I’m going to start on a tangent and hope that it decreases how many more crop up later on in this article. Holy crap, it has been forever since I did any actual work in MS Paint. That banner up there? No Photoshop involved. Not that it’s hard to tell. I think it turned out pretty nice though, in an ironic lo-fi sort of way. It took me like half an hour to put that border around the blue text. I miss my “stroke” layer style.
There. Now that that’s out of my system, let’s move on the actual intro.
You may remember that in the spring of last year, I wrote an article about a Star Wars Mega Egg. If you don’t, maybe go check that one out first, and then come back and read this one. We’ll wait for you. I don’t know if it’s really compulsory reading, but I’m considering this article a sequel to it, so you might as well bone up on the TE canon. Or something. I totally forgot what I was trying to get at with this paragraph.
Oh, right. I was initialy trying to lead into something about how the SWME (I pronounce it “swum-ee”) brang about an article renaissance here on TE. How it heralded a new age of me sometimes writing articles about things that are not video games. But that’s boring and not really relevant, so maybe I’ll just start trying to get to the point.
Back in July, when I was in Lac du Bonnet for the annual Canada Day celebrations, I made the yearly pit stop into The Bargain Shop to check out their wares, procure a buttload of candy to eat while waiting for the fireworks to start, and maybe find something interesting enough to write about. Of course, this might sound like a somewhat familiar story to you. If you’ve been reading TE for a while, it really should. I do this every year, and I write about it almost every year, whether or not I actually find anything.
This is what I found in 2013. This glorious thing. It doesn’t have a proper name -and I’ve searched the label thoroughly- so I’m going to call it the Amazing Spider-Man Mega Egg. It’s mostly egg-shaped, and it’s at least as mega as the SWME, so it’s a pretty fitting moniker. The strange thing about the ASMME (pronounced “as-um-me”) is the way it stands. Well, I guess it stands the way these thing usually do, but… Oh, just look at the next picture. You’ll get it then.
Yeah. I get that the label is put on that way because then it’s properly contoured to the general shape of Spidey’s head, but it would be really odd to walk down the candy aisle and see a bunch of upside-down Spider-Man heads on the shelf. It’s just not something you’d expect to see. In fact, I’d probably take a picture of it.
That peculiar sight is not what drew me to this item though. No, what made me buy this sucker is that it was the only upside-down Spider-Man head on the shelf. Poor little decapitated Spidey head was sitting there all sad and lonely; clearly I had to take him home. There wasn’t a price listed, so it was kind of a sketchy deal, but it was something that deep in my heart I knew I must do.
In the end, I bought a rather sizeable amount of other candy, and didn’t bother checking the receipt to see how much I paid for my Spidey head. Given that these things are usually pretty expensive for what they are and The Bargain Shop likes to mix in some horribly overpriced things in with the bargains, I’d wager that it was somewhere around $3. And that’s my optimistic side’s lowball.
I guess I should also note that I’m a big fan of the Amazing Spider-Man movie that this egg is promoting. Was promoting. That came out over an entire year ago at this point. Say what you will about it, I thought it was streets ahead of any of the Raimi flicks.
It’s worth nothing that the “front” half of the egg is totally see-through, and it’s definitely losing points for that. Make no mistake about it, the ASMME is in no way trying to keep its contents a secret, but I’d like to at least have an air of surprise going into this thing. Not knowing what’s inside is like 90% of the fun of these damn things, and they are sucking all that fun right out with their transparent plastic. The rest of the fun is 5% in good packaging, and 5% in those rare occasions when there’s actually something pretty cool inside.
SPOILERS: We are getting a handful of suckers
Also weird is that the egg opens horizontally as opposed to the usual vertical split. I don’t even know why. Historically, every plastic egg with goodies inside opens vertically. I don’t even need to research that claim to back it up. That’s just the way it is. Amazing Spider-Man Mega Egg is bucking that trend. It is the hipster’s Mega Egg of choice.
Oh, hey, look at that. A bunch of suckers. WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED? I wonder if they’re trying to say something about all of us who bought these things.
I have just decided that obnoxious allcaps sentences are going to be a new thing around here. It’s just something you’re going to have to learn to live with. Just like I have to learn to live with the fact that I spent an unspecified amount on money on an upside-down Spider-Man head filled with suckers. Having typed it out, that actually doesn’t sound so bad.
You should also read the allcaps sentences with the voice of Buckle from American Dad! So much funnier that way. In fact, read everything I write from now on in Buckle’s voice. Yes. I like this idea.
Buried underneath the seventy million Spider-Man suckers are a few packets of little Spidey candies and a small page of stickers. To say I’m disappointed would be a little facetious, but the fact of the matter is that the Star Wars Mega Egg had so many more stickers to offer. Twice as many, at least. Sure, I don’t really give two damns about tiny character stickers, and the Spider-Man stickers are easily the cooler of the two, but it’s hard not to feel like I should have more Spider-Man stickers than I do. What can I say? I’m an entitled brat.
Here’s a close-up shot of the edibles inside the ASMME. Because that’s the only way I can stretch this any further. The candy Spidey masks are… exactly what they’re described to be. They’re tiny little candies with the Spider-Man mask imprinted on them. I’m trying desperately to come up with something funny to say about them but all that’s going through my head at the moment is the America’s Funniest Home Videos theme song. The version with actual words from the Bob Saget era, not the current instrumental version. I cannot tell you for certain why this is.
The suckers are far less notable, as they’re just plain suckers popped into Spider-Man themed wrappers. It kind of looks like maybe they were supposed to bear the Spidey mask design, as there’s a barely visible pattern around the edges of the suckers. It clearly didn’t take and now they just look like plain suckers. At the very least, they’re all red, and everyone knows that red is always the best sucker. None of that yellow garbage up in here no sir.
What’s that? You want to know how the candy tastes? Well, the suckers are pretty good. I’d say at least a half-grade better than a generic red sucker. The candy masks are… well, they’re not bad, but they certainly aren’t as good as I thought they would be. The red ones in particular are fairly bland, but the blue ones are sweet and maybe taste something like blueberry candy flavour. They’re also pretty soft, so you can just munch ’em up with reckless abandon. Which is good, because I don’t much care for candies that I have to suck on for five minutes to soften up. That’s what the suckers are for!
And now you know the horrifying secret of the Amazing Spider-Man Mega Egg: I’ve known all along what was going to be in here. I alluded to this fact at least twice. It’s a little heartbreaking that they decided to spoil its contents up front, and to be perfectly honest, when I saw this part of the label in the store, there was a moment where I was willing to just let this one go. The Missus convinced me that I should get it anyway, and looking back on how many words I’ve been able to squeeze out of it even without an actual surprise, I’m pretty glad that she made me go back for it.
I struggled for a while, trying to decide whether or not I should put this big reveal up at the front of the article so that you readers were on the up-and-up about the whole lack of surprise thing going on here. In the end, I figured that the best course of action would be to save it for the “big reveal” at the end, so that the article could maintain at least an element of surprise, even when there really was none. And that way I could also shoehorn it into the “surprise stuffs” category despite the fact that it really has no business being there.
The real question is whether I should file it under “film” as well. The ASMME is very much based on last year’s movie, but I’ve said almost nothing about said movie. The indecision is driving me bonkers. I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.
But where do I go from here? Well, I guess we could go back to TE’s roots and try to figure out what would happen next if this was an article on X-E/DinoDrac.
Yes. I think that will do. Corporate Mascot Piggy has now been rebranded as Amazing Spider-Fan Piggy. He hasn’t been an actual corporate mascot for some time now, so he’s pretty happy to find a new purpose in life. Being a lowly promotional stressball wasn’t really the way he imagined things would turn out for him. I’ve just helped him move onto bigger and (questionably) better things, and I think we can all agree that the world has been made just a slightly brighter place today.
Amazing Spider-Fan Piggy will likely be doing the rounds at whatever the next big nerd convention to roll through town will be, Make sure to keep an eye out for him near any booths that are selling anything Spider-Man related. ASF Piggy takes his new persona very seriously. I expect his corner of the cubicle will be covered with overpriced Spider-Man fanart posters and papercraft characters afterwards.
Hey, people have tattooed far stupider things on thier butts than Spider-Man. Give Amazing Spider-Fan Piggy a break. Betcha Stan Lee has Spider-Man tattooed on his butt, too.
Oh great. Now this thing is ending on a visual of Stan Lee’s butt. I think we’ve hit a new low.