Anybody remember these? Surely they were the worst idea in the history of electronic toys.
Let’s just say that the players seemed to have no conception of a playbook. Unless bumping into teammates and knocking them over was some sort of trick play that my young mind simply didn’t comprehend.
As I recall, the quarterback actually had a spring-loaded arm too, so he could “throw” the little magnetic football…nine times out of ten about half way across the room and under and table where the dog could get to it and swallow it before you retrieved it.
I distinctly remember the terror of watching my quarterback “scramble” (over the course of about two minutes) sixty yards back into my own endzone. Luckily, none of the opponents ever managed to tackle him.
My brother knows some people who treat this game like a religion. They have teams and players painted down to the last detail, and modify the pieces to get the movements just right. They have tournaments on a regular basis. Strange but true.
Oh, I don’t know. When you’re twelve years old and you reach across the board to retrieve your guy and your crotch comes in contact with the vibrating corner… well… more than once it gave me pause and made me feel all… tingly.
It was a great toy, you just weren’t using it properly. You were a kid, it was assumed that you would use your imagination…
Super-Mega Bowl XXCMLVIIIX
Packers at 4th and goal, 1 play left to break the tie…the snap…
Suddenly the Weeble linebackers blitz, overwhelming the puny Green Bay linemen. The quarterback scrambles, looking to run, but is hemmed in by Cobra Commander shimmying over on his butt, and a Barbie torso slanting from the sidelines. The crowd goes wild, Battlecat’s roar resonating through the stadium. Fumble! The ball is snagged by a Warm Fuzzy, he’s going for the goalline…he’s picked up a Batman Shrinky-Dink screen…he could go. all. the. way.
Sadly, the Hot Wheels were currently lost in the deep end of the swimming pool after losing the final bracket of the previous day’s Demolition Derby elimination. The derby winner, Big Track, sealed the Hot Wheels fate with a perfectly programmed “dump” command off of the edge of the pool, a victory manuever rivaling that of the controversial Evil Knievel Cycle roman candle maneuver from two seasons before.
Sacrilege! This was a great game. I actually liked when a team changed uniform design so I could repaint the players. We had the little white felt ball.
Sometimes you have to invent rules. Forward progress for example. Or allowing the offensive player to stop and redirect players, but allowing the defense to redirect that number plus one, e.g.
Wish I still had that stuff. It was from the late 60’s. Probably would be worth some money today.
The quarterback had a spring-loaded arm? And there was a real football included?
When I played this at my cousins’, their house rule for a forward pass or a lateral was to turn off the game, tear off a tiny piece of foam from a nerf football, hold it next to the quarterback and throw it at the receiver. Whoever it hit caught the ball, and then you turned the game back on.
We were still kinda young, and apparently had no concept of ineligible receivers, and ended up ‘throwing’ the football at the back of an offensive lineman and letting him rumble forward for a first down.
I had a worse toy than the football game - it was an Etch-A-Sketch with no controls on it. Just a bunch of white and blue sand in a see-through plastic oval that you’d shake to make pretty sand patterns.
I had one of those! I used to sit there and turn it over and over and watch the bubbles sift through the sand. I didn’t even think there would be more than one of them.
Well there’s at least two, because incredibly, that thing is still around. It managed to survive my four older brothers’ childhoods and mine without being dismantled or destroyed, (a fate that befell 99% of all our toys), and sits in my parents’ house. I played with it over X-Mas. It’s as exciting as ever.
I still have my electric football set, so they were making them in the early 90s.
In my game, the QB was plastic dude with this plastic…wedge thing on the end of his arm. You kinda put the felt football on the wedge thing, then pulled the arm back and hoped. Kicking was kinda the same, except his leg had a little lever that you flicked and he “kicked” it about 2 inches.
I wish I still had my electric football set! Yes, I agree that the players most often did not do what you wanted them to do, but it was still a cool game.
I must have gotten mine for either my birthday or Xmas 1971, because it came with the Baltimore (NOT Indianapolis!) Colts in their white jerseys and the Dallas Cowboys in their rarely-worn blue jerseys. The game always came with the two teams from the previous year’s Super Bowl, and Baltimore-Dallas was the January 1971 Super Bowl matchup.
I have always been a Green Bay fan, so I ordered a set of Packers players in green jerseys, along with their Central Division rivals Detroit, Minnesota, and Chicago in white jerseys.
You could sometimes get the players to move in big arcs by bending the hairlike “legs” on the bases, but in the end the only offensive play that worked was to make a big box of guys around the ball carrier and send everyone up-field.
After the vibrating-board part of it got old (which didn’t take very long), I removed the players from the soft plastic bases and enacted countless games on my dresser top. I played with them this way a lot longer than I ever played with the game as-designed.
Technically, I was playing with dolls; back then, we didn’t have “Action Figures”.
Apparently there are leagues all over the place. Like yawndave said, some of these guys are really skilled and somehow can make the thing work much better than random chance.
Oh yea! My set had these plastic wheel thingies that the “legs” were mounted on in the base. You could turn the wheel thingies and the players were supposed to go in particular directions. They worked about as well as the rest of the game, which is to say somewhere between “a little” and “not at all”
