All good things must come to an end, or so they say. In the case of the Pet of the Year voting, though, we can confirm that sad statement, so heed the herald (which probably qualifies as something they would definitely not say).
POY 2022 Contest Winds Down
What has been a remarkably long public voting round for Pet of the Year 2022 will finally close one week from today. To avoid math problems fraught with potential headaches if you do not happen to be reading this the day it goes live, we can help you out: Voting for the POY 2022 ends at midnight (L.A. time) on April 7th. Given that the new CEO decided upon this quarter of a year approach, we started talking about how much things have changed for the POY contest over the years.
Naturally this got us to looking about for POY winner schwag, because, hey, once the contest is over and people have forgotten all about who won, we really only care about the goodies, right? Well, “publishing” was a different “thing” back before the Internet, and thus companies who had millions of people waiting to get a printed magazine in the mailbox every month tended to have additional millions of dollars to play with. They game some really cool presents, as it turned out, the value of which may or may have had anything to do with whether or not the winner happened to be living at Bob’s house at the time.
Those darned coincidences, y’know?
At any rate, we ran through a pretty decadent list of things that most people would not even want anymore, but it was last century, and things were weird. While you might be able to something with a car, or possibly even a catamaran, most people have no idea where they could even wear a fur coat anymore — even if they wanted to wear it — which they probably do not. Way back in 1976 the magazine listed “Cash and Gifts worth over $50,000” but then sort of stole its own thunder by listing the gifts as …
- Porche 924
- Lynx coat
- 18’ Catamaran
- Swimwear
Suffice it to say that the fancy Porche cost less than $10K when it debuted that year and even fully loaded in the turbo version they came in at under $20,000 — a long, long way from 50 for the high-ticket item, well, unless that was some seriously fancy swimwear. They stuck to the bragging about dollar value concept for some time, though. By 1981 it was “Cash and Gifts worth over $200,000” (allegedly), culminating in 1983, which promised a “First Annual $1,000,000 Pet of the Year Pageant.” … More on this last one later.
We then started crawling through other years, where we found the dazzling POY 1996 offering pictured to the side here, along with the typical car, coat, fancy clothes combinations that had become common. They had given up listing dollar value in the splash reveals, but had seriously branched into sponsored gifts. In a list of 25+ items, buried among the “attire” we discovered Andi Sue Irwin also scored …
- Three Nights in Athens, Greece followed by a 7-day islands cruise
- An 8-day Resort vacation in Nassau, Bahamas
- A week with up to 8 guests in a Mountain Chalet Resort
For the record, it turns out Andi invited none of us still here at Penthouse to accompany her on that trip, and we’re barely even bitter about it. If we ever see her again, we’re definitely going to ask what she did with the aquarium clock, though. Seriously, how do you clean a 6′ deep aquarium you cannot dive into? Those little scrubby magnet things were terrible, although people still buy them apparently. Hey, at least she got a helmet to go with her new motorcycle, and she did get $1,500 worth of free food at two different New York City restaurants, so she could have taken like three friends to lunch with her using those.
Bottom line, our POY 2022 Contest Comparison rabbit hole got less exciting pretty quickly, so instead we had the Art Dept grab a few photos of a random selection of past Pet of the Year winners, requesting specifically images featuring the model and the gifts. We got 18 fascinating photos of …
- POY 1976, Laura Doone
- POY 1981, Danielle Deneux
- POY 1983, Sheila Kennedy
- POY 1996, Andi Sue Irwin
- POY 2007, Heather Vandeven
Granted, only a couple of these actually picture the women with gifts they won in their POY contest, but a couple of them do, and that’s not bad from the Art Dept, honestly. (They can lose interest when you tell them you want photographs with clothes on the Pets. Go figure.) Actually, the research did turn up something interesting about that 1983 Sheila Kennedy year, but that as it happens would be a story already told. Sheila did happen to be one of those coincidetal “living with Bob” people, so…
For now, enjoy the gallery. If you reload the page, all the pictures will reorganize themselves, so it’s almost like you get to see new things again. We’ve done it dozens of times around here — just to be sure it works, of course.
By the way, the POY 2022 winner will not get a car, or a fur coat, a motorcycle, or (as far as we know) and aquarium clock. She does get a custom diamond-encrusted Pet Key necklace, and although we are not allowed to list the price, we can tell you it costs well North of a Porche 924 back in 1976. We also were going to ask a really famous (well, now slash-infamous) person quite familiar with beauty contests if he knew what happened to Bob’s grand plans back in 1984. We decided not to reach out, though, as this person has quite a few other things on his plate currently. He’s spent the last two years trying to learn how to count.
OH! At this point you probably have this page memorized, but just in case you’d like to get one more POY 2022 vote into the calculation. That page will be HERE until the end of April 7th. After that, the page becomes really boring. Fair warning…
