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The Toy Fair's Top 10 Strangest Products
FloggingMollyrox writes "UGO looks at the recent 2004 Toy Fair's Top 10 Strangest Products. Forget about Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man, the real stuff was an art farm that grows vegetables, a pogo stick that shoots you over the moon, 'real' shrunken heads, and an educational plush toy based on an alien invasion."
Either way.. I suppose it's an interesting concept... and they are kind of cute...
Buy the President
The anti-salmon
and was too normal or poor to get
They hoped to make a killing selling Simpsons-branded "Ralph Wiggum Nose Goblins". Then they found out that all the kids could easily make these themselves.
A few hours browsing at souvenir shops or department stores in the Akihabara district will teach you the meaning of 'strange'. These toys are soothingly ordinary in comparison.
And don't get me started to the Tokyo fish market *shudders*
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Baboochi left their planet because they were invaded by the evil Zartans and came to Earth to find a new home in the arms of children.
Baboochi(TM) will help teach your children to brush their teeth, clean their room, share with others, and many more important lessons that parents want their kids to learn.
Holy shit WTF. I must own one of these.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Having just read this Groklaw article, I must admit - I fear poor SnowMold Industries (See toy#2) could be in for a lawsuit!
It's Log!
It's Log!
It's big, it's heavy, it's wood!
It's Log!
It's Log!
It's better than bad, it's good!
hang on The Cheat...we're takin this baby TO THE MOOOOON!!
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such toy-fair debut documentary films as "Tickle-Me Elmo - the NC-17 Version" and "Coleco Adam: Miracle in Silicon".
Tellmi's illuminated quills are made of soft rubber and viciously vibrate when he's turned on. I'm not going to examine the double uses for such an item, but at the very least, I could see some necks being massaged.
Yes. Necks. That is the only thing this will be used for, i promise. Cartman's mom is on the other line wanting to order one....gotta go!
The earliest/weirdest toy I ever got was a drawer full of these weird plastic canadian locking blocks.
My parents, coming out of their hippy-ness, got them for me to "expand my mind and creativity". Being 7, what did I make with them? guns/firearms/rocket launchers/etc.
*sigh* good times.
The SCO-MOLD squeezes your somewhat generic *nix operating system into a form that SCO can demand a license and sue you for.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You know, for a minute, when I saw the last item, I thought somebody had come out with a plushy version of these little bouncy guys. Ah, well.
This sig no verb.
http://members.fortunecity.com/chippy3/songs/log.h tml
I've read that toy companies target adult buyers via product design, with products for young children- teddy bears for example, have proportions similar to babies, which supposedly triggers a [mat/pat]ernal instinct in parents.
Tellmi's figured out a much better instinct to trigger in the parents, it sounds like :-)
"Mommy, stop borrowing Mr. Quills! Every time you do his batteries are dead!"
I see this as a great strategy. A second one gets bought shortly after the first, for sure. The second one is in part responsible for the purchase of the third, anywhere from 9-36 months later...perfect! What's their stock symbol?
Please help metamoderate.
Check out "Orgasmic the Hedgehog", that blue sex toy thingy shown on the first page.
Looks like someone already got their hands on a Flybar. With video!
This sure reminds me of my favortie Christmas present of 1979, this, although the modern one is so big it must include an expansion set.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Flat Eric. Not that the Baboochi isn't a good start, it seems that toys that grown-ups can laugh at through one marketing channel and kids can appreciate on their own level will always endear themselves more effectively than simple flat blue animals.
Not unlike the Buddy Lee campaign... which succeeded both as doll-based jingle silliness for TV people and as more mature viral webmercials for the internet set...
I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
Tellmi's illuminated quills are made of soft rubber and viciously vibrate when he's turned on.
So do mine.
I may be a fat bastard, but having...a pogo stick that shoots you over the moon...doesn't make me a cow! -Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
Oh damn... they left out "Bag O' Glass" again!
it's a plush head containing fake vomit, bugs, moldy cheese, rats and worms. -- you just never know which disgusting, vile thing will pop out of his mouth, ears or nostrils next!
Watch out for the lawyers. This is a direct infringement of SCO's business strategy.
while sco {
wget -O
}
#1 - TELLMI (Digitspace): interactive hedgehog with blinking lights and moving limbs
#2 - THE SNOMOLD (SnoMold Industries): plastic bag filled with snow makes instant snowman
#3 - BLADE RACERS (Dynatech Action): "High velocity infrared racing system"
#4 - VOOT-VUE FARM (HSP Nature Toys): plexiglass box to see vegetables grow
#5 - MARVEL MYSTERY BAGS (Visionary Concepts): Plastic Marvel figures hidden in water-dissolvable bags
#6 - THE REAL SHRUNKEN HEAD (Witch Doctors?): "extremely lifelike", or deathlike, as it were, plastic shrunken human heads
#7 - THE FLYBAR (Flybar Inc.): Pogo stick.
#8 - WHAT'S IN NED'S HEAD (Fundex Games): Plush head containing fake vomit, bugs, moldy cheese, rats and worms
#9 - TKO FIT KIDS (TKO Sports Group): Inflatable child-size wrestlers
#10 - BABOOCHI (Baboochi World): Anthropomorphic blue furry M&M-shaped doll
Can you nominate heads? What about Bill Gates, George Bush, the CEO of SCO, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Eminem?
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
even on the second bounce, one of the demonstrators had to have himself at least five or six feet above ground
Sounds really cool. I wonder if it comes with a padded helmet for indoor use.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
I try to follow the link from work and our firewall has it blocked. If I'm real stupid, I can try the link three or four more times so that IT can start an investigation into my web viewing habits. Wahoo!
Well. That was...disappointing. Here I was, waiting for him to go to the stratosphere, but he just went...about how high you would expect. Feh.
(Still, you deserve +1 Informative for posting the link.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I say they should design real-life action figures of characters like Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Steve Jobs! Maybe we can even bundle them in two-packs. I think a Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds would look nice together.
What if we throw a CEO for Motorola and Kevin Mitnick in one pack? You know people would dish out the cash for this.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I'm just wondering - the concept of Lenny Kravitz underneath at least six feet of water is okay, but what was the point?
I really wonder why the blade racers are called a high-velocity infrared racing system...
Even if they could be steered by infrared remote controls this would be utterly senseless since they'd loose contact to the remote control when doing some loops etc. -huha
happened to me too, what was that all about?
My parents would have laughted their heads off if I had asked for this stuff. Back in my day, the toy store was up hill both ways, and we liked it, damn it!
No seriously, this stuff is a joke! My first toy was a set of wood sticks notched so I could make log cabins & stuff. That and a piece of cheap astroturf & I had a farm! Naturallyt he farm required animals so my father swiped a couple of drones from the bee hive. If you pull their wings off they make perfectly acceptable "cows," "horses," or "mules."
My next toy was a little broken down wagon my dad got from the dump. A little sledgehammer action on the axle & some paint and it was good to go. Of course it took about 30 seconds for us to go to the nearest hilla nd go for a ride. My devil worshiping brother helped me go a bit faster than I liked, usually. I've been thrown at speed and straddled a small tree at speed when rides went wrong, which could account for my present baldness.
Surely somebody else bombarded Destro & Snake from "space" with pellet guns & firecrackers?
Kids these days are getting the shaft. Childhood was a lot more fun before safety and responsible parenting were necessities. The fake vomit from Ned might get a few screams from mothers still. I want that now.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
That FlyBar reminds me of a toy we saw a few years ago... The Death Wish Shoes. :D
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Java
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
You mean i seriously wasted 5 mins waiting for this story anxiously only to find out about crappy toys?????
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
That ad sucked up like 90% of my CPU and delayed every action in Mozilla. Geez, I thought Flash ads were bad because of my "old" my Athlon-750. When something sucks up 90% of an Athlon-2400, it's just evil. Because of that, Ugo, mediamgr.ugo.com went very quickly into the list of domains that my Squid proxy blocks. It was just intolerable.
Check out this anatomical mummy bear, for which there is a thinly veiled advertisement at http://summum.kids.us.
These may be wierd in a 'oo! It's japanese and odd' way, but for my money, the wierdest toys ever can be found at Disturbing Auctions. Just look at the emotionally scarring toys and weep. Half of those are home made and beat hands down anything Japan could come up with.
I mean, if some kid combined that with his Habitrail he could put a powerful hurt on his pet hamster...
[I'll get back to work now.....]
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I'm sure many of the ideas on this site really are available in Japan...
I've got to say, that Flybar teaser photo is pretty effective
Many flash adds use as much cpu as they can get to give you a GREAT framerate. sadly.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The video is really unimpressive. It shows less than 2 feet of air, I'd estimate. (Though his article says he could get 4 feet, which is still less than the claimed 5-6 feet.)
At least there's Russian Rails (scheduled) to come out this year, Comrade(!)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Java makes baby Jesus cry.
My bet is that the big ad was set to a different size in the HTML than it actually is (maybe it was set to 450x515, when it is really 475x530) and so Mozilla has to render it smaller than it really is, which is not a strong point for Mozilla. Try viewing the image alone and shrinking your window so that you get scroll bars and see how there's not as much delay as there is when scrolling down that page.
In IE, I get similar CPU usage. It's probably the ripples-in-water effect used in the Flash ad.
It must detect that I've not got a Flash plugin installed for Mozilla and just displays the next best thing, a poorly-sized image.
Not ugo's main site, but Digitspace's, due to all of us sickos that want a vibrating hedgehog.
Did anybody notice that none of the "Major" toy brands made the list??
It just goes to show how much a company will go to, just to attract consumers!!
I always though that the slinky was the strangest toy!!
Hmm
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
Spongebob Joystick
Can't wait to not download it off edonkey.
sig under development
Root view?!? This toy looks about as much fun as watching grass grow...wait a tick...I AM WATCHING GRASS GROW!
Bart: Hey Lis', check it out, Pogo Stilts. These were banned in all 50 states
[they fly off his feet and hit Homer]
Homer: Oooow!! Ow! What happened!?
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
No mention of Giant Microbes? They now include such cute cuddly toys as the Black Death and Ebola!
Well that's a relief. I hadn't imagined that they'd use that appendage as the joystick. I was quite disturbed there for a moment.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well, regardless of the story, Baboochi rhymes with a ton of words, wheter you pronounce is i or e
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
An obvious cover story, it's the invasion of the body snatchers I tell you!
They're here already! You're next!
Watch this Heartland Institute video
At least the monster isn't named "Xenu"...
+1 Informative would be ideal. Thanks ever so much.
Fifty dollars says the company requires a release form for purchase.
Fifty more dollars says someone dies using a Flybar in the first week of sales ANYWAY.
SIG. This has been a test of the emergency S.I.G. System. If it were a real SIG, it would have been shorter. Again, this is only a test.
Just drop acid, already, and invent something better... or quit your whining.
Now with a deluxe model for reaching hard to get areas.
Great detective work, glk572 (if that's indeed your real name ;)
I knew the story sounded a bit too much like some scientology spiel, but never thought about googling the name of the toy's creator.
http://www.geocities.com/electricmonk.geo/cthulhu. html
:D
Great old ones for the little young ones
But did they really need to make these things anatomically correct?
A simple game for simple kids, Ned's Head is sure to bring frowns to at least a few parents, but come on....name any six-year-old who isn't fascinated with things like vomit and old cheese.
Uh, girls? The other 50 percent, remember?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
...or punch cards, take your pick!
Wow! that thing had no influence on the performance of my 600 mHz G3 iBook! Either it's true that macs are faster, or something is seriously wrong with your setup.
OTOH, I have heard before of Athlon users complaining about Flash. I thought that problem was solved years ago.
I'm sure it's a Linux Flash problem. Macromedia has done crap to improve the Flash performance under Linux, and poorly coded Flash runs much much worse (which these Club Dread ads obviously are)
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Please clarify your statement? Are you supporting the original ASS PLUNDER poster or T4D? Personally, I found the ASS PLUDER post to be quite a breath of fresh air since /. has become so boring as of late.