First you move the Contemporary Museum and now there are no longer giant weeble people playing “You Bet Your Crop” at the Museum of Science and Industry? Is this true?
I’ve been trying to explain this crazy game show to people (I believe the secret word is “irrigation”), and I cannot find any evidence of it online. What happened to it?
-k-
Giant weeble people?
Exactly the concept I am trying to illustrate to my friends! They were giant (bigger than lifesize) peg people with round wooden heads with goofy smiles painted on them, and one of them had a farmer’s hat on him. They kinda turned side-to-side while they were answering the You Bet Your Crop agriculture questions. It was totally lame! I couldn’t have hallucinated it. Twice.
This rings no bells with me, but I’ve made only 2-3 visits to MSI over the past 20 years and generally steered clear of the ag exhibits.
That’s the story I am getting from everyone I’ve been contacting. I have a ton of scientist friends, all of whom have avoided the ag section. Possibly lack of attention caused the giant weeble people to die a humiliating death, and they were warehoused, Indiana Jones style, in dusty silos in Gary.
I don’t recall weeble people at MSI either, but if they indeed lived there and now not, here’s hoping today they live next to the Arc in those dusty silos.
The old TV show “The Untouchables” once had an episode where some bootleggers plotted to steal a champagne-bottle corking machine from “the industrial museum”. That wasn’t the same place as this was it?
I sent email to the MSI asking about the Weeble People, and got this reply:
So I was not hallucinating!
Go Hawks!
-k-
Just wanted to mention that the MSI is FREEEEEE this week, Monday through Friday, June 7-11.
The trouble with having a fabulous cultural institution like the MSI available any time you want, is that you never actually get around to going there. Doh!!!
But a free week is a golden opportunity to say, “The time is now!” Check it out!
Damn–now I want to see the Weeble People! They have to beat the carriages and wagons that are STILL there…
I went to MSI last year to catch the Harry Potter exhibit. It was ok. Before that, we went last winter because it’d been so long since we’d been there. General consensus? Our kids have outgrown it. (that and the Nutrition area was closed for renovation, as was the human heart).
I just don’t care that much about submarines, coal mines or dark old Main Streets.
Sorry…
Daughter and I saw the Harry Potter exhibit. She loved it as did many others that inhaled all the books. Kids do eventually out grow the place, but as they become parents, things start lookin’ interesting all over again.
I enjoyed our last visit there.
Anyone capable of hallucinating giant Weeble People is certainly capable of receiving imaginary mail.
Just sayin’. 
We were just at the MSI last week with the kids, and if you have any interest whatsoever in the topic, the U-505 submarine exhibit was awesome. Totally worth paying the extra cash to do the tour, in my opinion.
Wait, from your description they sound less like Weebles (who wobble but don’t fall down, and more like Little People.
Knew the MSI like the back of my hand when I was a young-un, but never set foot in that dome - or the rest of the farm exhibit other than to check out the hatching chicks.
One exhibit I vaguely remember was some weird puppet theater thing in the communications area. And I still have a couple of medallions from successfully drilling for oil…
Just the other day my kid was Skyping, and I tried to explain to him the allure of the TV phones! Damn, I’m old! :rolleyes:
We were just there in March and had a great time (despite the loooooooong line to buy tickets). The U-505 tour was definitely worthwhile; our kids also liked the chick incubator, the cutting-edge-science exhibit, the wooden ship models and the giant Chicago model railroad.
We saw no Weebles or Little People, alas.
I remember that exhibit. Yep, the correct answer to the game show was “irrigation”. But good god, that was YEARS ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s gone. The whole thing was older than the petroleum ride, and that was ripped out a long ways back.
Man, I loved that petroleum ride.
Does anyone remember the long secret passage that started on the second floor at the heart exhibit and then passed the stroke movie which featured some old coot passing out on some back stairs, and then descended into a loooong hall which included among its highlights and in this order:
The “How Children Grow” sequence that started with a ceramic (?) purple-faced baby being yanked out of a cross-section of a vagina with foreceps.
The March of Dimes birth defects exhibit where you could watch movies of Thalidomide kids swimming like dolphins with their flipper arms.
The Cancer Exhibit which had not only a cartoon where Mr Magoo thinks he has cancer, but a breast exam film, which even though I was a girl, I found fascinating because it wasn’t often then that I could see tits on film. And my own hadn’t come in yet.
A colorful display of a veterinary hospital which wasn’t as bizarre as some exhibits in the rest of this hallway, but was interesting nonetheless.
An exhibit for rheumatory arthritis which featured a huge holographic hand that changed from normal to crippled as you walked past. Creepy as hell. Oh, and somewhere along the way here, you learned that the Catholic blessing hand pose was supposedly adopted when one of the Popes couldn’t move his outer two fingers because of arthritis. I’ve never heard or read this factoid anywhere else.
After this, you found yourself back in the Hall of Elements on the first floor of the Museum. It was a little disorienting because you started out on the second floor.
It was totally cool and awesome. And today, the whole hallway is blocked off behind a totally lame healthy heart exhibit. The whole thing is computer screens, at least, it was the last time I was there.
Thank god the walk-thru heart is still there.
Cancer? Stroke movie? Thalidomide kids? Man, any trip to the MSI left me with the feeling I hadn’t seen half the stuff in there, but I never even heard rumors about these exhibits. I managed to miss Body Worlds too but at least I knew about it.
I went to the MSI only once, when I was about 10 years old, in the 1960’s. It was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen. I wanted to spend days there.
Does anyone remember the exhibit in which you inserted a silver coin in a slot and it came out radioactive? Apparently there was a small neutron source inside, which induced radioactivity in the coin. To prove it was radioactive, you tested your coin with a geiger counter. Afterwards, I slipped the coin in my pocket, a proud member of the atomic age. All my kids were born without birth defects.
Did you hear about the tornadoes in Montana? There was one cattle ranch where the wind was so bad that all the cows fell over. The bulls, on the other hand, remained upright. The farmer asked one of the bulls “WTF?” and the bull said “We bulls wobble but we don’t fall down.”
Sorry.
