The Chia Pet has taken many forms over the last several decades. The decorative plant has built up its status as being both an easy plant to take care of and as a piece of pop culture art. As niche popular culture items have found their way into the greater zeitgeist, Chia Pets have expanded along with it to include things like “The Golden Girls,” Weird Al Yankovic, and Sonic the Hedgehog.
Among many other things its responsible for, “The Simpsons” has brought us a number of scenes that would eventually turn into memes. One of these was taken from the season 5 episode, “Homer Loves Flanders.” To set the scene, Homer has finally become friendly with Flanders after Ned won tickets to a football game and invited Homer to come with him.
This kicks off a “friendship” that turns into Homer effectively terrorizing Flanders by being his constant companion and not giving him an ounce of personal space. It takes on a ethereal quality of sorts when Ned and his kids are playing outside their home and Homer materializes through the row of bushes/hedges that separate their homes. After being rejected, Homer recedes backwards through them, as if dematerializing into them. You know the meme, now you can have the Chia Pet of it.
The Chia Pet is listed as coming in Fall of 2024 on Stortz Inc. Is it exclusive, will it have wider availability, what’s the price point? All good questions that we’d love to have answers to. For the time being you’ll just have to keep watch on the page to see if anything changes. Stortz Inc. is a Canadian distributor that work with other large brands, Chia obviously being one of them.
If you don’t know how the Chia Pets work it’s pretty simple. There’s a clay sculpture in the shape of something, in this case, the hedge. You take the seed mixture that comes with the chia pet, spread the seed mixture on the surface of the clay, pour water inside the clay sculpture to hydrate the seeds, and then it starts growing over time. All the better to engulf Homer in the hedges and terrorize the Flanders family day after day after day.
Hopefully we’ll get more information on a release date or availability soon, it would be a great Christmas gift for your meme loving friends.
