Think back to when you were young, maybe eight to twelve years old, and think of all the toys and you loved.  There was Nickelodeon Gak that was that sticky, smelly, green goo that over time was the primary collector of dust, dirt and hair from around the house.  The icing on the cake was that it made awful farting noises that cracked kids up and I’m sure made their parents nothing short of proud to have been the purchaser of such an entertaining toy.  There were Crazy Bones, which were terribly confusing because they were packaged in the same pouches as fruit snacks.  Kids get over excited about tasty treats and were instead bestowed with Crazy Bones --little plastic figures that were used in a game kept more secret than the Manhattan Project. Seriously, nobody knew what to do with them.  Along with these, there were other toys that truly conquered childhood.

Stuffed animals were huge, but having Billy the teddy bear quickly became too primitive for the modern day child to play with, so they morphed stuffed animals into none other than Puppy Surprise.  Okay, it did seem pretty darnn cool to have three, four or five bean bag puppies placed in the Velcro pouch on the underside of a stuffed animal dog.  However, when you really consider the anatomy of the entire operation, kids were ripping open the Velcro stomach to see the puppies that were inside.  Talk about back alley surgery—the gruesome procedure looked more like an abortion or a third-world Caesarian Section.

Then they decided to advance stuffed animals from their surgical intentions to the ‘smart’ mind of the Furby.  Those things were creepy motherfuckers.  Furbies had no off switch, they never shut up, they found some secret way to operate without batteries, and they always knew exactly what to say the scare the living shit out of you.  Even when the damned creatures weren’t talking, per se, Tiger Electronics (the child-hating makers of Furby) innovatively recycled an old scare tactic—creepy, nonhuman sounds.  Ignore a Furby for too long, and a strangled, grim-reaper-inspired gurgle slowly trickles out of Furby’s beak.  Damn Furbies…

And then there were POGs. POGs was presumably an acronym, although nobody ever seemed to figure out what it stood for.  I’m proposing “Pile Of Gay shit.” Sure, using the S is technically cheating, but it gets the point across. For some reason, those cardboard circles were insanely popular for about 4 weeks. About five percent of them had pictures of gaudy rainbows and trippy spirals and the other ninety-five percent had magic eight-balls on them for no apparent reason. Then you had to drop a “slammer” onto the stacks of POGs in order to play the game.  Unfortunately, slammers were so expensive that kids would just bring random objects to the game and say, “Hey this is the brand new slammer! It’s the best!” and other kids would reply, “No it’s not, that’s just a marble you found in the hallway!” and this would lead to playground brawls and timeouts.  POGs in general were just a sad state of affairs.    continue >>