The Naming Of Pumpkins: Size Matters

In the world of plastic pumpkins, performance is everything and performance hinges entirely on the amount of candy you can hold in your hollow, molded head. It's brutal, but it's true- size matters. Today we're taking a look at two fellows who sit at opposite ends of the plastic pumpkin size spectrum. Today we're going to meet Frank & Fuller...

This little fella is Fuller and he's no bigger than a second. Actually, he's no bigger than five bite-size Snickers bars 'cause that's about all that you can cram into his head. That's a guesstimate, I didn't actually cram bite-size Snickers bars into Fuller's head. Mostly this is due to the fact that the hole at the top is barely wide enough to accommodate a bite-size Snickers' awesome girth.

Now it's pretty obvious that Fuller was never meant to be a fully functioning candy collecting receptacle, so what was he? I'm no expert, but it seems plain to me that Fuller was a mock-up prototype of the kind typically employed by door-to-door salesmen in the 1930's and '40's who didn't want to lug around boxes of the full-size wares they were peddling. Your average plastic pumpkin salesman would probably have had a briefcase full of these mini-pumpkins, in all styles & colors, with which to tempt the lonely and unfulfilled housewives of that era. Fuller was merely a sample of bigger and better things. It would be six to eight weeks before the mailman delivered the full-size goods.

Besides being the smallest pumpkin in my collection, Fuller is also the most recently acquired having been picked up in a thrift store a little over a week ago.

Frank, or "Big Frankie" as he likes to be called by the ladies, could eat a half-dozen Fullers for lunch and still have room left over for a Hungry Man Sports Grill Beer Battered Chicken Finger frozen dinner. He wouldn't do this because he is not a cannibal and he's also a recovering alcoholic. He'll stick with the Country Fried Beef Steak dinner sans beer or Fuller.

Bite-size Snickers guesstimate? 40,000. Easily the equal to your average pillow case, Frank would be a viable choice for all your trick or treating needs if it wasn't for the teeny, tiny plastic handle strung through his temples. I'm thinking that puny thing would snap under just a couple of pounds of pressure and dump your Hallowe'en loot all over the lawn of your most annoying neighbors... the mean born again couple who hand out religious tracts in comic strip form showing cute little cartoon trick or treaters writhing in Hell's punishing fires. Frank's the kind of guy who would think it was funny to pull a stunt like that.

If that strap could manage to hold up under the weight of a full-load of candy, you're still going to have to deal with the fact that come November 1st, your bucket-carrying arm is going to be grossly over-developed in relation to your doorbell-ringing arm. All the kids at school will call you Popeye.


Two plastic pumpkins do not a worthy post make so I'm including Buck Diamond as a little bonus. Ah, Buck Diamond... adventurer, inventor, daredevil and inveterate womanizer. Buck's feats of daring-do are the stuff of legends and you don't need me to tell you all about them. Remember when Buck tangled with the Nazi Dinosaur Men of Kuala Lumpur? Of course you do! The way he used the cap off an old bottle of Kickapoo Joy Juice to disable their ice-cap melting doomsday ray? Nobody but Buck could have pulled something like that off with quite such panache. Oh, Buck! You scallywag!

Even plastic Hallowe'en buckets like to join in with the dress-up fun, so the next batch of pumpkins will spotlight some of the costumed jack-o'-lanterns in my collection.