Home Depot made hundreds of skeletons before perfecting its 12-foot star, Skelly

polygon.com:

White picket fences are out; 12-foot-tall skeletons from Home Depot are in.

Even if you’re from an urban area devoid of lawns, it’s still likely you’ve seen the 12-foot skeleton in question, which has become the center of viral internet fame time and time again. Videos starring the bony lawn fixture, which can garner as many as 16.4 million views, aren’t all that complicated; a lot of times, people just share the different ways they use the skeleton, whether dressing it up or driving it around town. Still, the decoration is so large that even the simplest videos lend a humor and gravitas to it as a recorded subject. Over time, the skeleton has almost taken on a life of its own.

But every icon has an origin story — and in this case, a pair of creators. On the occasion of Halloween and the 12-foot skeleton’s renewed fame, Polygon sat down with Lance Allen, senior merchant of decorative holiday at Home Depot, and Rachel Little, senior project engineer, to tell the story of the towering internet star known as “Skelly.”

Between the two of them, Allen and Little have worked on hundreds of skeletons. Not every skeleton designed at Home Depot R&D makes it to store shelves, but when one does, they’ve likely had a hand in it. Before Skelly became a combination of metal piping and LCD eyes we know today, it was a dream. The pitch for Skelly came from a simple human impulse: Make skeleton big.

“Originally, when we sat down, we started throwing out 10 feet. And it was like, ‘Nah, that just doesn’t seem tall enough,’” Allen told Polygon via video chat. “‘Everybody knows how tall a basketball hoop is.’ And then it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s make it 12 feet. Let’s think of two 6-foot guys standing on top of each other, where they could be