UselessFinds
A Five-Metre Glowing Dragon You Wave Around

three metres, or five if you are ambitious

Absurd Costumes

A Five-Metre Glowing Dragon You Wave Around

A lit dragon on handling poles, three or five metres long, in green, red or yellow. Requires arms and space.

Buy this nonsense$62.14$35.42(sponsored link, opens in a new tab)
  • dragon dance
  • led prop
  • festival
  • performance prop
  • glowing
  • chinese new year

What Is This Thing?

A dragon dance prop: a long segmented body on handling poles, threaded with LEDs so the whole length glows. It comes in three-metre and five-metre versions, in green, red or yellow, with a moulded head at the front carrying most of the lighting.

The listing photographs are all taken at night, which is not a cheat — in daylight this is netting on sticks, and after dark it is a serpent moving across a park.

Why You Don't Need It

It is five metres long. It requires at least one other person to operate properly, a large open dark space, and somewhere to store an object the size of a canoe when you are not using it.

You will use it approximately once a year, if that.

Why You'll Buy It Anyway

Very few objects change a space this much for this little money. A glowing five-metre dragon moving through a dark garden is a genuinely large-scale effect, and the closest alternatives — projection, pyrotechnics, hired performers — are an order of magnitude more expensive and considerably more paperwork.

It also happens to be one of the rare party objects where the operating of it is the fun. Someone has to run with it.

A Five-Metre Glowing Dragon You Wave Around — photograph 2
A Five-Metre Glowing Dragon You Wave Around — photograph 3

Who It's Actually For

Lunar New Year, obviously, which is what it is built for. Beyond that: outdoor festivals, school and community events, large Halloween parties with a garden, and anyone organising something for a crowd of children who need to be led somewhere.

Take the five-metre version if there are two of you and the three-metre if there is one.

before you click buy

The listing states plainly that batteries are not included, and a prop this long will want several sets. Sort that out before the event rather than on the evening.

Check what the frame is made of and how it packs down. The difference between a prop you use annually and a prop you use once is whether it goes back in a bag afterwards.

more things nobody needs