Halloween Is a Heady Time at Vic’s Novelty

It’s a quiet morning at Vic’s Novelty.

The conveyor belts are still. Skeletons hang on a rack like cheap suits. The Halloween orders have all been shipped. As it has each year at this time for half a century, Vic’s Novelty sits back, puts its grotesquely swollen feet up on the extruding machine, and takes a deep breath.

My tour guide glibly enumerates the items that have gone on from Vic’s cavernous factory in Oxnard to populate the earth. Some of them might reside in your closet, awaiting tonight’s batch of trick-or-treaters.

“Skulls that scream,” intones Leah Provenzano-Kittleson. “The Wigglin’ Hand. The Rat-in-a-Trap. Mummies. Corpses. Brains. Tombstones. Cut off heads.”

We pass pallets of black rubber rats, known around Vic’s as “our New York rats.”

Dozens of rubber chickens are suspended from hooks by their feet, awaiting a paint job.

“There’s a real demand for them,” she says. “We have a customer in Salt Lake City who orders a thousand a week.”

A thousand rubber chickens a week! And who said Salt Lake was a dull town?

Of course, Vic’s Novelty doesn’t sell to individuals. The customer in Salt Lake is a middleman of mirth, a wholesaler who sends Vic’s rubber chickens to eager buyers throughout the world. At the rate of 1,000 a week, he’ll have this classic comedy prop in the hands of every man, woman and child on earth before the next millennium.

That’s industrial-size fun, and it’s the specialty of the house at Vic’s.

Leah guides me to barrels brimming with small lumps of brown plastic.

Anyone who has ever been 10 years old knows how hilarious this ersatz canine product can be when placed strategically on dad’s La-Z-Boy.

Tucked into an industrial neighborhood, Vic’s is ground zero for all your dog-doo needs. It is far and away the biggest U.S. producer of the stuff, Leah says. Customers order 50,000 pieces at a time. Vic’s makes seven varieties, including one with sound.

I didn’t ask to hear it, and Leah didn’t make me.

At 35, she’s a third-generation novelty executive. As a girl, she helped her father clean the factory at night; by day, she sold his handiwork--mainly small reptiles--at school.

She speaks reverently of her grandfather, a craftsman who founded the company after a Eureka! moment with a lizard in 1948.

For reasons known only to him, Vic Provenzano picked up the lizard that skittered across his path and made a mold of it. Soon his garage in North Hollywood was the home of Vic’s Novelty.

The business took off. In the 1970s, it “dominated the vending-machine market of soft plastic snakes and lizards,” according to a company history.

Now it makes all the snakes and lizards sold at Disneyland, Disney World and EuroDisney. It also sends reptiles to some of the finer resorts in Las Vegas.

Vic’s son--Vic Jr.--took over in 1977, and moved to Oxnard in 1982. When he died a few years ago, Leah took over the business end. Her mother, Chris Provenzano, is an accomplished sculptor. Chris makes the molds for the company’s products, comes up with ideas--the screaming mirror is one--and serves as Vic’s president.

Over the years, the business has changed.

It used to be that you could get by with simple body parts--bloody fingers, amputated hands, cutely turned-up elf feet. But now, Leah said, the public is demanding bigger and bleaker; items like “our quarter-corpse”--a bony male torso topped by a horrified face--are increasingly popular, she says.

Even the traditional skeleton has a nasty new appearance. Vic’s “Mr. Bones” isn’t gleaming white; a dirt-like veneer gives him what Leah calls that “fresh-dug look.”

As for Leah, Halloween will be a simple affair--perhaps a fright wig and a bloody bolt in the forehead as she hands out candy. Her husband, Steven, an electrician and blues guitarist, will wear an old mask.

“Halloween’s usually not that big a thing around our house,” she said as she showed me out, being careful not to step on the bloody, pulsating Rat-in-a-Trap.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at [email protected].