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.