So last night my son and I were at his school carnival, which is a crazy, far-too-crowded affair at which every kid in the school and their parents and scored of other people all jam themselves into the elementary school gym and play carnival games in order to win candy and donated stuffed animals. My son was frantically searching for any donated Pokemon plush, but at this one game we found a true score as he won a walrus! This is an “official” picture, the one we won doesn’t have the “Ty” tag, but he does have a small label reading “Paul”. I chuckled at the joke, saying to my 9 year old son, “Turns out Paul was the walrus after all”. Of course he had no idea what I was talking about.
I don’t know anything about Beanie Babies – my sum total of knowledge would be just an awareness of the crazy antics surrounding them when they were popular. I’ve never had any, or course, and they were “over” long before my son was on the scene. I thought that the Beatles reference on the label was just a sly in-joke, until I looked up Paul the Walrus on Amazon. That’s when I found out that it was not so much a sly reference to the Beatles, as a full-on exploitation of the whole Walrus/Beatles thing. I guess every Beanie Baby has a poem, and Paul’s is:
Traveling the ocean in a submarine
Singing and playing a tambourine
One day hoping to lead a band
First he needs to find dry land!
The description goes on to describe another Beanie Baby called “Ringo the Raccoon” and this is where I decide to stop investigating before I find out what they’ve done to John.
http://www.amazon.com/Ty-Beanies-Babies-Paul-Walrus/dp/B00000JTER