:
The Laffun Heads came in a large assortment of designs, most of them with the same demonic Buddy Hackett-esque face, but with different hair, hats, and ties. The "Original Peter Figuren" text on the back is apparently a credit for the sculptor, Gustav Peter, who was an Austrian mostly known for sculpting hedgehog figurines:
If I took down the text on the back correctly, Steve's model is apparently a very old one. All the ones I've seen on eBay say "Manufactured in Korea by the crazy guys...".
Circa 1978, there was a new series of heads labeled "JOBAR'S New Edition Laffun Head". These were put out by Jobar International, Inc., who apparently licensed the design from Bibi Products. These no longer used the Original Peter Figuren sculpt, and while they weren't anywhere near as creepy, they also lost most of the charm. Here are a couple of models that were recently for sale on eBay, The OLD MAN and The CHEF:
Jobar International, Inc. is still around, by the way, though they don't seem to sell any whimsical items anymore. Bibi Products Co. does not exist anymore, per this page where someone was looking for The Uncorker, a special corkscrew they used to sell in 1980.
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Dan Harkless
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