Every collector has one.
The blow mold you keep hoping will be sitting behind a folding table at an estate sale. The one you search for on Marketplace even though you know perfectly well you searched for it yesterday. The one that makes you slow the car down when you spot a suspiciously familiar plastic silhouette sticking out of somebody’s garage. In my book, The Glow That Won’t Go Out, I highlight collector Brandon’s Indiana Jones-like pursuit of an elusive angel teddy bear blow mold.
Right now, one of those pieces is the Santa’s Best Tasmanian Devil Christmas blow mold.
I recently talked with blow mold collector and dealer Ed (@sickeddie) on Instagram, and when I asked him what collectors are really hunting for these days, his answer caught my attention.
Taz.
According to Ed, the Santa’s Best Tasmanian Devil is one of the most sought-after blow molds right now — and finding a good one is becoming increasingly difficult.
It makes sense.
Because Taz isn’t simply another Christmas blow mold.
He’s a wonderfully strange artifact from the moment when traditional illuminated lawn decorations collided headfirst with 1990s pop culture.
And somehow, it worked.
When Christmas Blow Molds Met the Cartoon Licensing Boom
To understand why a glowing Tasmanian Devil ever ended up standing next to plastic Santas and Nativity sets, you have to go back to the final great era of traditional blow molds.
Santa’s Best arrived in the early 1990s and became one of the recognizable names in holiday décor. Along with companies collectors know well — Empire, General Foam, Union Products and others — Santa’s Best helped keep the molded-plastic Christmas tradition alive as American decorating tastes began changing.
But by the 1990s, there was a problem.
How many different ways could you sell America another Santa?
Manufacturers needed something new.
The answer was sitting inside Saturday morning cartoons, mall stores and seemingly every T-shirt rack in America:
licensed characters.
Warner Bros. characters were everywhere during the 1990s, and few benefited from that explosion more than the Tasmanian Devil.
Taz was perfect for the era.
He was loud. He was ridiculous. He destroyed everything in his path. He looked great on a T-shirt.
His popularity had grown far beyond his original Looney Tunes appearances, aided by television syndication and Taz-Mania, which debuted in 1991.
By the end of the decade, putting Taz on merchandise wasn’t unusual.
Putting him on a giant illuminated plastic Christmas decoration?
That was inspired.
Enter the Santa’s Best Taz Blow Mold
Around 2000, Santa’s Best turned the Tasmanian Devil into something wonderfully absurd: a Christmas lawn decoration.
And not just any lawn decoration.
The large Taz stands roughly 40 inches tall, depending on how he’s measured and positioned, complete with his unmistakable face, Santa-themed styling and removable antlers.
There was also a smaller 18-inch Santa’s Best Taz, giving collectors another version to hunt down.
The large version is the showstopper.
This isn’t Taz politely standing at attention like a choir boy.
It’s Taz.
He looks as if Christmas happened to him rather than the other way around.
That’s part of what makes the piece so appealing today. Traditional blow molds often relied on familiar holiday imagery — Santas, candles, snowmen, angels, reindeer and Nativity figures.
Taz came from another universe entirely.
Put him in a lineup of vintage Christmas blow molds and your eyes immediately go to him.
Why Taz Is So Hard to Find
Here is where the story gets interesting for collectors.
Santa’s Best wasn’t making Taz during the enormous postwar boom in plastic Christmas decorations. He arrived near the end of the classic blow-mold era.
Santa’s Best ceased producing blow molds in 2003.
That means Taz never had decades of continuous production behind him.
Compare that with some classic Santa or snowman designs that were produced in enormous quantities, sometimes through multiple manufacturers and tooling changes.
Taz had a much smaller window.
Then add another problem:
kids loved him.
A traditional plastic candle might get carefully packed away every January. A giant Tasmanian Devil was a character. He was handled. Moved around. Played with. Dragged through garages.
And then there are those antlers.
Collectors searching for a large Taz today frequently encounter examples with missing or damaged accessories. The attachment areas can be vulnerable, and finding one with its original components intact can make a big difference in desirability.
The fact that replacement Taz noses and antlers are manufactured today tells you something about how seriously collectors take restoring these figures.
Nobody starts manufacturing specialty replacement parts for something nobody wants. Are you looking for a blow mold replacement part? If so, blowmolds.com and blowmoldstore.com are reputable places to shop.
The Blow Mold That Captures an Entire Era
There’s another reason I think Taz has become such an interesting collectible.
He represents the moment when two different kinds of nostalgia overlap.
For traditional blow mold collectors, he represents the final years of the classic illuminated plastic yard decoration.
For someone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, he represents something completely different.
Looney Tunes shirts.
Warner Bros. stores.
Saturday morning cartoons.
Shopping malls.
Character merchandise.
Christmas catalogs.
Big-box stores stacked with seasonal decorations.
Taz sits right in the middle of all of it.
He’s not quite mid-century Christmas.
He’s not modern Christmas either.
He’s late-20th-century American Christmas preserved in plastic.
And that period is rapidly becoming collectible in its own right.
Then the Inflatable Arrived
Of course, there was another storm brewing on America’s front lawns.
The inflatable.
During the early 2000s, inflatable decorations offered retailers a massive logistical advantage over traditional blow molds.
A four-foot rigid plastic character takes up a lot of shelf space.
Deflate a similarly sized inflatable and you can put it in a box.
That matters when you’re Walmart, Target, Home Depot or any other retailer trying to fit an entire seasonal department into a finite amount of warehouse and shelf space.
The economics changed.
Consumers changed.
And one by one, many of the classic blow molds disappeared.
Santa’s Best ended blow mold production in 2003.
What had seemed like an ordinary mass-market Christmas decoration suddenly had a finite supply.
Twenty-plus years later, collectors are fighting over the survivors.
What Should You Look for When Buying a Taz?
If you stumble across one at an estate sale, flea market or Marketplace pickup, don’t just look at the paint.
Look at the whole piece.
Check the plastic carefully for cracks, particularly around areas where accessories attach. Examine the antlers and nose. Look for repairs. Check whether the original light assembly is present and inspect the cord before attempting to illuminate it.
Paint condition matters, but don’t automatically dismiss a piece with some fading or paint loss.
These were outdoor Christmas decorations.
They lived outside.
Sunlight, freezing temperatures, moisture, garages, attics and twenty-plus Christmas seasons leave evidence.
Personally, I’d rather see an honest survivor with some wear than a heavily altered example masquerading as mint.
And if accessories are missing, restoration may still be possible. An entire cottage industry has developed around keeping vintage blow molds alive, and replacement components are now available for Taz — including noses and reproduction antlers. At blowmoldstore.com you’ll find replacement parts for Taz specifically, among others of course.
That’s another sign that this isn’t merely an old decoration anymore.
It’s a collectible worth saving.
What Is a Santa’s Best Taz Worth?
This is where collectors need to be careful.
Online asking prices are not the same thing as actual market value.
At the time of writing, examples of the smaller Taz can appear in the low hundreds, while sellers sometimes ask considerably more for scarce large examples. Ed showed me an eBay listing for what appears to be a pristine Taz going for almost $900! Condition, size, original accessories, working illumination, paint quality and local availability can all dramatically affect what someone is willing to pay.
The 40-inch Taz is the one I’d be watching especially closely.
A complete example with strong paint, original antlers, nose and working light assembly is a very different collectible from a cracked body missing half its accessories.
So don’t buy based solely on somebody writing RARE!!! in an online listing.
Do your homework.
That’s half the fun anyway.
From Big-Box Novelty to Blow Mold Grail
There is something wonderfully appropriate about Taz becoming a collector favorite.
He wasn’t designed to become an heirloom.
He was seasonal merchandise.
A licensed character molded out of plastic, painted in bright colors, wired with a light bulb and sold to families who wanted something funny on the lawn at Christmas.
Nobody buying one around the turn of the millennium was thinking:
“I should preserve this carefully. Collectors are going to lose their minds over it someday.”
And that’s precisely why pieces like this become collectible.
Most weren’t preserved.
Some cracked.
Some faded.
Some lost their antlers.
Some went into dumpsters when families moved.
Some probably disappeared during Saturday morning garage cleanouts for five bucks apiece.
And a few survived.
Now collectors like Ed are searching for them.
That’s what makes this hobby endlessly fascinating. Sometimes the most interesting piece isn’t the decoration everyone knew would become valuable.
It’s the ridiculous plastic Tasmanian Devil somebody bought for the front yard more than two decades ago.
And somewhere out there, one is probably still sitting in an attic.
Waiting for somebody to figure out what they have.
Want to Learn More About Vintage Blow Molds?
The Glow That Won’t Go Out: The Complete Collector’s Guide to Vintage Holiday Blow Molds explores the manufacturers, history, identification clues, collecting strategies, restoration techniques and stories behind the glowing plastic decorations that once filled American neighborhoods.
From Empire and General Foam to Union Products, Santa’s Best and the pieces collectors are still chasing today, it’s a celebration of a Christmas tradition that nearly disappeared — but never stopped glowing.
The glow isn’t gone. You just have to know where to look.
By Curtiss Wayne Andrews