Written by Jonathan Wojcik

PETCO & PETSMART 2026

Two Headed Aquarium Doll

   A resin figurine of a little humanoid being made out of coiled rope, with a stitched-together heart on its chest and TWO heads, each with one stitched "X" eye and one actual eyeball to stare at one another! I like its proportions a lot, with the little t-pose body, big heads and single rope sticking out the top of each cranium. I also like the greenish shading towards the base.

   Petco puts out a lot of things each year in this stitchy doll style, but usually they're soft dog and cat toys. This is the first time I've seen them as solid figurines for aquariums. Personally, I love aquarium decor as just regular human decor, especially since you can't be certain they won't leach (the opposite of leech) chemicals into the water. Of course this also makes them just fine for decor in dry enclosures, such as for desert beetles or scorpions.

     There's another "species" of these, too, and this one is a bit stranger! It doesn't have any arms that we can see, it wears a tattered purple tunic over its body, and the two heads are on long necks. It could very well just be two snake-shaped rope creatures in the same t-shirt, for all we know!

Doll Spider Figurine

   The last of these I'm going to talk about is a figure version of a spider petco also sells as a dog toy. It's a simple, round black cartoon spider, one eye is a stitched X, the other a real eyeball again, and just half of its eight legs are made of coiled ropes.

  So, I'm not sure this will make any sense, but these figures feel like confirmation that these are literal "living doll" characters or creatures. You know, like...a crude rope doll shaped like a spider or a little person might only look like a doll because it's a doll, right? They represent a spider and a person, just in a stitchy patchy doll format. But here they're represented in a whole different medium, and still looks like dolls, so like, that means they represent creatures who always look like dolls. Do you get me.

Spider Figurine

     See??? THIS aquarium figure is also a spider, but it's not in doll format! This exists in the same continuity as the last figure, but this one is an organic biological arachnid! It's a really cute one, too, standing tall on its legs with two nervous-looking white eyes. This is an "archway" type aquarium object, for fish to swim under should someone actually gamble with giving it to fish. Probably the next most interesting thing about it is the base, which is a patch of grass and some little white flowers. A springtime meadow is a bold choice of backdrop for a Halloween spider! That's like the exact opposite kind of environment you associate with Halloween! And yet, it is among the favorite environments of spiders.

"SUMMERWEEN SNAKE" DOG TOY

    They literally just call this a snake, and put it under a "summerween" label, but it's a black and white striped serpent whose entire head is a scaly pink, saw-toothed mouth, with a clump of blue hair, and a single huge eyeball filling its jaws. Or maybe the head is just an eyeball, and the "teeth" are more like lashes in the "eyelid?" It also has a green hair poof on the tip of its tail, to add just one more extremely non-snake anatomical detail. It's a cool as heck body plan either way, and maybe it is somehow a reptile that has been exposed to some very weird chemicals, dark magic, space radiation, alien parasitism, or the evolutionary factors of an alternate reality. A world where this is in fact just a "snake." Or maybe the designer was going for a beetlejuicy worm monster, whatever.

"SUMMERWEEN" SQUID

    Yes, there is also a cephalopod in the style of the "snake." Its got a little white central body with two eyes in the same black socket, exactly like a Mario Blooper, but then it has a big black pen, the fins are black and white striped, the small arms splayed out to its sides are purple, and the two long whips are not only also beetlejuice striped, but end in pink paddles the same texture as the snake's eyelid-mouth. To me this implies creatures altered by the same weird phenomenon, or, perhaps, an entity that has shape-shifted into both of these forms.

GIANT HAUNTED POPSCICLE PLUSH

    As you saw in my introductory photo, there are three styles of huge giant sausage-shaped Halloween plush at Petco this year. One of them is printed to look like three spooky faces stacked atop one another - a pumpkin, a purple happy vampire, and a positively miserable-looking ghost - who are all dripping and melting a little. Out of context, it looks like a plush of a giant Halloween candle, but they call it a "popscicle," despite not having a stick. I DO appreciate the fact that it comes already covered in brown splotches, like fake dirt stains. This is funny because it would have looked like that anyway after a few days in the possession of a dog, but in case you didn't have that kind of patience, they made sure your visitors will think this thing is filth-encrusted from the moment you bring it home!

GIANT OOZING CANDY CORN MONSTER

  The second giant long plush toy design is a "candy corn," the stripes of which are also dripping. Actually much more like a "popscicle" than the popscicle. It has a scary pumpkin-type face on the tip, making it a candy *monster,* but the whole thing is also stretched out into a long finger shape. I like that it's several factors removed from a candy corn, but that's still the only thing you can recognize it as.

There's a third one of these, which you saw already, but I'm talking about it later because it's the best thing ever.

VAMPIRE WITH ORGANS

    This plush vampire comes stuff with a smaller plush of a brain, an eyeball, a severed finger, and a heart with a little happy face on it. All four of these things are also roughly the size of the vampire's whole torso. So maybe he just has a fairly large heart and brain, but whose finger and whose eyeball could those possibly be? This also comes in a Frankenstein's Monster version, but that one makes slightly more sense, so it isn't as funny.

COFFIN PLUSH

     I just like this plush coffin because it has eyes peeking out of a little window on the front. It's cute!

SKULL PLUSH

     Meanwhile, I like this plush skull because there's an adorable worm winding through the eye sockets.

GIANT MUMMY HOT DOG

    Here it is. A huge enormous plush hot dog that is also a mummy, with big cartoon eyes, and splotches of "ketchup" that evoke blood. This is so perfectly ridiculous, it truly deserves to be so much more than a dog toy. This should be sold everywhere, for everybody, regardless of their species. This, right here, is what should replace those awful "Jamaican Banana" plushes at carnivals. Mummy hot dogs should be inescapable.

PETSMART AQUARIUM GHOSTS

    So there wound up being only really one kind of thing at Petsmart I had the energy to include, and that's these neon orange sea creatures wearing ghostly bedsheets. They include a crab, a sea star, and for some imaginative reason, a tiny narwhal. It could have easily just been a plain fish, which would make sense at this scale, but the tail is in the fluke orientation and it has a unicorn horn, so, this is a very tiny orange narwhal. Maybe they're all actual ghosts, and this is what a narwhal's soul looks like? These come as a set of three, but they're not alone:

PETSMART OCTOPUS GHOST

  Towering over the other three subaquatic spirits is a bright orange octopus wearing its own sheet ghost costume. The little ones only have eye-holes on their sheets, but this one has the eyes and the mouth! It's another precious addition to my small collection of Halloween-specific Cephalopoda, and I also couldn't help taking home this poor little unwanted "misprint." The mouth is too far to one side, and one of the eyes is dripping. What if nobody else wanted this one, just because its face is brokened?? I barely actually bought anything at all this year. This was the first of only three or four Halloween things I felt the need to actually own this season. I've been more of a Distant Admirer and Curator than a real collector of anything for many years now, to be honest, but this is the kind of thing special enough to join the extra-special secret club of non-essentials I spend any money on.

   Anyway, I said I wasn't going to arbitrarily turn images into transparent PNG's anymore, but here's a tall transparent Hot Dog Mummy for you. Please make good use of it on your "socials," I even rotated the image to make it taller for you! That's called a "FREEBIE!!" ;)