Have you ever lied to your kids? Has one of your little ones ever brought you a toy you secretly hate, and when the batteries ran out, you took a second long glance at it and said something like “Welp! I guess we’ll have to toss that out since it’s broken?” If your answer is yes, welcome to the saving-your-sanity parent club! If your answer is no, you’re either a parent with the patience of a Buddhist monk or a dang ol’ liar!
I compiled a list of toys that may have been fun and entertaining while we were young, but are now the bane of most parents’existence. Most children’s toys are not a problem at all, but a select few are definitely problematic.
Furby
Some may look back on the memories of their personal Furby and fondly reminisce of their childhood experiences with it and the joy it brought them. I, on the other hand, look back on the memory of my oldest nephew’s Furby with shock and soul wrenching dread.
He opened it on Christmas Day when he was three years old. When it was removed from its packaging, it lit up and talked in gibberish when he touched the top of his head. He then put it down and moved on to open another present. The thing was obviously scorned after being rejected, and I personally believe that’s when the Furby decided to kill us all.
A few months prior to Christmas, my Aunt’s cat had a litter of kittens and my family took in two of them, Tiger and Gizmo. Come to think of it, the kittens were most likely the source of Furby’s spontaneous and erratic behavior. They would pounce on it and set off its sensors, knock it off of shelves, pick it up and move it around. After a while, Furby started losing its hair which made it look all the more freakier and probably angrier.
Apparently Furby had enough. When my nephew turned eleven, he began waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of slow and evil laughter followed by gibberish. It was enough to make anyone wet their bed. Furby didn’t live too long after that.
Fischer-Price Corn Popper
POP! POP!! POPPITY-POP, POP, POP, POP, POPOPOP!!!!!!!! This is the demented battle cry of this particular toy. What looks like brightly colored ball in a pushable plastic snow globe is nothing more than blunt bludgeoning weapon of toe destruction!
I had one at my Granny’s house when I was a toddler and would play with it all the time. You could literally feel the ground quake with its telltale clunks and clanks! And there I would be,the young B. Dam in his natural habitat, running back and forth throughout her house, decimating toes as I ran by with my toy. If destroying feet wasn’t enough, I was told that one time I tried picking it up over my head, struggling and probably crying out of frustration. When my oldest cousin asked me if he could helpand picked it up for me, I put my hands over my head and he put it in my waiting hands. Then I ran away with it still outstretched over my head and tried throwing it at my older sister. I now know why she hates me to this day. LOL!
Doing such an act at my Granny’s house got me a butt whooping with a wooden spoon (Gotta love them Italian Grandmothers).Apparently, constantly running over peoples toes, doubled with the fact that I used it to bludgeon my sister, allowed my toy to magically disappear.
Years later, my daughter got one and she rarely used it. Although, when she did play with it, I got a taste of my own medicine. My poor, Granny. I can only imagine what I put my lovely Granny through. One day my daughter played with it for an hour straight and after waking up from a nap (surprise, surprise), it was magically gone. I don’t think she even noticed, but my toes did.
Tamagotchi digital pets
Yes, I owned a Digital Pet. And had they been real and not digital, I would have spent more time institutionalized than Michael Vick. I was a terrible virtual pet owner, even though I always had it on me. I could never keep one alive. From over feeding it to over working it….their vitals would always decline, and I would find them drifting up to that digital pet shop in the sky (cue the twenty-one gun salute).
Tamagotchi: *chirp*
Young B.Dam: feeds virtual pet
Ten seconds later
Tamagotchi: *chirp*
Young B.Dam: feeds virtual pet again…
Another ten seconds later
Tamagotchi: *chirp, beep, chirp!!*
Young B.Dam: “Mom! My virtual pet died again!!!”
B.Dam’s Mom: “DAMNIT! That’s the third time today! If you do it again and whine about it I’m taking it away!”
Scene.
And that is how I lost my first digipet. The loss was so unbearable. My Dad bought me another just to drive my Mom bonkers (My parental units are divorced and are still in hate mode with each other to this very day. It’s romantic). Now, my Mom can put up with a wide assortment of crap, but apparently the constant beeping is her Achilles’ heel. Hell hath no fury like my Mom’s scorn for beeping Tamagotchis.
Little people’s See and Say
I vaguely remember these toys, however I do recall having one and when the dial would start spinning, I would press my hand down on it to make the voices sound like Darth Vader. Then my eldest cousin, who was into The Beastie Boys, showed me how to make it do the whickity-whickity whack noise. That’s when it disappeared, and I never questioned its disappearance until I had a child of my own.
*pulls lever* The cow says: Moo!
*pulls lever* The dog says woof!
*pulls lever* The cat says meow!
*pulls lever* The cow says Moo!
*pulls lever* The gat says PLEKET-KET-KET-KET!
Which came first? The See and Say or Extra Strength Excedrin? No one cares because they have a freaking migraine. But, Excedrin came out in ’60 and the first See and Say came out in ’65. I see that as a fortuitous preemptive strike against annoyingly loud and repetitive kids’ toys.
My Princess Squishy-Face would constantly start then immediately restart it over and over again. Thankfully she seemed to grow bored with it fast but for one hot minute it was damn near unbearable. Fortunately for me and my beautiful fiancé, once Princess Squishy-Face put it down, she kicked the habit for good.
Hungry, hungry hippos
CLACK! CLACK!! CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!!!
The noise isn’t even the worst part in my opinion. The worst part isn’t even the endless clacking of the game pieces. The worst part is the glob-damn marbles! Honestly tell me, do your kids still have the original twenty marbles? Or like the extinct Dodo, were they hunted down for sport? Or like my kid’s game, were they immediately lost to the family dog? Side note: did you guys have to wrestle the marble(s) from your dog’s mouth too? My little Ozzy Pawsbourne got a hold of a mouth full, and to my dismay, I wasn’t able to get them all out in time. That being said, the marbles were property of the dog. I wasn’t going to go “looking” for them after he was “done” with them. He probably has an entire wardrobe of Barbies finest fashion wear; including shoes and parking lot full of Hot Wheels permanently lodged in his stomach, so what’s a few marbles?
I am also willing to bet PETA could have a problem with the game seeing that Hippopotamuses are a “vulnerable” speciesand their population is decreasing. And then there’s the whole over feeding/force feeding thing… but they’re hippos! Eating is basically what they do! According to the Interwebs, hippos can eat up to eighty-eight pounds of food a day ─ a meager one to one and a half percent their body weight! But because of this game, we assume that hippopotamuses are gluttonous monstrosities of pure floating death. Have you ever seen a hippo go on an attack run? It’s faster than you’d think… I’ve always assumed that they would be slow due to their weight. So wrong… so very wrong.
Gak
As a kid I thought Gak was the shit! It was an awesome color and you could make it fart in its plastic container! What else could a little kid need? It was slimy and could fart sounds at the drop of a hat!? GAK. WAS. AWESOME. The keyword in that sentence? ‘Was’. It was ‘Was’. Because as a parent, it’s personally the bane of my existence. My daughter loves slime. She likes to make it and play with it! She also leaves it out on the kitchen table over night for me to find at five in the morning! I thought someone had spilled milk on the kitchen table and didn’t clean it up! I was super pissed off to say the least.
But if you feel like I do about slime you may probably also think that slime as a toy is a racket; a hustle; a swindle; a con; perpetuated by toy and glue companies to get parents to keep churning out their money for something that is going to get thrown out in two week’s time. In my opinionated opinion, thismakes it the world’s worst toy.
Teddy Ruxpin
Teddy Ruxpin was an animatronic Teddy Bear that when powered by batteries and a cassette tape, would read you stories. The really cool thing about him was the fact that ugly could put any tape in him and it would work! Have you ever seen a Teddy Bear sing Ozzy Osborne? It’d be a lot cooler if you had!!! I mean, it wasn’t in Teddy Ruxpin’s voice, but it was still pretty cool! The doll was already really creepy to boot! It had a blank, dead eyes that would bear into the deepest, darkest depths of a six year old’s soul. Glob forbid the batteries go dead. Those pleasant stories quickly became 100% nightmare fuel. And personally for myself, whenever he would talk or move his eyes,you could hear the little motors inside him moving and that always made me think of The Terminator when it’s just an exoskeleton walking around.
I poured over the interwebs looking for similar creepy Teddy Ruxpin stories out there, and boy there were a good many. Apparently I wasn’t the only one housing an evil bear from Hell. I’ve read numerous stories about Teddy moving by himself and talking without being prompted to, or how it talked with no batteries and the switch being in the ‘Off’ position. Now some may just be stories, more than likely from crazy people, but at what point do stories become Urban Legends? There’s just waaay too many of us with similar horror stories.
In conclusion, toys that are horribly annoying (in my opinionated opinion) with parents having to deal with the mess, the noises, the potential for their kids to use them as weapons…. it gets old fast. Enjoying these toys as a kid was one thing, but now as adults we know, and we are not going to fall victim to the same trappings as those that reared us. No, we are woke.Aware. And of a high mental acuity.
So, to the un-woke person that bought my child, my beautiful Princess Squishy-Face, a little wooded Elsa that needs to be painted. PAINTED. Because we’re just going to skip over giving the four year old markers. For that, I will give your child a recorder for Christmas to extract my revenge. Because the best response would naturally be a passive aggressive ‘FUCK YOU’ in the plastic form of a migraine summoning recorder.
RiceBall 