Six Finger and Vac-U-Form, etc
It’s crazy the useless stuff we made parents buy!!
I remember a cardboard ‘city’ that had cars you drove around on it. The cars had a magnet under them and you moved them by using a wand with a magnet under the board. See the problem? The board had to lay flat, so the table, floor, etc were out. You had to balance the thing between two chairs; and if you pushed up with your wand, the cardboard folded in the middle and fell off teh chairs.
Vac-U-Form was a crazy invention that let you heat up a small square of plastic on the left side (I mean REALLY hot), then flick it onto the other side, where you pushed it over a steel mold (such as a skull) and used a pump to vacuum the air out from the mold. Now. this was fine until you realized you had to do the same thing to the other side of the skull. Then you cut them out of the square. Now what? How do you glue them together? The edges are as thin as paper. And what’s worse, the entire thing was so light that a gust of wind would blow it to Pittsburgh. The ad made it look like you could make your own toys. Nope. All the thing was good for was creating and making a mess.
How many kids really made a Matisse on an Etch a Sketch? All that thing was good for was twiddling knobs. In those days, companies had no trouble showing you things that were not just unlikely, but also openly deceiving. They show you all the kids your age, then show you someone (one of the kids, we guess) drew The Last Supper on the etch a sketch.
And the air gun. A large bulky ‘gun’ that you loaded up with compressed air and fired at someone. Now, when you’re playing army or war, shooting air at someone 50 yards away is a blueprint for inane play. All the thing was good for was putting it against your skin and then make it suck air against your body; someone said that it gave a hickey, whatever that was (hey I was 7, give me a break).
And these thin Styrofoam airplanes called Flying Things. They came in a little bag, and had all sorts of outlandish creatures and/or demented looking humans on them. They were funny to look at–but, flying? Nah. Most crashed as soon as you tossed them. And the Styrofoam was so thin, it cracked on impact half the time.
And let’s not get into ‘Ant Farms.’