Hello !!
I have finished the game two times, but never have I used these items:
• Beta tape
• Animal paperweight
• Snake in a box
• Bear repellent
Has anyone used them ?
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The developer team talks about them in the last podcast: those (among others) are backer items, from higher-level backers. Except the tape, that’s a red-herring.
They said they tried to incorporate all of them into the game, but could manage for all.
I know if you don’t have the bear repellent when you go to the woods, you hear a bear constantly and the character is scared.
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I think if you use the bear repellent before going into the forest you don’t hear the bear sounds. I don’t know if anything bad actually happens to you if you don’t use it. Didn’t for me.
Nothing bad happened to me either. But I think 
said she was scared. I can’t remember well.
I guess the bear is about as dangerous as whatever animal it was that lurked in the jungles in Zak McKracken.
The tape refers to a real movie “Blazing Saddles” by Mel Brooks, with Gene Wilder among others.
It is there for a reason. If you already have finished Thimbleweed Park and watch this movie, you could understand why it’s there.
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“Blazing Saddles” was the inspiration for the Monkey Island 2 ending.
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And I thought the ending of Monkey Island 2
looked a lot like this
Concidence?
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Here is a list of backer items in a blog comment.
With the stuffed animal + math trophy those are likely the 16 backer items.
Some of those were incorporated into puzzle chains but most are red herrings (with or without Easter egg use).
Other red herring objects are most of the stuff from the highway (e.g. Atari cartridges, plastic rings) and there were also red herring bags in the game 
(OK, the latter can’t be picked up)
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I just wanted to add that the most superfluous and useless item in the entire game is the speck of dust… and I mean also in a literal way: the verb “use” doesn’t work on them.
The ratio “attention paid to it by players / usefulness of it” tends towards infinity. 
Since collecting specks of dust even appears in the to-do lists, I even hypothesized that they could have some hidden in-game purpose or usage, but I didn’t find any.
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Welcome, Nor Treblig!
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I collected all my pieces of dust. At first, I was under the impression that each character must pick up his own collection. Then I realized that it was actually a single set, but still thought I had to have one character collect them all. So I went out of my way for all the other characters to hand over their specks of dust to Agent Reyes 
.
Eventually I caught on that it was mostly an in-joke for obsessive-compulsive pixel-hunters. Even then, I still kept collecting them. 
-dZ.
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The “specks of dust” comes from an idea of a twitter user.
Ron loved so much that idea, that he decided to implement that in the game.
You’ll get (mulitple) achievements when collecting speck of dust, which is why it gets added to the ToDo list. This may be more worth to some people than all the other useless items
(I mean, look at this badge system here… 
, what’s going on??)
Yes, after a long fruitless research I have to assume that the only “useful” thing that you can do with them is to get some achievements… but that’s not what I thought when I played the game.
I wondered if specks of dust had also an “in-game purpose or usage”, because I found it suspicious that the developers put in the to-do lists only this achievement-motivated task.
I think it’s just a joke. Back in the day, part of the “adventure game mechanics” were not only using every item in your inventory with every other item, but randomly clicking all over the place looking for hotspots. This was called “hunt the pixel,” where the player had to scan the entire scene, pixel by pixel, in order to find that special hidden hotspot.
Thus, in Thimbleweed Park you actually get the hunt real pixels!
I remember the pixel hunting session of the past and I got the irony of being able to actually hunt pixels, but that wasn’t enough to stop me wondering if there was also a practical use for them.
Yeah, I hoped for that as well. I wasn’t disappointed to learn that it was just a joke. I thought it was funny.
One of the times when I got really stuck, I had so much in my inventory that I used the dumpster to try and narrow down the important items. It worked well – the useless ones went happily in there while the important ones were met with ‘Throw it away?!’ 
For the most part, anyway. I think I might’ve been left with the paperweight and snake-in-a-box.
Is it actually possible to collect all specks of dust in one playthrough? I would guess so.
I played the game a second / third time and collected all I could find. All the locations, all the characters. And I just began when the game showed the specks on the do to list (which isn´t the case at the beginning of the game for some odd reason).
I ended up missing 3 or 4 specks to complete the task. Frustrating! (OK, not really ;))