I speak of Simpsons merchandise. My friends know of my fondness for the program and over the years I’ve gotten a whole bunch of Simpson toys, dolls and games as gifts and bought a few myself. Just about every one of them has been a piece of crap. They fall apart, there are dioramas with little wired up speaking dolls of the same scale, but the dolls can’t be switched among the diramas.
I love it, it’s just like the Crusty Brand products in the series – just really cheap and shitty. Call me an idiot, but I find the inherent joke worth the price of the crappy product.
I got two new things this Christmas. One is a set of Simpsons coasters. If you leave your glass or mug or anything else undisturbed on the rubberized coaster for more than about 3 minutes, your vessel and the coaster form a powerful but very short-lived bond. This results in the coaster being lifted off the table whenever you lift your drink, and then falling to the floor just before you can snatch it from the bottom of the cup.
I laugh and laugh at this.
The other new gift is a yellow Sinpsons Magic 8 Ball, with quotes from the characters on the surfaces of the floating dealie that’s supposed to answer your questions. More than half the time the dealie gets suck sideways in the viewing window and no message at all is visible.
This is so exactly in the spirit of the series it makes the things even more charming. I wish they could make it give off toxic smoke and electrical shocks, except that it might actually kill somebody, which wouldn’t be too bad if it wasn’t me. I already have a copy of the only book ever recalled by its publisher as a public health hazard (not a Simpsons-related product).
Guessing that’d be one of those balloon animal books that came with balloons. Between the talc that keeps the balloons from becoming one big lump of latex rubber and the latex rubber itself, there’s a lot of people that would be deathly allergic to it.
OTOH, some Googling finds books with plastic bits that snap off, becoming choking hazards, some books that had straignt pins left in them from the manufacturing process, and similar loose bits. But nothing popped up as being actively dangerous.
Is it Penn and Teller’s How to Play With Your Food? With the prank sugar packet that was supposed to be impossible to open, but was opened by some people, and contained a toxic substance? Did you get it before or after the recall? I got mine after (no, I wasn’t a bandwagon jumper; it was a Christmas present) and had to order my sugar packet.
That’s it. It had a Kevlar sugar packet, and the trick was that your friends couldn’t tear it open. But people couldcut open, and it was filled with some toxic crap.
I don’t know, and I don’t even know if Penn & Teller knew. I saw them on Carson a few just after the recall, and they simply blamed the publisher. To parapharse, “Hey. we specified the details of the packet. We didn’t say anything about what went into it, except that it be a powder that felt like sugar in a packet. We figured they would use sugar.”
They were actualy kind of pleased with themselves to have produced a ground-breaking book without even trying, the only book ever to be recalled by the FDA.