The Thing - A Car for the 1970s

The Volkswagon Beetle was the emblematic vehicle of the 1960s counter-culture: cheap, well-designed, and poke in Detroit’s eye. By the 1970s, Volkswagon was ready to roll out a follow-up vehicle that would capitalize on the burgeoning off-road/dune buggy market. It would be rugged and modular, and easy to customize, a realization of an anti-consumerist ethos that valued function over form. The ad copy read: “At last, the car that can be anything.”

The result was the Thing – featured here as a prize on ‘The Price Is Right’:

The Thing looked the part with its stamped metal body panels, and it did have some neat design features- for example, the doors actually came off, and could be swapped front to back. However, as with so much in the 1970s, what should have been a good idea didn’t pan out in the real world, and the Thing’s lifespan was short.

What were the problems? For starters, the Thing may have been the ideal vehicle for your hip pot-smoking college kid, but it was priced at a full $1,000 above its near-relative the Beetle. Another drawback was that the Thing was apparently a harsh and drafty ride – one would think that it had been designed for military service, rather than for civilian comfort and fun.* But what really put the fork in was safety. In 1975, a mere two years after the Thing debuted, new U.S. vehicle safety standards were put into effect. The Thing may have been designed to be many things, but safe wasn’t one of them, and it had to be pulled from the market.

But in its brief butterfly life, the Thing seemed to be a realization of the 1970s' promise of a brave new earth-toned world. Here is an advertisement that describes the concept - before the safety standards killed the dream:

*History footnote: What was most certainly not stressed in Volkswagon’s advertising for the Thing was just where its design originated. Much like the Beetle, the Thing came to be during the Nazi era; unlike the Beetle the Thing was actually designed as a military vehicle. Just as the US Army produced the Jeep, in the war years the Wehrmacht designed a serviceable lightweight off-road vehicle, known as the Kübelwagen (Bucketwagon), which ended up seeing a lot of service in North Africa. Unlike the Jeep, which went into civilian production immediately after the war, the Kübelwagen design was not revived until the 1960s. By then, continental memories of the late unpleasantness had faded somewhat, and the Thing came about as the result of a pan-European project to produce the ‘Euro-jeep’.

Here is the original version of the Thing, fulfilling its original purpose:

'Which Witch': The Game We Never Managed To Play

‘Which Witch?’ was a Milton Bradley children’s board game released in 1970, just in time for a decade that saw interest in the supernatural and uncanny skyrocket (remember The Exorcist?). On first look, the game has potential – it is played on a three-dimensional board that reconstructs a haunted house. Witches lurk and determine the player’s fate. Unexpected things – like a steel ball directed by chance –are sure to occur. The winning player gets out of the house alive; the fate of the other players isn't revealed, but can be presumed to be unpleasant.

You would think that such a game might manage to bring a taste of real spookiness into the format of a children’s game. ‘Which Witch’ could have been pretty cool, a reflection of that adult world of occult hippy weirdness that was rumbling overhead. And I remember that it did have an ominous sort of aura to it when I was six or seven years old. It seemed a bit scary, a game that must be pretty grown-up, given that it seemed to have something to do with horror movies, which were so very grown up that we would have to wait years and years before our parents would consider taking us to one.

In reality, though, the game – just like so many other of the more grown-up séances and ceremonies of the period - never really worked out. Designed by the prodigal hacks at Milton Bradley, the game relied on exhausted Hollywood horror-movie tropes (the good witch in the game is called ‘Glenda the Good’ for example) and the weakest tea that could be brewed from the leaves of the Brothers Grimm. Cartoon witches, cartoon ghosts; children turned into mice.

Worse than the weak content, though, was the design. As soon as it was taken down from the top shelf of the bedroom closet the game turned into a chore and a challenge. Getting the board assembled and ready to play required the manipulation of a bunch of small, easily broken, easily lost parts. Here are the instructions for the board assembly. Not how to play the game, mind you, just how to set the game up:


Try doing this drunk. Or if a piece is missing. Or if you are seven years old. It makes me now wonder the game was intentionally flawed, as a way to forestall parental complaints that their kids had been too badly spooked by it. Or perhaps a failed poet at the company had managed to sneak in under the hood and turn the assembly into a modernist tone poem of frustration, what you would get if you asked Gertrude Stein to put together a game board.

Presuming that an indulgent parent with mechanical aptitude was nearby, and the board did get set up all right, what happened then? Well, not much. There are three witches, you see, one good and two bad, and the players draw cards and role dice in shallow, perfunctory stabs at escaping the witches’ haunted house. It is a standard Parcheesi/snakes and ladders knock-off, enlivened by a few dodgy mechanical devices built into the board that knock the game pieces around a bit.

So, board assembly was a task beyond the age group for which the game was intended, and playing the game just wasn’t that interesting. As a result, the game was rarely actually played. My memory of Which Witch is that our across-the-street neighbors had it, and that on a semi-regular basis we would get all enthusiastic and giggly and preemptively scared and set out to play the thing. So we would take out the box and slide out the board and spread out the pieces and parts – and then attempt to assemble the thing for the length of our five minute attention spans – and then argue for another ten minutes over what we were doing – and then give up. We would bend the cardboard parts the wrong way to see if perhaps they would fit better. We would find alternative uses for the parts (the mice pieces were good to chew on). We would wander away. We never, that I remember, actually played the game.

Here’s the game board – dig the subtle graphics:

















A final note -- the game existed in multiple European versions, and I understand that the Italian version of the game was intended to be played in the dark and featured a skull made out of glow-in-the-dark plastic. That would have been cool, and probably good to chew on as well.

Ted M.

Space Food Sticks... Wha?

Pretty cool, these individually wrapped tubes of, I guess, space food. Each little stick came on like a Slim Jim made from a stale peanut butter flavor Power Bar, which come to think of it is essentially what Space Food Sticks were -- an early version of the modern energy bar. They were actually pretty nasty when you get right down to it, but the packaging was smart -- the metallic wrapping had just enough weight to it that you needed your teeth to wrestle it open, and the foil was a cool metallic silver on the inside. It really did seem possible that these things were made and packaged for actual astronauts. The outer space angle also let Pillsbury, the makers of Space Food Sticks get away with, or even benefit from, the patently synthetic nature of the food in the stick. It tasted weird, smelled weird, and felt weird in your mouth, but that was okay -- space is weird. Our mom was reluctant to buy them, and when she did we gobbled them up in a day or two. I think Space Food Sticks was a main reason for Mom's abrupt buy-in to the health-food fad that swept the nation in the mid-seventies.

-- Rick M.