I guess it still exists, in some new incarnations.
I actually don’t remember it. I’m scanning some childhood photos that I haven’t seen…in some cases ever. I’m on one now from about 1973. I blew it up so big that I noticed something in the background…looked like a game of some sort. I zoomed in at 100% and it’s “Ker Plunk,” whatever that is. It looks just like this:
Three words that did NOT go together for me back then were “tantalizing,” “nerve,” and “skill”!!
I can’t tell if this is my birthday or Christmas in the photo. I’m leaning towards birthday just because we opened presents around the tree. On the other hand, I’m only three here, so maybe they let me open a few before I went to bed. Either way, I don’t remember playing this game.
I remember it for its name (which has always made me chuckle, for I associate it with what one does on the toilet). I only played it a few times, and never took to it.
We played it often. I wouldn’t care to now. There are sticks in a cylinder with marbles over them. Pull out a stick for your turn and collect the dropped marbles. The person that dropped the least marbles when the marbles have all dropped is the winner. The base went under the sub pump last year to let the water flow in better. The cylinder went in the trash and the stick and marbles disappeared years earlier.
My good and super noisy game was Popcorn. A plastic doom over 4 colors of balls with a spinner paddle in the bottom. The balls bounced all over in the doom. The up to four players had to get their color in their three slots and pop out the bad colors. There were some variations. This game was loved by us kids and hated by the adults.
I remember Kerplunk. It always seemed like a lot of set up (putting all the little sticks into the cylinder, putting on the marbles, rescuing any that fell through prematurely) for a fairly short game. I think we thought it was just OK.
Seems like an odd choice for a three year old though, considering the small marbles and fiddly gameplay.
I think I still have my Kerplunk down in the basement! Not the top-tier favorite game, but we played it alot…and I bet we have all the sticks and marbles, becauseMom was anal about accounting for all parts before putting a game away!
Yeah, but my family members were sadists. (You know how some people hope they’re adopted when their family members are nuts? I actually was!) These are the same people who bought me Operation a year later.
To this day I hate that game. Scared the shit out of me whenever I touched the metal. Of course, the anticipation of being frightened was worse than actually touching the metal. My dad would get pissed at me for crying, and then FORCE me to play the game with my brother.
We had a Ker Plunk game. One thing I well remember is that when the marbles dropped and hit the plastic at the bottom of the cylinder, they made a heckuva noise. Not a game you could play quietly!
I played it now and then as a kid, and generally enjoyed it.
But the version they make now is even more cheaply made than it was in my youth. The plastic sticks now bend so easily that it’s tough to get them through the holes on the other side of the cyllinder. So, setting it up is a bigger pain than ever before.
When I was nine or so, I bought one at a garage sale down the street. Their grandchildren happened to be friends of mine–the oldest was a year behind me–and they asked for it when they found I had it. I would have if they had offered to reimburse me.
Tantalizing, huh. From the Greeks:
Tan·ta·lus (tnt-ls)
n. Greek Mythology
A king who for his crimes was condemned in Hades to stand in water that receded when he tried to drink, and with fruit hanging above him that receded when he reached for it.
We had it in our Sunday School, which kind of tells you what demographic it was designed for. I remember playing it only once, then wondering what the point was–there didn’t seem to be much strategy there at all.
