Last week, I received an e-mail from ABC’s LOST
store informing me that anyone who purchased an item would, while
supplies last, receive a free Mr. Cluck’s keychain. For those who
haven’t watched LOST, this is the name of the fried chicken
franchise owned by Hugo, otherwise known as Hurley, the show’s lovable,
unassuming millionaire. As Hugo is probably my favorite character on the
show and I’d already been planning to buy his bobblehead anyway, I
decided to go ahead and bite. I put in my order, and then I put it out
of my mind, since the bobbleheads don’t actually come out for another
month or so.
But a few days later, I received a box in the
mail. It was a box of a fairly decent size, nearly as big as a shoebox,
but it contained one tiny keychain of about three inches in length, two
inches from wingtip to wingtip. After I’d rolled my eyes over the
excessive packaging, I examined my acquisition. I must not have been
paying proper attention, since I was under the impression that this
keychain would feature the Mr. Cluck’s logo of a smiling yellow chicken
head, probably on a flat metal keychain. After all, the store sells Mr.
Cluck’s t-shirts, and this is the design they use. If there was a
picture of what the actual keychain looked like, I missed it.
So I was surprised when I realized that my chicken keychain had no specific connection to LOST.
Instead, it came with a generic tag that reads “Mini Chicken n’ Egg
Backpack Clip”. What’s more, aside from yellow coloring, this chicken
bears no resemblance to the Mr. Cluck’s chicken.
This little
bird is a three-dimensional, rubbery creature suspended from a metal
chain with a clip on the end. It has a small red comb and wattle; I
would take it to be a rooster, except that it has a strange mechanism
whereby you squeeze the middle and a vaguely egg-like bubble pushes
through a hole between the chicken’s legs. Depending on the angle at
which it is pushed, this egg appears either yellow or milky white. I
didn’t discover this feature immediately, and I initially found it
rather novel, but upon further thought, it struck me as gross.
The chicken also features gangly, bright red feet that stick straight
out, and there’s a reddish line going down the front, along with reddish
coloring on the puny wings and tail. On its head is a pair of bright
blue eyes with black dots for pupils. For the most part, though, this
chicken is yellow, and it is covered in tiny bumps. It’s clammy to the
touch; there are no feathers in sight, so this is evidently a dead
chicken that has retained the skill of egg-laying. A zombie chicken, I
suspect, which I suppose is appropriate for the final season of LOST,
which has often been jokingly referred to as The Zombie Season. But I
sure hope this stringy, undead, thoroughly hideous chicken is not
indicative of what goes into Hugo’s chicken buckets. Gotta tell you,
dude, that’s pretty poor advertising.
To top it all off, I noticed the other day that a two-dollar charge for this “free LOST
keychain” had turned up on my card. I didn’t even request the chicken; I
would imagine that some people would have gotten to check-out without
realizing that this was a part of their order. Had I known that I would
be charged an extra two dollars so they could unnecessarily ship it
early, and had I realized that this keychain was so ugly that I would
almost pay someone to take it off my hands, I certainly would have
bought my bobble from Entertainment Earth instead. That’s what I get for
being seduced by “freebies”. But that’s a complaint with the ABC store,
not the manufacturer of this tiny terror.
If you know someone
who has an irrational fear of chickens, perhaps this would make a
morbid gag gift. Otherwise, I can’t recommend it, and certainly not for
the going rate of nearly $4.50. If you hope to have a “cluckity-cluck
day,” I suggest you seek out the company of more sophisticated fowl.
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