2024's Skelecritters!
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Arachtopus
From Spirit Halloween, this oddity recycles the head of the beloved Crazy Bonez giant skeletal octopus, but casts it entirely in shiny black plastic and equips it with bendable, fuzzy spider legs rather than tentacles, creating a monstrous skelespider (sklider) with two large, humanlike eye sockets on a single-segment ribcage body. The result is a cool design, though I kind of wish it came in bony white; the black may be cool, but it obscures the details!
Horned Bonefish
These, I do believe, actually came out last year or before, but I'm suddenly seeing them everywhere. They're a piranha-like little fish with sharp teeth, but they also have big rhinoceros-like horns on their heads, an odd design choice that I'm not so sure about myself. I do appreciate the attempt to represent the chaotic weirdness of actual fish skeletons, however!
Nondescript Bonefish #1
This is another differently styled bonefish, with a more realistic look to it and tattered fins that still seem to have a little flesh clinging to them. They've got big heads with sharp teeth, but not in the "piranha style" so many others are opting for. More like a mean looking trout on a shortened goldfish body. It's cute!
Nondescript Bonefish #2
I found this one at a Winco supermarket, but they're also available at Party City and a few other places. It's simpler and less flashy than our previous two fishies, but I think it's my favorite. It has a nice big skull, eerie little round eye sockets, big pectoral fins, another nice styleization of weird, weird fish ribs and just feels more down to Earth than the snarling piranha monsters, you know??
NEW Skeleton Anglerfish
Crazy Bonez already has its own deep-sea anglerfish, and I think theirs still looks the best, but if you want one with the humongous head and fat little body more famous to its real-life inspiration, this one has you covered, and its light-up lure is also on a rubbery illicium that bobs and dangles, along with an orange glow inside the mouth. I think I'd love this one just as much as Crazy Bonez if the eyes were a bit different. That artificially "angry eyebrow" socket really does bring down a lot of these designs, for me, for whatever reason. Maybe it just tries a tad too hard?
Skelepenguin
One of a couple new skeletons available at Target this year, this penguin is actually pretty dang close to the real thing! It even has the huge birdy sternum that a lot of other Halloween products overlook!
Skeleton "Otter"
Another Target addition is an otter, of all things, though this one, like a lot of Halloween mammal bones, decided to swap the real thing's skull for a cartoony bone-textured version of a living otter's face. The rest of it isn't too bad, except for how human the ribcage looks. This is really more like some sort of little bony demon creature, an unnatural familiar with no particular connection to mustelids.
GIANT Skeleton Rooster
These are available at a chain called Tractor Supply, and they're not aiming for accuracy here, no, with the finger bone tail, bone crest and bone wattle, but you wouldn't know it was a rooster otherwise, would you?! It stands pretty tall, almost up to the average adult chest, but Tractor Supply also offers some smaller size skeletal chickens to give this monstrosity its very own flock.
Crazy Bonez Wicked Bonez
These are being sold online as Crazy Bonez brand and under an additional "Wicked Bonez" label, but I haven't seen any in person! They're full size skeletons, but with a cool blue tinge and an eerie, ghostly face with sort of "melted" features! I'd love to see more "ghostly creature" sort of skeleton beings in this style!
HALF SKELEBUNNY
This Home Depot entry is a cartoon "bunny skeleton," with the cartoon mammal face and bone ears, but in a fairly new twist for our yearly skeleton posts, half of it is still "fleshed" right down the middle! or is it "felted?" I mean, the whole thing's plastic, but it's kind of in the style of a stuffed animal rabbit, with little stitches where the furry part meets bone. Does this make the bone ears more forgivable, because it's already not a natural lagomorph, or less forgivable, because you don't really need the bone ear to reassure you what animal this is if the other half has a regular ear anyway? I could go either way, so I'm gonna say I like it just fine.
WORRIED SKELEBEETLE
I'm not totally sure this is a new one for 2024, because I'm only finding it in second-hand internet listings, so maybe it's a leftover from 2023? It's in the style of the Crazy Bonez skeleton bugs, and even erroneously listed as a skeleton spider everywhere, but it's really some sort of six-legged insect with small, membranous wings on its back and large, hooked mandibles! I believe the intention is some sort of beetle, although it's lacking the protective elytra - hardened forewings - that should cover the more delicate flight-capable hind wings. Granted, the jaw structure doesn't match anything in nature anyway, so it could honestly belong to just about any insect order with both wings and chewing mouthparts. If termites can be cockroaches, which they are, then this could be damn near anything, even some bizarre Hymenopteran, like a wasp that evolved down a more beetle-shaped path.
SKELEPEDE
I've only see this at Michael's so far, and it's pretty striking! A small, finely detailed skeleton centipede, curled up in a snakelike rearing pose. It looks great, and would make a positively kickass tabletop gaming miniature if that's something you do, although I have to admit it has me wishing for a bigger, longer version, bendable like the giant snake skeletons that have long become a standard. I'm honesty surprised this little, statically posed 'pede has come to exist before a more elongated model, really, but it's still a very welcome new addition to the bonebug family.
"VINTAGE" SKLIDER?!
I was wrong. Wrong about everything. The original CRAZY BONEZ sklider is still the first time anyone in the industry, to my knowledge, has simply mashed up a lifelike plastic spider with a lifelike plastic skeleton in a straight 1+1 way, but it is not, I now know, the first all-bone arachnoid in the Halloween retail world, because this breathtakingly gorgeous Goodwill find is from at least the 1990's! This magnificent relic has a fat, circular, chunky body sculpted to resemble a mass of thin bones with a "ripped open" sort of top, in order to function as a candy bowl. Eight short, pointed bone legs protrude from the sides, not actually touching the ground, and a small, fanged, jawless humanoid skull sticks out the front. The effect is basically like a monkey skull and eight fleshless human fingers attached to a bird's nest made of old ribs.
Let's bring it to life!
Direct Video Link
Two things are noticeable about this guy: one, he kind of sounds a little like Mark Hamill Joker. And two, he's the "most difficult" animated candy bowl I've personally seen, because most that I've encountered have only a single motion sensor, but he has three. If the goal is to get the candy without setting it off, then that's literally three times the normal difficulty setting. Of course a screaming spider made of human bones would be the dark souls of candy bowls.
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