The discussion side-tracked a bit to Charles Atlas and Sea Monkeys, and I thought this would make a good thread on its own.
Did you ever order any X-ray specs? Sea Monkeys? 10 foot tall floating skeletons or ghosts? How did the resulting product live up to expectations (99% of the time poorly, I’m assuming)?
Here’s a link to a good sampling of the ads. As mentioned in the other thread, I always had my eye on the x-ray specs. I got the Sea Monkeys and:
Anyway, talk about a letdown! I was only 6 or 7, though was still sensible enough not to expect them to be anthropormorphic and create a tiny undersea Altantis-style kingdom in my fishbowl, like the ad pictured. But the few ant-sized brine shrimp that hatched were extremely anticlimactic. All but one quickly died. The lone tiny brine shrimp held on to life and swam around until one day I accidentally knocked the fish bowl off my dresser when I pulled too hard on a stuck drawer. I remember the lone Sea Monkey swimming in a puddle on my bedroom floor until my mom unceremoniously wiped it up. I started to say- “mom, wait…uhhh, eh, never mind”.
Someone’s gonna mention Kirk Demarais’ excellent book Mail Order Mysteries so it may as well be me.
Never ordered myself though I remember gazing longingly at the ads both in comic books (usually at the barber shop) and in the back of my Boy’s Life magazines that came with being a Cub Scout. I think I was most captivated by the giant sets of army figures and the hovercraft plans. Most of the gimmicky magic trick stuff and X-Ray specs were available off the spin-rack at my local Ben Franklin Five & Dime store so I already knew how cheesy the fake bloody finger looked.
I’m suddenly reminded as well of the ads in the back of the Weekly World News. Going along with the stories about Bat-Boy and Elvis hiding in a White House bunker, you had pages of ads promising magic spells and special devices and blessed holy water and MLM schemes. I guess preying on the gullible in what’s supposedly silly light entertainment never goes out of style.
I remember always seeing the vacuum powered hover craft in the back of Boy’s Life. IIRC, someone made one and t kinda worked. I’m probably thinking of an episode of Mythbusters when they did that, but I thought someone else bought the actual plans and built it to spec (but maybe that’s how they did it, as opposed to MB just building one that happened to look like the old magazine ad).
Here’s the ad, exactly as I remember it.
ETA, I’m picturing Backyard Scientist making one, maybe with the help of another youtuber.
ETA2: NM, I found a TKOR video where he made something similar-ish, and that’s probably what I’m thinking of.
I got a pair of wireless communicators. They were wireless all right, they used string, like tin can telephones. And the little device that allows you to become a ventriloquist? It was a little whistle you hide in your mouth. I promptly swallowed mine.
I didn’t, but my brother did - sea monkeys, X-RAy specs, solar hot air balloon.
Sea monkeys were fun (if nothing like the artwork, but by then they were required to have an “actual sea monkey” inset in the ad). Later in life, a friend of mine did a MSc on brine shrimp that required him to keep humongous tanks of them, I called him the Sea Monkey King.
X-Ray specs were crap. The illusion only sort of works on hands.
The solar balloon was just a very thin giant bin liner, but it worked as advertised. Could even lift a Lego cupola we made for it.
Yeah. A periscope-like device billed as the perfect tool to enable precision drawing of anything in view. You were to look through it at the paper you were drawing on, and it would superimpose what was out in front of you (90° angle from looking straight down at the paper) but you could still see the paper as well, so all you’d have to do is trace.
Not entirely an illicit ripoff, but it didn’t work for me because my eye could either focus on the distant object’s reflected image – in which case the paper in front of me was out of focus – or it could focus on the drawing I was trying to make, in which case the reflected image was a fuzzy blur.
I was captivated by that ad as well, but I knew that actually building it would never happen.
I remember that episode. I seem to recall the sub was made out of corrugated cardboard, and Chris put it in the tub with the glass door closed and was going to to try to submerge the sub. He wanted his dad, played by his real-life father Bob Elliot, to get in with him, and dad was like “you’re crazy, son”.
I was always curious about the ‘ghost’ that followed your commands. A friend said it was just a big balloon on a string with a scary ghost picture on it.
From memory, I bought one of those giant sets of army men (x hundred pieces for $8 or something), which lived up to expectations – they were cheap plastic, but all of those army men were back then. I bought a bag of random stamps because I was a stamp collector for a while – lots of duplicates, but they were pretty cool, from all over the world. I bought this actually quite powerful magnet that I could carefully lift a 40 pound weight with – it was a magnet with two metal plates and a handle.
From Bazooka Joe, I definitely got a sort of rounded kazoo by sending in a ton of comics. I think I may have gotten something else from Bazooka Joe, but I can’t remember.
I’m sure there was more. I don’t think I ever had sea monkeys or x-ray specs.
I got hold of a number of those things from other sources. I’m don’t remember ordering anything through the mail. I found a hole in the wall toy store that had a variety of the novelty tricks, joy buzzer, smoke from your fingertips, fake firecracker, and a smoking donkey. I don’t recall where some of those thin plastic tubes that were hot air balloons came from, hold them over a fire to fill up with hot air and release. Later when we moved to Philadelphia I got to out to the Edmund Scientific store in New Jersey, picked up a couple of more balloons, couple of other things I don’t recall, but couldn’t get the ‘build a working digital computer’. I don’t know what little that did and didn’t realize how soon I would be building working digital computers on a higher scale of technology.
Yes, I bit. Sea Monkeys, Xray specs, and probably more I have forgot.
The hardest thing about ordering these items was the wait. Months would go by with me checking the mailbox everyday. I was young and was completely convinced by, and invested in these products. No wonder it is so great to advertise to kids, lol.
I discussed the Xray specs with Dad, and how I would be able to see what is in the fridge with the door closed. Dad reasonably asked why hospitals paid huge amounts of money for their xrays, if they could just use these for a dollar? I assumed the hospital had not yet heard of Xray specs.
So, huge disappointment when I got them. They just had a fuzzy view. I eventually learned the trick of looking at your hand against a strong light. I eventually broke them open and saw there was just a feather in front of a small opening.
Sea Monkeys were also a disappointment. If the internet existed they would have lasted for about a week.
I used to dream about the working submarine, but is was a bit rich for my wallet.
I had a friend from Barbados, and would think of the fun we could have visiting his country, and exploring the ocean (I was land locked). Probably a good thing I did not order it.
That was me. I wish I had been as skeptical as some of you folks.
I wanted everything, and I completely bought into their ads. A Frankenstein monster that will follow me around and obey my every command? I’m in! A real-life submarine that I can use to explore the ponds and lakes? Oh, yeah! X-ray specs? You know that I had to.
Dad wouldn’t let me spend any of my money on “that crap.” I was so mad at that fuddy-duddy. He clearly didn’t understand… Step 2: something something the future something modern technology… and I couldn’t believe that one man could be that blind. I mean, it was right there in the ad!
So, in the end, no, I don’t think that I ever got anything. A couple of my friends did, though. They talked about all the cool stuff they did with their gizmos, but (funnily enough) they would never let me come over and use it.
I bought them, too. Fortunately, I was reading comic books at an early age so I wasn’t disappointed to find out my army was flat plastic pieces that were maybe 1 1/2" high, shattered into shards when you tried to have the infrantries battle each other, and get lost faster than a real soldier on a 3-day pass.
I got the 100 pc Toy Soldier set and I was a bit disappointed. The scale was off on everything and the soldiers were all two dimensional. I liked the planes and ships though.
I also sold seeds once and made a decent enough haul to get the bow and arrow set, so I had that going for me.
And it was advertised as the Polaris nuclear sub. This wasn’t no Jacques Cousteau exploration type sub, this was a nuke-shooter, with “rockets that fire”. Kids were basically being encouraged to play Armageddon back then. Pretty dark if you think about it. From the ad:
What hours of imaginative play and fun as you and your friends dive, surface, maneuver, watch the enemy through the periscope and release nuclear missiles and torpedoes!
My 7’ Frankenstein monster turned out to be a black & green Frankenstein image printed on a 7’ piece of plastic. Not exactly what I expected, (I’m not sure what I did expect), but was still cool mounted on my bedroom wall.
