Somewhere inside CrunchLabs, a pumpkin was spinning a mixtape. The Party People had just pressed play on a motorized jack-o’-lantern rigged with multiple song tracks, a disco mode, a techno mode, and a red emergency party button that nobody was supposed to touch. The crowd watched it light up and thrash around on the table, trying its mechanical heart out, and Mark Rober stood there feeling something he freely admitted he was not expecting to feel. That is the whole point of the second annual CrunchLabs Toy Engineer Pumpkin Carving Contest, a tradition Rober traces back to his time at NASA: give a room full of engineers an hour, a pumpkin, and no rules except ‘make me feel the most, whatever that means.’
This year four teams showed up in full costume. Back to the Future’s Doc and Marty arrived first, followed by team Bippity Boppity Boom in fairy-tale regalia, the Pumpkin Paparazzi armed with something suspicious under their table, and the Party People, who radiated the specific calm of people who already knew they were going to win. Rober and Science Bob returned as judges, and the one-hour clock started.
Flash paper, silly string, and a Cinderella carriage
The Pumpkin Paparazzi opened their presentation with an invitation for a group photo. Three attempts in, a cam driven by a motor launched silly string across the room. The prank had a real mode and a prank mode, and Rober, who makes a living out of this kind of thing, was genuinely caught. ‘Don’t try and prank the prankster,’ he said, which was as close to a concession as he was going to offer.
Team Bippity Boppity Boom brought a motorized Cinderella carriage built from a pumpkin, complete with flash paper covering the sides and flash string holding the whole structure together. When the clock struck midnight on cue, the spell broke, the carriage collapsed into a crushed pumpkin, and a glass slipper appeared inside. Rober picked it up, held it to his foot, and announced it was much too small. The room had no argument.
The Party People and the emergency button
The Party People went last and gave Rober a mixtape, which turned out to be a pumpkin with a built-in speaker and a rotary track selector. Disco. Techno. And then one more song that made Rober go quiet in a way Science Bob immediately noted for the record. After Rober confirmed he could always feel a little bit more, the team handed him a pair of orange glasses and pointed to a fourth button on the panel, a red one, labeled the emergency party button. He pressed it. The pumpkin lurched, spun, lit up, and kept going until it was unclear whether the light inside was electronic or something beginning to smolder.
The winning team shared one crayon toothbrush for a year
Rober awarded the win to the Party People and handed out king-size candy bars. The runner-up prize, one crayon-shaped toothbrush to be shared among an entire team, prompted a genuine plea for individual brushes. Rober relented, then pointed out that the winning team was already plotting cavities.
That spinning, lit-up party pumpkin sat on the table after the contest ended, still technically glowing, still technically moving, still technically trying its hardest to keep the party going.
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