♪♪
-Every day is an interesting day.
(yodeling music)
So we take these bizarre risks.
-There's canned dog food and dirty dishwasher bags.
-We never quite know if people are going to think
things that we think are funny,
but enough of us think it's funny.
So it's got some legs to it.
(rubber chicken squeaks)
-Hello?
(yodeling music)
-We look for an empty place in people's lives
and fill it with the thing that they don't know
that they were looking for.
-I think I want to give them emergency underpants.
-I'm from Boston. I have never been here before.
I just found a candle
that smells like pizza, and it's pretty accurate. (giggling)
I really wanted to purchase the dog head.
Woof, woof!
I think this is a crazy, cool store.
I could spend an hour or more.
-We should get...
-Yep, done deal.
-There are things that won't work for us.
And also there's things that are too normal for us.
And even if I like them, it's just not weird enough.
It won't stand out.
(playful music)
(horse neigh)
-We have things that we enjoy
that are far weirder than what we actually sell.
But what you have here is what we think
people will find socially-acceptable weird.
An example of something that we thought
might be too weird for the general public
was squirrel underpants.
They're basically just little furry streakers
that hang out in parks in your backyard, all naked.
People didn't think it was as weird
as we thought people would think it was.
(playful music)
Squirrels would only know we were making fun of them
if they have the internet.
So the day the squirrels develop
this connection to the internet,
we're in trouble
because there's a lot of stuff in the internet
the squirrels aren't going to like that.
-Archie McPhee is the great uncle
of the ex-wife of the owner of Archie McPhee, Mark Pahlow.
He was a famous
practical joker.
I just love the sound of the name.
And at the time, we wanted a name
that was short and snappy.
I tried mail order businesses buying and selling
collectibles and antiques and things,
but eventually I got into what I really loved,
which was the stuff that was sold
in the backs of comic books, x-ray specs,
and drinking birds, and those kinds of things.
-Mark Pahlow has a bravery and genius to see something
and imagine the person that would want to buy that.
-Transforms your hands into a centaur: handitaur.
(playful music) (laughter)
-In 1980, I met a fellow
that introduced me to importing, took me to Asia.
I started buying small and the result is this.
-We have about 10,000 items at all times.
I know every one of them.
(scream)
That's my scream.
You're welcome.
For me, I don't struggle as much with who would buy this.
As much as I hope they buy this.
We have bacon. -Handerpants.
-Beebo, this odd
cartoon character from Taiwan.
-Clam de Cane's Get it? With Dashboard Monster,
It's been one of the worst sellers of all time.
-But we did have a plastic cake decoration.
The attorneys for the Beatles
said that it looks too much like the Beatles,
so we agreed to stop selling it.
But then George Harrison
got involved
because the figure that most resembled him was so ugly
and so poorly done that he had incinerated.
-The world
was catching up with us in terms of what was cool.
So we decided we had to start making our own stuff.
When we started making action
figures, we were looking for underserved heroes.
So that resulted in the librarian action figure.
-Because librarians really changed people's lives
and someone said,
“Oh, yeah, Nancy should be the model for that.”
And we were talking about what the action should be.
And we immediately all agreed that it should be
a shushing action. (shushing sound)
It turned out that
there are about 37 librarians around the world
with no sense of humor.
-You can't make something interesting that everybody likes.
That's pretty much the definition of boring.
-We're constantly bringing in new things
and new experiences.
For example, the Rubber Chicken Museum.
-The Rubber Chicken Museum.
-We have the world's smallest rubber chicken,
and we also have the world's largest rubber chicken.
-Oh, there it is. -My God, what is that?
-That's the Wallingford base.
This is for your safety, that it's locked up.
We captured the beast.
We know it eats soap.
-One of the things that surprises a lot of people
is how many actual practical items we have.
(rock music)
-Is it actual...?
-It is.
We have taxidermy eyes, part of a Scientology meter.
This is a Portuguese keyboard. Muffin fans.
That's one of our biggest items.
We don't know what we're doing all of the time.
And you just never know.
-When you want to be the person
that people don't know what to expect from. (shouting)
You have to keep creating things
that people don't expect, and that's our specialty.
-You are awesome.
-I don't know how many other cities
there are where it could exist other than Seattle.
-They get the joke.
There's so much of our stuff is so nuance.
-Bacon-scented mustard.
-I have this kind
of offbeat sense of humor, so it suits me.
-Silly, and there's nothing else like it. Look it. Look it.
-Just a small group of people.
just really say, “I love that.
I want more of that.”
And there our people.
-Oh, my God!
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