Nowadays, new CFL's simply shut off when the filament melts apart during the EOL "hot spot movement" phase. I hate that.
I'm looking for CFL's, (including Circline screw in adapters) that provide interesting EOL shows. I've got fans and fixtures in my
apartment that have incandescent lamps, and I want to possibly replace most of them with CFL's. All of which will be vintage,
and most of which will be electronic.
Anyways, does anyone know of CFL's that typically provide intense EOL shows? I know of some, but the ones I can think of
usually go to EOL prematurely, with a small internal electrical explosion at the base.

Well, the ones "providing an EOL show" are those causing severe fire hazard...
So it is the push for a reasonable safety, what causes the CFLs to fail without any effects.

It is just because the "show" is nothing else than a huge power dissipated at spots not designed to handle it.
And dissipating excessive power at spots not designed to handle it is exactly the cause of all the CFL fires.

@Medved, yep, I highly agree with you on that... which is kinda why I was reluctant to post this thread. I've seen a lot of CFL
EOL's end off with what could potentially cause a fire. (Electrical explosions, sparks flying out of the base, plastic melting, etc)
This isn't an easy topic, since those CFL's described are the ones I'm actually also trying to avoid.
But I'm beginning to think that most electronic vintage CFL's, contained components that couldn't handle the high spike in
power during EOL. Including the Circline adapters.

It is practically impossible to avoid excessive loading at EOL and impossible to design a ballast that really can handle that (the oversized components beside being excessively expensive will have too high parasitic capacitances, compromising the efficiency during normal operation). Plus the overheating tube itself is a thing threatening the system (e.g. melting and damaging the sockets,...)
The only option to have it safe and reliable is to have a mechanism that just shuts it down once such overload condition happens and rely on the thermal inertia for the smaller components to handle it before that mechanism acts.
In CFLs and cheap ballasts it is the lamps filament acting as a fuse, with better quality ballasts it is dedicated circuit monitoring the lamp or ballast running parameters (lamp voltage, voltage vs current phase relations within the ballast lamp circuit currents,...) and shutting the ballast down once EOL lamp detected.