Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Judging from the smell, it's "Unmistakably - Crayola"

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Warning: Don't let the kiddies read this one, there is some colorful language used ahead! (haha, I love myself!)
When I saw these sitting on the shelf at my local "junk" store I thought "wow I wonder what Crayola could possible make these markers smell like that hasn't already been done before." Well I can say that they have applied some pretty unique scents to these markers, all of which are absolutely appropriate to the avatar that is associated with them. Avatar you say? Yup each and every marker in this Crayola package had its own mascot. Something that I cannot applaud Crayola for enough was the inclusion of several "horror" themed mascots for the markers. Featured below I will display the actual mascot that is printed on each marker (which were total assholes to scan into pictures) with it's respective title as given on the marker itself, I will then give the mascot my own treatment as far as a name goes.  After that I will take a whiff and give you what I think each scent is, followed by the official scent of the marker. How do I know what the official scent of each marker is according to Crayola? Well I did what any marker sniffing blog writer would do, I emailed the source. I was amazed at Crayola's fast response. (it only took 1 business day) Kudos to Crayola for the handling of the email. Well without further ado I present to you the "Crayola Silly Scents" experiment.
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Mascot: Fawkes the phoenix (don't know who that is?  Look it up.)
Color: Orange
Scent according to my nose: Cinnamon
Official scent according to Mr. Crayola's nose: Spice

Close enough, spice and cinnamon pretty much go hand in hand right?  Cinnamon is a spice after all so I believe I can count this one as a correct guess.
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Mascot: Treebeard
Color: Green
Scent according to my nose: Pine scent
Official scent according to Mr. Crayola's nose: Pine

Not bad, 2 for 2.  I suppose this one was a gimme though.  What else is an enchanted forest titled marker supposed to smell like, steak?  Although if Saruman was manufacturing these markers he would probably want "Enchanted Forest" to smell like burning.  (rimshot?)
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Mascot: Rafiki
Color: Yellow
Scent according to my nose: Banana
Official scent according to Mr. Crayola's nose: Banana

Again with the obvious crayola?  Couldn't you have been a little more creative and maybe made "Belching Baboon" smell like the zoo or something.  Imagine an unknowing kid taking a whiff of that bad boy. Haha  Oh by the way Crayola:0 Jason:3
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Mascot: Puff - the magic dragon
Color: Red
Scent according to my nose: What the fuck! (the only honest thing I can think of that smells that bad is dragon's drool for real!)
Official scent according to Mr. Crayola's nose: Calamine

Chalk one up for Crayola!  That seriously smelled like living death.  Yuck!  Yes, it's that bad.  I hope I never EVER get sunburned again because calamine just got wiped off of my list of  "must have" summer items.  Actually the more I think about it the more I'm inclined to just let Crayola win this little battle of senses because of the intelligence behind using calamine as the official scent of Dragon Drool.  If you don't quite get the irony in that, go ahead and think about dragons and what they do, you'll figure it out.
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Mascot: Rudolph's little buddy
Color: Peacock Blue
Scent according to my nose: Fresh Linen?
Official scent according to Mr. Crayola's nose: Fresh Air

Fuck you crayola!  You cheating bastards!  First you annihilate my sense of smell with "Baboons Asshole", then you throw a curve-ball and name your next scent "Fresh Air".  Will someone please vindicate my nose and go outside and tell me what you smell.  Gasoline?  Grass?  Global Warming? (yes even that has a scent, it smells like mountains melting into the ocean.  Sound about right Mr. Al Gore?)  Those might be some of your responses but I sure as shit do not think anybody stepped outside and said, "Boy sure smells like air out here".  Could you imagine if "air" did smell though, we'd all be fucked.
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Mascot: Vick the vapor (see what I did there)
Color: Violet
Scent according to my nose: Pimpinella Anisum (Anise) although I suppose the masses would say black licorice
Official scent according to Mr. Crayola's nose: Licorice

I have to remind you that the color names and official scents were sent to me in an email from a Crayola Consumer Affairs Lead Representative. (who's name I won't divulge)  Now do think this Crayola rep sat there and sniffed each of these markers as I have?  No, she was given this list by Mr. Crayola and told to send it to me.  Keeping that in mind, do you seriously think that I should give Crayola the point for naming this scent "licorice"?  There is a clear difference between what BLACK licorice and regular (is red regular?) licorice smells like and this is clearly BLACK licorice.  Sorry Crayola this one goes to me.  Oh and by the way being that everything black is more evil than it's other colored counterparts don't you think there was no way to mess this one up.  I mean come on, black licorice would be the one experimenting with voodoo while regular licorice is trying to win a Nobel peace prize for developing a cure for shingles right?  (shingles are another story for another day, but in case you were wondering, yes they are as painful as you have heard)
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Mascot: Haggis
Color: Black
Scent according to my nose: French Vanilla (yes there is a difference from vanilla, go ask your local "Yankee Candle" employee)
Official scent according to Mr. Crayola's nose: Burnt Marshmallow

Touche' Crayola!  Bold move on your part.  Not only did they give this a marshmallow smell, but they made it totally XXXXXXXXXTREME (as the local tweens would say) by making it "burnt" marshmallow.  This point goes to Crayola however I will respectfully disagree with the title of the scent again.  You see this most certainly does smell like a marshmallow, it however does not smell like a BURNT marshmallow which as we all know smells like, well.... you know.... a....., oh forget it, you know what I mean, burnt smells different from not burnt marshmallow.
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Mascot: The baddest box of popcorn your ass has ever seen!  But we'll call him Ernie
Color: Blue
Scent according to my nose: Popcorn
Official scent according to Mr. Crayola's nose: Popcorn

Couldn't fool me this time Crayola. However I have to tell a little story about this to you fine fans of HalloweenOverkill.  I was talking to my buddy the other day and I says to him, "What does a scary movie smell like?"  And do you know without hesitation what that walking bag of atoms said after oh about 0.4 nano seconds of deliberation?  "Popcorn!"  As if the only answer eligible to the human brain WAS popcorn.  Seriously I would really like to know when I missed the "Horror Scents 101" class.  But I digress I suppose the only scent any type of movie could smell like would be popcorn, except "Skeleton Man", that movie smells like shit.  Oh, and in case you weren't paying attention go ahead and look again at the logo of "Scary Movie Blue" and tell me that he isn't the ringleader of this cabal of scented freaks.  Seriously look at his demeanor and tell me he doesn't scream "sunny dispostition"?  I bet he orders them around the Crayola warehouse like some kind of third world dictator

Well there you have the Jason vs. Crayola common "sense" tournament of champions.  The final results:
Jason - 5
vs.
Crayola - 3
I dominated this match much more than the score would lead you to believe.  The only reason they even got two of those points is because of a really creative title for one of the scents and another for a scent so inhuman that it should be only spoken of in the same whispers as the great god Cthulhu. (short story: so Cthulhu comes up as an error in my spell-check and you know what it wants to replace it with? Thulium, that's Atomic #69 in case you don't know.  Giggity Giggity Goo.  Sorry that's the old high school boy in me coming out)  So thanks for playing Crayola but I'll proudly be taking that trophy, thank you!  Oh and by the way look out soon for the 1st Annual HalloweenOverkill Halloween Countdown logo to be revealed.  And if you haven't already signed up for the horror draft please comment here to let me know you want in!  We had an influx of people wanting in and I thought we would run out of spots but now it seems we don't quite have enough, so head on over and sign up or just email me.
p.s. When I said at the beginning there would be colorful language you thought I was just being a smart ass didn't you?  And for the record I don't think using such language is a must for a blog but I do feel if used properly can add a little cinnamon (spice according to crayola) to the posts and can even be funny sometimes.  One more thing, so that Crayola doesn't send Ernie over to drown me in popcorn, those mascot titles you see in the card with the picture are the actual titles given to them on the marker.  The name's I gave them in the little bios underneath each card were made up by myself and have no affiliation with Crayola Silly Scents markers.

4 comments :

Sharon Day said...

Okay, all I want to know is, did you color your nose at all by accident as you sniffed? That'd be a hazard of this job.

Halloweenman666 said...

It's so funny you say that. When I was sniffing the purple marker I thought I got it on my nose so I went to the bathroom to look and didn't see it.

The Artful Gypsy aka Wendy the Very Good Witch said...

Cool post! Although it seems like they should have picked a theme and stuck to it with these markers. Either make them all Halloween themed or not. If they were going to go as far as having a witch, voo doo, dragon and enchanted forest...seems like they could made the whole pack a Halloween themed pack and maybe sold more of them, They should have added some classic Halloween smells like candy apple, candy corn, pumpkin, hay etc. to some putrid smells like rotting corpse, and graveyard dirt. I'm just saying...
:o)

Jeremy [Retro] said...

great colorful post...