A wind-up mechanical shooting gallery?
Actually, for something like the Wii, where a lot of the games are digital versions of sports and such, I’d say possibly soccer balls, footballs, baseballs, bowling balls, boxing gloves, etc.
They’d be delighted by the technology but they’d also be disgusted and disappointed in many areas. Our post-modern hedonistic culture would shock people from this gentle time and so would be the general legalization and approval of various practices that were appalling to people of '59. As for who is right in this regard, I don’t know.
“Gentle time”? People who lived through World War II, prohibition and Jim Crow?
Any of number of games suitable for playing indoors. I can just picture Mr. Drysdale in his bank’s executive suite playing one of of those office putting games. In fact, the whole concept of the rec room–the Wii is basically a rec room in a box, isn’t it?
Gentle I meant in the matter of manners and such things.
Doubtful.
Well, as long as you were white and Christian, anyway. I’ll bet there are a whole lot of blacks and Jews who were alive in that era who could tell you just how “gentle” the manners were.
That doesn’t mean that the reaction of (say) a white Christian brought forward to the 2000’s would be somehow invalid in response to the OP’s scenario. The OP didn’t ask, “a person from the 50s be disappointed in ‘the future’, speaking from a strictly minority viewpoint, thankyouverymuch.”
One thing most predictions from that era seem blind to: availability of critical resources to the mass of the population. Industrial production had increased the availability of goods and services so quickly, and the promise of nuclear power made it seem like all such ‘old’ problems had pretty much been solved.
Progress would fix everything. IIRC, physicist Edward Teller once advocated reshaping the floors of harbors by detonating nuclear devices. The charmingly optimistic assumption that fallout could eventually be ‘designed out’ of nukes made that idea less insane than it now sounds.
To be fair, things like jet packs and flying cars would be more than just laboratory curiosities if we had cold fusion reactors in our homes. Nobody was predicting wars over energy and water.
I also think people from that era would be stunned at changes in sex roles, and relations among racial and ethnic groups. Middle-class and above males who were used to patting the derriere of every attractive woman would probably be pining for the good old days.
No, but it would be a bit odd to assume that the generic human is a white Christian.
If it’s the kind of person (presumably American) who would have been reading Popular Mechanics and dreaming of flying cars in the 1950s, then no, it isn’t. White Christians of the 1950s were bad, bad, bad people, we get it. But unfortunately they did constitute the majority of Americans then.
The OP didn’t specify Americans, or Popular Mechanics readers.
Who else would have been dreaming of flying cars back then? Everyone else would have been trying to avoid being shot by revolutionaries and/or debating whether to boil their boots for dinner.
Well, certainly they weren’t much thinking about moon bases even here, considering that the US space program essentially did not exist until post-Sputnik.
I don’t know about the “kinder and gentler” aspect of things, but I think most folks in the 50’s would have been absolutely aghast if you showed them Grand Theft Auto IV, which was recently rated one of the top ten video games of all times. A game played by teenagers, centered around killing cops and innocent bystanders, and featuring prostitutes, strippers, and lots of profanity.
The OP stated that this was about people in 1959. 1959 was post-Sputnik, and the U.S. space program had already started. For that matter, there were already articles in U.S. magazines years before Sputnik about our wonderful future in space.
Why were the average men of the 50s bad, bad people? They were not a monolithic bloc and most were fairly genial and liberal folks who unlike most people today also liked some decency. I prefer the '50s (minus the racism and technology) to today since we were not as infected by post-modernism and ultra-environmentalism as now.
Darn that environmentalism! Who wants to breathe clean air or drink water that won’t turn your insides to glowing ooze, anyway?
Paging Starving Artist - you can cancel the amber alert, 'cause I found your kid. 
Why did the US space program need to exist for people to think about moon bases?
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/How-the-Spaceship-Got-Its-Shape.html
Some more interesting stuff at this website. Lots of futuristic predictions from the 1950’s:
Here’s an interesting set of predictions, not space related. I think it’s safe to say Dr McDaniel would be quite disappointed.