Zap Action!

You COULD spend the afternoon putting together a plastic car model, get dizzy from the tube of glue, ruin the dining room table painting it, and wonder why one wheel refused to turn. OR you could spend about a half-hour snapping together one of the Zap-Action Pirates of the Caribbean models, and have a wicked cool mousetrap-like contraption that pulls a skeleton dude's arm out of its socket at the flick of a switch.

Here's one:

The pirate skeleton POPS out of the treasure chest and slams his dagger down on the map. A genuinely startling moment!

Here's another:

See how the pirate dude is chopping at the alligator with his sword? In reality he's chopping off his own leg. This was one of the hardest models to get to work properly -- although, come to think of it, they were ALL hard to make work. The rubber band that powered the chopping action was small and difficult to work with, and the little knob it was supposed to go on had a tendency to snap off. No amount of glue would fix that situation, though sometimes you could glue the rubber band itself onto the plastic. All of this glueing and rubber banding was a guaranteed sick headache and day-long lingering odor of xylene in your nose.

But it was worth it! I'll leave you here with one of my all-time favorites; the arm-from-socket model:

All of these awesome images can be found right here.

I Love the Smell of Cooking Plastic

Incredible Edibles represented a garden of wish fulfillment for the child lucky enough to have one, or – as was more likely by the 1970s – to have inherited a still-operable set from older siblings or cousins. You got to make your own candy, in the shapes of bugs and snakes, no less, with control over color and flavor. You did this in a semi-industrial press that got dangerously hot and weirdly smelly. With Incredible Edibles the worker controlled the means of production, and so an ideal mode of consumption came into existence – namely, that you as the kid got to eat as much custom-made candy as you wanted, under the guise of playing with a semi-educational toy. Until the raw materials (the Gobble-De-Goop© which came in little plastic containers and looked like auto paint) ran out, you lived in a very sticky worker’s paradise.

Incredible Edibles was just one blossom on the mutant rose bush that was Mattel’s ‘ThingMaker’ empire; a line of products that seemed aimed at educating the factory workers of tomorrow in the fine art of plastic engineering – and to start their exposure to toxic off-gases as early as possible. The ThingMakers were a line of small cheaply-made ovens, with interchangeable metal dies in which you poured liquid plastic. The heat solidified the plastic into a variety of toys or, in the case of the Edible Edibles, semi-gummy candy. 

The company did a bang-up job of exploiting the concept’s possibilities  – some of their offerings in the mid to late sixties (as currently described on Wikipedia) included:

• ·         Fighting Men (1965) — This set of six molds could be used to create mini soldier figures, using an innovative two-part mold to give the Fighting Men a front and a back. The set also included pieces of wire to place in the figure, making it bendle with the bottom wire protrusions being able to stand on a styrofoam base. Other molds in the set created weaponry and equipment for the Fighting Men to carry into battle.
• ·         Fright Factory (1966) — Five of this set's seven molds were dedicated to creepy disguises, making pieces such as fake scars, snaggled teeth, or a third eye for one's forehead. Another mold (with a special insert) made a shrunken head, and the last made a dangly skeleton that one built from parts.
• ·         Picadoos (1967) — A Thingmaker for artists. This one featured molds with 10x10-space numbered grids. By carefully placing colored Plastigoop in the grid, one could create decorative artwork in either beads, mosaic tile, or cross-stitch varieties.
• ·         Mini-Dragons (1967) — The eight molds in this set formed wings, horns, claws, tails, and other body parts, which could be combined into various fantasy creatures.
• ·         Eeeeks! (1968) — In the same vein as Mini-Dragons, this set of eight molds formed several varieties of mix-and-match legs, bodies, heads, wings, antennae, etc., to create large, bizarre insects.
• ·         DollyMaker (1969) — Five two-sided molds are used to create two styles of little dolls, and a wardrobe of late '60s fashions and accessories for them.
• ·         Super Cartoon Maker (1969) — A licensed Thingmaker, the eight molds in this set form replicas of Charles Schulz's Peanuts characters, such as Snoopy, Charlie Brown and Lucy.
• ·         Jillions of Jewels (1970) — The last of the classic Mattel Thingmakers. The set had five molds, but instead of the liquid Plastigoop, these formed solid plastic "gemstones" and jewelry frames from two kinds of powdered "Jewel Dust" compounds.

By the early 1970s these sets must have seemed like much less of a good idea from the parental standpoint. Let hot plastic fumes soak into Junior’s developing lungs? Let his small hands juggle hot metal molds? Let him actually eat these dubious products?   Before long, Creepy Crawlers and Incredible Edibles were driven from the market.

Personally, I think that it was all just overprotectiveness, a collective failure of will that did this. We still live by the precepts of industry and engineering, after all. Really, it is only honest to show our young how this plastic world is actually made and molded, to let them know that almost everything they touch started life in a barrel shipped from Newark, New Jersey. 

But then again, I don’t have any kids.

Bruised Little Fingers

Clackers were the yo-yo’s delinquent cousin, loud, violent and unpredictable. The toy consisted of two over-sized, heavy marbles suspended from a loop of string. All that was required to play with them was to hold the string in the center and jerk one’s hand rapidly up and down. The balls established a rhythm of collisions six inches north and south of your hand, and produced a hallway-echoing racket that could heard all the way over in your best friend’s Language Arts class. (The vaguely testicular design of the toy was lost on us as children but gives the adult male pause, considering the hand motion involved and the banging balls).

 

This was a dare-devil toy of sorts.  Get nervous and let your grip wobble, and the balls smacked your hand. Hard. Get scared and let the string go in mid-operation, and the balls took flight across the room and hit your little sister in the eye. But it got even more adventurous, at least for an (un)lucky few! The balls were made of acrylic plastic, which was pretty tough, but not always tough enough. When the balls shattered – as they sometimes actually did – they produced a burst of sharp flying shards which, if produced on the upwards swing, kept going right into the child’s face.

Not surprisingly, Clackers were recalled later in the decade, after enough children had acquired interesting facial scars to get the government’s attention.

Smash-Up Derby Goes Boom

 

“Crash, bang, smash them up again, it’s smash-up time my friend” – the theme song pretty much said it all. The Smash-Up Derby Cars were precision-guided to satisfy our childhood love of destruction. The cars were ingeniously powered by the ‘SSP’ system, which had you insert a toothed strip of plastic through the car, and then yank it out to power the car up.  SSP stood for ‘Super-Sonic Power’, which it wasn’t quite, although it was still pretty good. The cars went fast, and when you got them to hit each other head-on they pretty much exploded, with their doors, wheels, hoods, etc. all popping off in different directions.  The set came with a couple of ramps, and the best collisions occurred if you could get the cars to intersect in mid-air – which was not easy to manage. These violent little beauties were the perfect reflection of the golden age of the television car chase. 

As I remember, our parents really didn’t like them. The first reason for this was probably the lower class implications of the junkyard derby theme (note how the trash-Nashville the music in the ad is). The second reason was more pragmatic –and more podiatric – namely, the prospect of a toy actually designed  to spray small, sharp plastic pieces all over the floor, where they could be stepped on by the unwary and barefoot parent.