Journeymen Deadshirters Mike Pfeiffer and Max Robinson are the Trash Boys. In TrashMall, they bring you the hottest products and apparel from thrift stores, vintage shops and other retail hotspots around New York’s five boroughs. This month they scraped the bottom of a recently-opened Five Below.
Terminator Hunter Killer Tank Building Set
Quantity: 1
$5.00
Description
This sturdy construction block replica of the Hunter-Killer tank from the Terminator series is made of Best-Lock, the only mass-market building block with the balls to include awesome guns in their playsets. Your child will be delighted to almost get a LEGO set of a movie from this year.
Reviews
Mike: I’m timing Max as he makes this, and the awful quality of these ersatz LEGOs is forcing him to do Krusty The Clown grunts every like… two seconds. It took him thirty minutes to complete and another thirty minutes of acupressure massage to calm him down enough to write words again.
Max: WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT FUCK YOU BEST-LOCK YOU PROBABLY BUILT U-BOATS DURING THE DAMN WAR.
Mike: While dancing around the fact that they’re just shitty LEGOs, the history of the company on their website says that they got successful because they were willing to do actual military sets unlike the GUTLESS DUTCH who had to make sets about brave space police boys racially profiling aliens.
Max: I like that this is a “TERMINATOR” line of blocks, not even tied into, say, Terminator: Salvation. Just TERMINATOR. And that’s all you get. The real draw of this is the T-800 exoskeleton mini-figure and it falls apart if you touch it at all as a dramatic fuck you to its human owner. PLUS it’s eyes are painted all weird and loopy
Mike: It took them thirty years to make you pay five dollars to get angry for a half an hour. Can we agree that fake LEGOs are the most shameful off-brand thing? Bagged cereal is fine, and we all had to drink store-brand soda in college, but if you bring Mega Bloks into my dojo then you better be prepared to eat them and pass a fully-constructed Halo Warthog thirty minutes later.
Max: It goes 1. Lego, 2. K’Nex, 3. Nanoblock, 4. Megablocks, 5. Buy a video game or something. This set is terrible and I felt good throwing it in the trash upon completion.
Mike: But in that thirty minutes… you loved a lifetime.
Party Dad Family Car Decal
Quantity: 1
$2.00
Description
In this day and age it’s important to itemize the family members in your vehicle for insurance purposes. Let everyone behind you know that the man of the house would love to hold a frosty cold one® as much as his own flesh and blood.
Reviews
Max: PARTY DAD! PAR-TY DAAAD. GET A DUI / LIKE NOBODY CA-AN.
Mike: My dad likes to party all the time, party all the time, party alllll the tiiiiiiime (and it is very worrying).
Max: “We should put cute little stick figures of ourselves on the back of the family SUV. Hmm, what’s Ted’s most distinguishing feature? OH! Definitely that he drinks.”
Mike: Passive-aggressive car family decals are the battleground of the 21st century. Mom implies that dad is a drunk, Dad gets a “mom” decal with visible stretchmarks and moves the kids over to his side of the window.
Max: I mean, at least Party Dad looks happy? Even if his hair is visibly unkempt. Party Dad may have had to put his football career on hold after Sharon got pregnant but at least he has those Friday nights at Doyle’s, you know? At least he has The Eagles: Greatest Hits and that Craigslist motorcycle to work on.
Mike: I’m never going to get married, I’m just going to buy four Party Dad stickers and put them on the back of my Range Rover and never stop showing up outside your house to insist you come out and get some brews.
Max: His marriage might be on the rocks, but for Party Dad–and for us–the celebration is only just beginning.
Cell Lock-Up
Quantity: 1
$5.00
Description
Your children are distracted from family time at the dinner table by their electronic devices. Teach them a lesson by putting their phones in a tiny jail for a half hour so that you have time to answer your work e-mails at dinner without them disrespectfully taking a “Selfo” while asking if the mac and cheese is gluten free.
Reviews
Max: YET ANOTHER dad product. “Texting Cody from the table during family dinner? That’s forty-five minutes in the cube, creep.” -Judge Dad.
Mike: And the recidivism rate is fucked. 90% of phones that get put in phone jail end up back in there by next dinner time, because of a combination of sass-mouth and “what is that picture of, young lady.”
Max: It’s a little plastic jail cell for your cell-phone. With little cots and everything. This is like one of those terrible product ideas your uncle has but then it ACTUALLY GOT MADE. It yells at you too? A talking plastic prison for your phones so your son is unable to send a dick pic during meatloaf night.
Mike: I’m sure that this guy has had a bunch of similarly patronizing and ultimately destructive ideas, like a special Hannibal muzzle for your wife, or an app that makes snoring noises when your mom tries to talk to you on the phone for too long.
Max: Even as novelty products go, can you seriously imagine using this more than once? At the most excruciating meal of your adolescence?
Mike: Just like real prison, it’s a pointlessly humiliating exercise in futility that fails to accomplish any discernible goal and passes the cost on to you, the consumer.
Max: Good luck finding a job on the outside, iPhone 4S. God help you if you’re an Android.
Pocket Pros Stinger Yo-Yo With Real Scorpion
Quantity: 1
$4.00
Description
Why walk the dog when you can walk the scorpion? Take your pick-up artistry to the next level and dazzle the HB9’s at the local discotech with sensual yo-yo tricks while your arachnid pal shows them you have a dangerous edge.
Reviews
Mike: Only four dollars to be able to do a “Devil’s Cradle” with the IMPRISONED PRINCE OF THE SCORPIONS.
Max: I insisted we buy this because I love “things with dead bugs preserved inside” that you always find at museums and stuff, and this is like a prop a foulmouthed kid would have in a 70s Spielberg flick. A yo-yo with A DEAD SCORPION INSIDE.
Mike: I’d like to be clear that the package says nothing about the scorpion being dead, and the only thing that frightens me more than the resilience of arachnids is the stack of medical test result envelopes on my nightstand. This is asking for trouble.
Max: This scorpion once walked around, ate food and looked at things. Maybe it had desires. But then some people put it in a yo-yo for all eternity to be sold at a Five Below. That’s heartbreaking.
Mike: I already have a little plastic thing full of broken dreams I carry around all the time, it’s called Pokémon and I can play it on the train without massively whacking myself in the nards. Oh yeah, and by the way, long after you and I are ground up and fed to hyperintelligent apes, this scorpion will STILL BE STUCK IN PLASTIC. It’s not going away.
Max: Joke’s on you, I’m going to have my beautiful corpse encased in a clear plastic frisbee that will be launched into space to scare/arouse whatever intelligent life it comes across.
Got a cool product you think TrashMall should feature? Email Robinson@deadshirt.net.
Deadshirt's writing staff is dedicated to bringing you thoughtful and entertaining media commentary. We're mostly indentured, which means we can pass the savings on to you!
Connect
