Boris The Talking Skull

From x-entertainment, September 18, 2007:
Halloween can really bring out the idiot in one's inner spender, and I'm not entirely convinced that I don't spend more during October than I do for Christmas. On one hand, that seems pretty ridiculous. I don't have to get presents for anyone, and irresistible old ladies aren't swinging Salvation Army charity bells in my face the second I step out the door. On the other hand, I could never buy a talking skull with light-up eyes in December. Meet Boris, and his incredible "10 voice" synthesizer!

Talking Thru Boris is an electronic skull that comes with a big bad "microbone" attached by the most gratuitously long wire I've ever seen. Not kidding -- the wire that attaches Boris to his microphone is at least eight miles long.

The wire needs to be long. By sticking Boris on a table and hiding with the microphone in the next room, you can speak words of terror into the stick and have Boris regurgitate them in one of ten possible voices, scaring the beejeezus out of anyone stupid enough to not realize that you're exactly the type of jokester to pull a stunt like that.

With Boris costing 25 bucks, this is a pretty expensive way to annoy someone. It's the kind of Halloween thing you see early on during your shopping adventure, but refuse to purchase until it's positively confirmed that there isn't anything else in the store even remotely worth buying. That's how Boris came into my life, though to hear him tell it, I was all aglow with butterflies from the second I saw him. The skull lies. It was either him or some dumb witch-themed figural lawn stake. I am not in charge of any lawns.

As if a window box revealing a life-sized, gap-toothed plastic skull wasn't enough of a hard sell, the package is littered with the most insane amount of enticing text bursts imaginable. If you think about it, all it usually takes is one "NEW!" in a yellow font over a red, star-shaped graphic to get us to do a double-take. Here, I'm reading stuff like, "SYNCHRONIZED ANIMATED MOVING JAW." You could give me 150,000 sets of alphabet refrigerator magnets, and I still wouldn't arrange the letters any different from what you read in the above spread. Shit is fucking holy.

And if you need just a little more persuasion-by-box, take a look at this guy. Tappy Tibbons in 15 years. Which would be now, I guess. That's so him.

As far as life-sized human skull replicas go, Boris is on the "too vertical" side, but only slightly. Not bad, all in all. He kind of walks a fine line between wanting to look spooky and wanting to look like something that would do a crackhead dance in an old Mickey Mouse cartoon, but I can't fault Boris for that. He's got a lot riding on this. If nobody buys him, he'll be dunked out wholesale to the nearest clearance outlet, where bargain shoppers will fetch him from shelves that he has to share with knockoff McCormick spices.

The bone-shaped microphone looks more like a dumbbell-covered-with-Pillsbury-cookie-dough-shaped microphone, but it's a functioning mic, and that's more than I've ever asked from things that actually did look like real bones before.

Incredibly, Boris's creators saw fit to give him no less than ten different voice effects, ranging from "Robotic Low Voice" to "Robotic Very Low Voice." This is even neater than it sounds, because you can create a legendary level of dichotomy by making Boris say things like "I'll rip your feet off and feed them to you" in a really high-pitched girly voice.