Bogleech Halloween Classics:

MAGNIFICENT MAGGOT!

   If I could save only one Halloween doohickey from a blazing inferno, chances are pretty high that I'd pick the Magnificent Maggot. With a face like an alien skull and one giant eyeball, this rubber grub is practically everything I need in a material possession that doesn't access the internet, and if I could figure out how to access the internet with this thing, you know that's how Bogleech would have been updated all along. The presence of legs and a chitinous head capsule indicates more of a beetle or moth larva than a true maggot, but we can hardly judge him by what he hypothetically pupates into. When the motion sensor in his little corpse-nose is triggered, the darling larva wriggles along about as realistically as you could expect from a big rubber toy, flashing bright colors from within his eye and emitting the most delightful slurping, chewing noises, but don't take my word for it:

   Here's a lame video I took of both Magnificent Maggot and Crawling Brain, where you can really see Maggot's wiggling feet!

   While totally accidental, our precious baby bears more than a passing resemblance to Hideshi Hino's Bug Boy, albeit moreso in this particular cover art than in the Manga itself, where Bug Boy also sports horns and a human-like, if fanged mouth.

   One year after Target carried the "original" maggot, I came upon these smaller, hard plastic flashlights at a party supply store, and bought at least three or four of them, two of which I still have somewhere. This bright green version is less accurate to a real maggot as far as color scheme goes, but slightly more accurate anatomically, since only the mouth appears to be hard and chitinous.

   The same color scheme is present on this alternate, full-sized maggot, which I didn't find until October of 2008 at a "Halloween Headquarters." This one, interestingly enough, sings the song "Born to be Alive" in what the package advertises as a "twisted" voice. It's fairly twisted, but I didn't take a video of this one yet.

   All versions of Magnificent Maggot were labeled as part of a product line called "Dr. Shivers Carnival of Terror," allegedly one of this "Dr. Shivers's" pets and/or laboratory minions. I never could find any other product under the name, but that's okay. If I were a mad doctor who could create giant, singing and slurping maggots, I doubt I'd ever create anything else either.