SPIDERQUEST: Quest for the Man-Sized Spider

so i've always liked spiders my favorite stuffed animal as a kid spidey was a spider and i got him when i was like three when i was a kid i always said i'd be an entomologist like in every school project even though i really dislike most bugs that aren't spiders i don't know if you have the option of just studying spiders and i kind of gave up on entomology when i went to the academy of sciences museum and i saw that the whole entomology wing was like entirely dead spiders on cork boards which i don't really know if that's representative of the field but that was the message i got at that age but anyway they're still my favorite animal i um i like their big hairy bodies and how many legs they have i just think it's funny that they have so many legs i'm going to admit it crossed my mind once or twice just a fleeting thought like i wonder what's the biggest spider i could get the ferrari of plush spiders enter fao schwartz for those who aren't familiar fao schwartz is a now extinct toy store chain with high-end toys for rich kids but the presentation of fao schwartz was everything they were basically like little theme parks just going to them was fun even if you didn't get anything they had a theme song and animatronics this truly magical talking tree brings joy and excitement to everyone who sees it it was custom manufactured for fao schwartz retail stores this magnificent talking tree is bound to make a grand statement and mesmerize all who see it the possibilities are endless with its animated eyes mouth and an adorable moving raccoon it will become the center of attention everyone was different with a different theme so the wonder me as a kid was the one in san francisco and they had like a jack and the beanstalk theme with huge giant feet that stomped and like an animatronic goose and a harp i looked online for footage of this location and there's like none there aren't even any still photos which is super sad but there is a little bit to be found of the new york and las vegas location so i will be showing you that part of the way they enticed kids to buy toys was by showing them all in this happy little toy kingdom the baby dolls came from a real nursery the plush toys lived in a plush toy jungle and each brand display had whimsical jumbo versions of popular kids toys by the way somebody is going to crack me that no fao shorts isn't extinct because it reopened in new york city but i went to the new york reincarnation last november and it was bad totally didn't capture the spirit of it like it's still an expensive toy store but it just kind of looks like an expensive toy store the whimsy is pretty absent from it can we talk about the current minimalism trend and how it carries over to toy stores like toys r us is coming back but now it's going to be a streamlined warehouse where you order the toys off screens and get them shipped to your house as if digital catalogs are a good way to market to a demographic that doesn't understand delayed gratification or object permanence anyway fao shorts is kind of famous for their gigantic plush toys which seem mostly to be used in store as like an aspirational display i'm sure you can see where this is going kids go in and are dazzled by the idea that any child would own a life-sized brontosaurus plush and then they go and get a normal-sized brontosaurus plush which still costs like sixty dollars because it's fa shorts and then they go home so last year i learned that in 2007 fao shorts released a harry potter tie-in collection of luxury toys including oversized plush of some of the film's characters the lineup consisted of a three foot fluffy the three-headed dog a 12-foot hungarian horntail dragon a life-sized buckbeak the hippogriff a life-sized fox the phoenix and hilariously a three foot hedwig the owl did you see the album from harry potter i don't know something about making hedwig impractically large larger than an owl would ever be was just extremely funny to me finally the collection included aragog the giant spider measuring 66 inches from toe to toe the biggest plush spider that i personally have ever heard of i searched the footage for this giant spider displayed in store and it looks like they mainly suspended him from the wall or ceiling so it looks like he's dropping down on a web to gobble you up but he also found a couple pictures of him like posed behind velvet ropes and this completely amazing one of him looming over an escalator i found out about this spider last year but as you can imagine it comes up for sale very rarely it's a magical combination of factors where i assume few were made few were sold and of those few survived then a couple months ago i saw one go up for sale and i was like come on jenny you don't need a giant spider but i recently hit half a million subscribers on youtube which i consider a pretty special occasion and hey i i did bookmark that spider listing and for some reason it never sold so so yeah i messaged the seller and committed to buy this giant spider the best celebration i could possibly imagine um here's the next problem the spider was in arizona and if i wanted it i had to go get it and we're in a global pandemic and arizona is currently one of the least cautious and most affected states in the country so you know i'm not going to not get the spider but i have to be very cautious about how i get the spider so it's time for a spider quest let me walk you through the steps in a convenient numbered list step one round up all the friends i have who have already been exposed to covid including one who is willing to drive the whole way thank god step two fill a cooler with snacks so you don't have to stop at rest stops i also had to pack other essentials like some great reading about arizona extra camera batteries and memory cards my wallet with all my id and credit cards and finally this spider had to be paid for in cash and i was worried about carrying that much money around on a road trip so i cleverly disguised the envelope so no one would open it and hit it somewhere that no one would ever look step three make a themed playlist of songs about spiders [Music] [Laughter] yes it's called my spider i don't know what i was expecting step four pre-plan rest breaks and if you absolutely have to stop do it somewhere that is empty with a low population we stopped in oatman an old western town with feral donkeys oh my god we should roll down the window and say hi to it okay i'm just gonna roll in the window and just see what it does just organically oh oh hi oh my god it's so friendly it's not even really trying to get food you're so friendly okay now it's kind of trying to eat my hand but just in like a horse way not in like an aggressive way they had a lot of cute little shops and you wouldn't think it from the outside but they also sell some really beautiful lingerie step 5 book your overnight stops at socially distanced locations our first night i found this place called the canyon motel and rv park and i chose it because not only are you not in a hotel building with other guests you can actually book a night stay inside a real train car my sister and i stayed in caboose number two which is supposedly haunted by the ghost of an old switchman who walks the car swinging his lantern at night i always think it'll be fun to book haunted hotels and then toss and turn all night afraid of ghosts but it was cool staying in an authentic sleeper car i turned on my white noise app because i already have a preset that's train noises so that was another level of realism another reason i chose the train motel is that it's down the road from the remains of bedrock city [Applause] [Music] hey gang get your very own dinosaur operator's license when you visit bedrock we'll teach you everything you need to know to become an expert dinosaur operator just like me yeah bedrock city was actually a chain of multiple flinstone theme parks there was one in south dakota and one in british columbia those ones had walk around mascots and animatronics and you know trees the one in arizona was the least elaborate of all of them but it was also the longest surviving one it officially closed last year in 2019 but even before that it had been up for sale for a while it was managed for years by the widow of the guy who built it and she really just wanted to retire after a certain point so it was an extreme disrepair long before it closed it's also kind of generous to call it a theme park it was basically a themed playground it had concrete shells of various flintstone buildings which you could walk around and take pictures in when it was still operational it also had a theater playing flintstones cartoons all day and a little train ride through a volcano the most iconic fixture was the big brontosaurus slide which you would climb up and then you'd slide down the tail like you're fred flintstone when he clocks out from work the park was recently purchased by new owners who had a lifelong dream of opening a sanctuary for birds of prey they've renamed the property raptor ranch which when i first heard it i was like dinosaur theme park but no it's not a dinosaur theme park by the time we rolled into town for the night they'd already been closed for like an hour but we decided to drive over and just scope it out from the outside wait where i don't see him yet oh there he is blocked off from it no my impression from my research was that it was a big informal rv park and we could just walk right up to it but it was actually all encircled by a big wall i see an old building look at that blue thing that's an old split stone building umbrella an old flintstone umbrella and i see dino it's dino but we saw a guy drive up and walk right into the closed gift shop so i was like i'll just go inside man i i just want to like i just want to inquire oh yeah they're closed let's find me so we went in and just figured i'd ask how many fixtures they still had to decide if it was worth coming back before we left in the morning oh check out the one other guy in the shop calling me a fake flintstones fan you probably didn't even watch it when you were a kid i did i mean i watched flintstones so he is wrong but i'm i don't really like flintstones i'm more of an abandoned theme park fan so anyway i asked the owner how much of the park was still left and she was like oh it's all still back there and i was like what like oh my god we have to come back tomorrow and she was like oh well i'm still here you can you can just go in now if you want oh my god so we literally got free reign to go around the park and it was closed so we had the whole place to ourselves and yeah it's all still back there it's all still here oh okay yeah apparently the initial plan was to bulldoze bedrock but when they saw how nostalgic it was for people they decided to leave a lot of the surviving fixtures intact they even have a thing on their website where if you had pictures at the park as a kid they want you to retake a picture there as an adult and like send it in there is stuff in here it's kind of eerie isn't it oh eerie oh if i saw a figure of a character i would die i think once raptor ranch has taken its final form any ties to the actual flintstones brand will be gone but they said they intend on keeping the iconic brontosaurus slide and a lot of the vehicles they've also started repurposing a lot of the existing caveman shaped building shells into the bird enclosure so you can still get the flavor of the original park but then you appear in the building and there's like an owl living inside looking where it's like a yeah sanctuary it's a flintstone house that's now oh it's an owl wow it's a beautiful owl a flintstone if we'd been there during its actual operating hours we could have seen a birds of prey show demonstrating different behaviors so if you're a fan of big birds or abandoned theme parks or you know both definitely stop by here sometime what is it what is it what is it big snake i wouldn't crawl into that thing oh i'm crawling in that snake you are nuts it's full of cockroaches no it's not i'm just gonna look it's recording right i think so and then you just crawl deep deep in the snake okay so here's steve sit down and get your hair done i don't feel safe no dad actually maybe don't do that looks like a church in here it's the altar fred oh big teeth that's cool oh my god oh my god oh my god that scared the bejesus out of me oh my god and yeah i warned you i would be ready for that there's another mannequin in here it's a betty rubble oh my god oh this is bad vibes the way she's leaning [Music] oh jen and angie's epic road trip adventure june 2019 i'm so cute oh i'm gonna guess this was some kind of flintstone gadget that would like be a tv for them or something or it's a clock i guess case with a shark creature i assume this is like their pantry little shell there it's open i'm just gonna take a little peek inside how scary right scary the door is creaking in like a way that's kind of scary oh and something's cooking yum i wonder what this was part of it [Laughter] oh my god we're in like a tropical volcano oh and there's a maybe this used to move yeah this probably used to glow and then these probably used to twirl so they would fly i hope little and steve are enjoying this because i am this is more than i even imagined it would be it's right next to the grand canyon we literally went here instead of the grand canyon i mean i've been there before i think it's better than the grand canyon that's my hot take put that quote on the website i'll take the snake tunnel and the big fred flintstone billboard any day yeah the dab doo means welcome to you it's beautiful oh also you better believe i slid down the big iconic brontosaurus slide oh my god [Music] step six acquire spider when we got to our meeting place for our spider dealer it was 108 degrees outside which was absolutely horrific oh oh my god it's big spider it's so large can i hold it oh it is is so large and beautiful i asked his former owner for his origin story and apparently he and some of the other big harry potter plush were purchased by a large bookstore in town for a display in the children's section the display was there for years but kids were scared of aragog and they received countless complaints from moms to move or get rid of the big spider my spider dealer bought it from them and it's been waiting for an interested buyer ever since so that's me thank you very much thank you so much look at [Music] i'm gonna pull them through from the other side oh my god look it look at this once we had aragog we went to our next overnight accommodation which was for me one of the highlights of the trip this is the tombstone monument ranch and it's basically a tiny western town like frontierland at disneyland or knutsberry farm but it's a private ranch and a hotel so the little storefronts you see actually are the hotel rooms the rooms inside are surprisingly big and recently updated and they have porches with rocking chairs out front so you can rock and pretend you're in a tiny western town it was also nice to stay at a hotel that had one of those devices for pulling cowboy boots off your feet as well as about 20 hooks to hang your cowboy hat they also have a dining room and a themed operating saloon we liked this place so much we actually ended up staying an additional night and i'm sure it's bustling outside of a pandemic but as of right now it was great for social distancing i think at any given time across our visit we were one of like two parties on the whole property so we basically had it to ourselves which meant i was also able to take aragog out on the town and show him a good time i mean honestly i probably would have done this if the place was full too [Music] oh my goodness youtube videos [Music] well look in here they have a whole herd of horses on property and there was an option to book activities like trail rides shooting or archery i could imagine a big family booking the whole place out for like a family reunion and staying a whole week but we were trying to be as no contact as possible so we didn't do the activities we just kind of wanted to chill there and it definitely made me feel like i was staying overnight at a little theme park plus it was out in the middle of the actual desert so we got to see a real tarantula a real tarantula is it still there oh good oh look at it oh my god i can't believe it it's a real tarantula oh it looks so good this ranch was a two mile drive from tombstone the famous cowboy town tombstone was pretty sparse too so we were fully able to walk around the main street and look around however not all the businesses in town are committed to social distancing and one of them even said not to wear masks because they believe in free speech so you know if you find yourself there proceed with caution we did take in one of the last emptiest showings of the gunfight show which was extremely earnest and just great enough about me how is respectable business treating you dark tubes are the place to be so you can plug the money around the trees around here and they had a knockoff haunted mansion exhibit which you got to go through alone with just your group it was incredible go to boot hill cemetery [Music] since taylor swift wow i like the cemetery is the mini golf course don't shoot until you can see the lights of his eyes oh my god and of course everybody had to get cowboy hats so that was the spider quest as of recording time the entire spider posse has completed a self-imposed 14-day quarantine and none of us had any symptoms so i guess it worked and now i've got aragog a big beautiful spider oh god this was the closest to like vloggy content i've ever done and you shouldn't get used to it but it was a special occasion this is really heavy this whole video was just my 500k special i'm not gonna put that in the title i feel like nobody actually clicks a video called 500k special because they assume you're just gonna like sit in your room and uh do an announcement video or something and this was not that so if you're one of my 500 000 subscribers thank you for subscribing and um if you're not i don't know go away this video wasn't for you or subscribe that's what i should have said there subscribe by the way none of the places i showed in the video know that i have a youtube channel we weren't sponsored or like comped by anyone they were just all genuinely cool places to go which is why i put their business name in the video finally i bought my spider second hand the ethical way to purchase a giant spider but because it was originally a harry potter product i will be making a donation equivalent to the price of the spider to a trans charity i picked the okra project which provides free meals to people experiencing food insecurity i will also be putting a link to them so if you haven't heard of them maybe check them out and consider donating yourself just like radiator springs racers it is oh my god you're right we should be playing the score from that ride you have to speed up going up the be hill that we are not on the outer lane we should listen to the spirit stallion at the cimarron soundtrack for you yes if vegas was on the way back i was going to go marry him but i'll have to have to think something else could do with him he's very large

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 830,651

Keywords:

Id: -CRXUeTmNtE

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/OrbitalComet]

I didn't expect this to be a nice road trip snapshot of how it's like to travel during a pandemic. Also I can never get over Jenny getting overly passionate over gigantic stuffed animals

[u/serafew]

This was such a fun video, and so soon after the Bronycon video was also great. We have been blessed :)

[u/Dexav]

God, she's such a dork, I love her.

[u/Ethlandiaify]

The Porg has been dethroned

[u/09u49r0340094]

For anyone curious about the price of such a magnificent specimen, it's $1000

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Aragog-Spider-GIANT-Harry-Potter-Plush-Creature-Collection-FAO-Schwarz-Stuffed/163826304015 .

Pretty sure this was the exact listing too since it's Arizona and are there really gonna be TWO sales of a giant aragog plush in one year?

[u/AllTheRowboats93]

We need a Defuctland video on the Flintstones parks!

[u/kystone1]

A sequel to my favorite Jenny video, the plus spider review video

[u/Evil_Flowers]

Love Jenny. She's like if a manic pixie dream girl was actually well-written.

[u/PopupEpstein]

I want that Spider