If you’re planning on setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July, you can stick to boring sparklers and firecrackers, but how about “One Bad Mother?”, a 16-shot show of crackling flowers with a finale of three shots, each shooting up to 60 meters high into the air and 45 meters wide?
If you want to stay closer to the ground, there’s “Fiery Frogs” which shoots out a fountain of sparks. Or you can opt for “Raging Rottweilers” which shoots out multi-colored stars followed by “awesome spinning silver tourbillions with a strobing red and green finale,” according to the description.
These and other similarly named products can be found on the explosive-laden shelves at Phantom Fireworks at 1226 S. Atlantic Ave. in Daytona Beach and Big Nick’s Boom Boom Sticks in Flagler Beach. Nick’s is actually a roadside tent at 2751 Moody Boulevard adorned with giant letters that read “big fireworks.”
“The Boom Boom Stick is everything that boom boom does, and that’s pretty much every item we sell here,” said Haley Ritter, a sales associate at Nick’s.
But be warned. Some of these products are slightly less professional. And the wrong fireworks can kill or injure you. The Consumer Product Safety Commission warns that there have been reports of eight deaths and an estimated 9,700 injuries from fireworks in 2023.
And these products don’t come cheap. For example, “Piglets” is a fireworks assortment priced at $1,499. It features, among other things, a “Fire and Fury” finale-level firework with packaging featuring a King Kong-style creature firing a machine gun.
“We have everything here from a lot of mortars to some smaller cakes and bigger cakes,” Ritter said of the Piglet range. “We also have a final cake here.”
A “cake” is a cluster of tubes connected by a fuse that fires a series of successive bursts of air. These tubes can be up to 3 inches (7.5 cm) in diameter, and a single cake can sometimes fire over 1,000 shots.
The variety of effects within individual cakes is often such that they defy descriptive titles and are instead given cryptic names such as ‘Bermuda Triangle’, ‘Pyro Glyphics’, ‘Cosmic Carnival’, ‘Emerald City’ and ‘Molotov Cocktail’, to name a few.
An example of a small cake at Nick’s is the “Trash Panda,” which shoots flaming balls. The packaging features a raccoon with peace signs amidst a pile of trash.
There’s also the hyper-masculine, terrifying and darkly dramatic packaging – an item at Big Nick’s is called ‘Alpha Male’ with a wolf on the front.
“These give nine very large shots,” Ritter said.
At Phantom Fireworks in Daytona Beach, customers can get their hands on a 16,000-pack of firework strips decorated with three snarling wolves. The packaging touts the performance as “super loud” with “maximum power.”
But the most powerful fireworks in the building are on another aisle. Those are nine-shot rounds loaded with the maximum amount of powder allowed for consumer sale, said Andrew Schroeder, manager of Phantom Fireworks Daytona Beach. Those include “Da Bomb!”
“All these fireworks here, this is the closest thing we’re going to get to professional fireworks,” he said.
As for products with fun names that also pack power, Schroeder and assistant manager Zamari Davis showed off a stack of Whacky Tobacky packs. This product shoots “nine enormous hanging gold brocades with a red strobe core,” according to Phantom Fireworks. It costs about $330 in Daytona Beach.
“It goes about 250 feet into the air and the cracks are huge,” Schroeder said.
A tip from both companies is to come by after July 4 for good deals. Nick’s is open through July 5.
Schroeder urged people to read the instructions before setting off fireworks.
“Be safe,” Davis said.
Domestic peace is also a factor. Phantom’s largest assortment retails for $1,499, and includes “24 hard-hitting Quest 60-gram canister artillery shells.”
The name? “Grounds for Divorce.”
This article originally appeared in The Daytona Beach News-Journal: 4th of July fireworks in Volusia, Flagler shows off power in a wild package
