I won a Halloween contest at age 3 and the prize was a plastic airport. There were at least a hundred pieces. It had about ten jets, runway markers, fuel trucks, radar tower, people, and everything one would find in a military airbase. That was a super duper deluxe prize. Woho!
Wasm’t there also a real working tank? That and the sub were around the same price - something like ten bucks.
I always assumed it was basically a cardboard box that you build with interlocking tabs or something, with maybe a $2 plastic periscope for verisimilitude.
Well, I actually BOUGHT it at DisneyWorld, but I’d seen it in comic book ads for years before…
“Smoke from your Fingers!” Amaze your friends when you snap your fingers and REAL SMOKE poofs out in front of them! Or something along those lines.
It was a tube of clearish whiteish goop, which you smeared on your fingers. You were supposed to kind of snap, and the goop would string out between your fingers and float on the air and look like smoke.
But of course it didn’t, and it didn’t. All it did was make your fingertips all sticky and gross.
Then again, I was like 8, so they were probably pretty sticky and gross anyway.
I was born in '60. I must have bought about 80% of the crap sold in Comic Books. The X-ray specs I got had a feather in them, and if you looked at your hand up to a light it looked like you could see your bones.
I remember what a pisser it was getting the “log cabin” table cloth. My brother & I sat under that table and laughed and laughed. Come to think of it, that wasn’t a pisser at all. That’s a great memory! 
You didn’t do it right then. I had that stuff. It was one of the very few things that actually did what the ad said it would do. The key was to put enough, but not too much on your fingers. Too much & it just globbed up your meat hooks. You had to rub hard and get it hot…good and hot. Then SNAP! The puff of “smoke” would poof out. It was quite impressive when done correctly. I even won a prize in the 6th grade talent contest using that stuff!!
Man, did you miss out.
That’s the one thing I actually ever ordered from my comic books. And I had so much fun with it I could still puke about it.
They were cheap plastic, it’s true (not paper with squiggles, though!). But they came in a cardboard footlocker and there was a zillion of them. I never counted so I don’t know whether I got the full 1001 but I’ll tell you it was enough for me at age 7 or 8 (1974 or 1975) to play with that whole summer in the playground.
I feel for you.
And wasn’t there something where you could grow stalagmites and stalactites?
I remember a fishbowl and some drippy yellow, red and blue stuff growing minerals or whatever…that was in the back of either Richie Rich or Superman.
<sigh>
Good times, indeed.
I learned early on that if you burn the striking portion of a book of matches, the goop left over after it is done burning would actually smoke. That was cool, and cheap, and incredibly messy.
We had those. I thought it was pretty cool. (OK, only for the first day or so, then it got boring…)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zebra
I never got anything but I really wanted that 1001 army men set with all those tanks and battleships.
WE had the 1001 cowboy & indian set, which came with cardboard fort and plastic tee-pees. My cousins had an army man set (not sure if it was the 1001 piece set sold in the comics.) At the time a show was on TV called Time Tunnel. We would pretend the army went back in time to help the cowboys wipe out the indians. We had these guns that shot little discs sort of like THIS
only made better. We found out the gun would shoot pennies just fine! We played with these from morning 'till supper!
I LOVED the army man set. My brother and I would each take half of them, then sit on the kitchen floor about 10 feet from each other. We’d set up our men in ‘formations’, then roll marbles at each other’s men, trying to knock them down. The person with the last soldier standing won.
I also liked the Sea Monkeys. I liked them even more as an adult, actually, because they are campy and manual that comes with them is hysterical. “Sea monkeys are no dream, but they ARE a ‘dream pet’”
We just went through a batch of Sea Monkeys last year. Complete with the little plastic aquarium with magnifying dots and light. But be careful - you should never trust a species that gets its young through the mail.
I loved the ads in the back of the comic books.
I once ordered some “full color photo” of some singing group for 10 cents plus postage. The photo came and it was a black and white photo of the four guys. My older brother laughed and said, “I thought it was supposed to be a color photo” and I said, “it is. They are just wearing black and white clothes.”
I have mentioned here before, but I also sent in a coupon to sell Christmas cards and earn prizes. It was the best use of postage I ever made! Back then, it was considered pretty special to have your name printed in the cards and I sold boxes and boxes and boxes. I got great prizes - a B&W television for my bedroom, a tape recorder (back when they still used reel to reel tapes!) and sometimes I would just opt for the cash. That company just loved me to death. I think when I was in my late 20’s and living in Germany, my mother told me they were STILL sending me the catalog to go sell Christmas cards!
I can’t find it now, but there is a website that has all of those great ads scanned from old comics and you can see everything you guys have mentioned…from the submarine to the log cabin to the 1001 army figures.
I found the link to the comic book ads!
Take a stroll down memory lane here!
Thanks for the link!
Here’s the famous Polaris Nuclear Sub. Only $6.98!
They clearly state that you’re getting the actual sub, not just plans. “Sturdily constructed of 200lb test material.” “Because of the Polaris Sub’s GIANT SIZE, we must ask 75c for shipping charges!”
Complete with rockets that fire, electrically lit instrument panel, torpedoes that work, a real periscope, and controls that really work.
I’d love to see what you actually got if you bought this.
Here’s another comic book ad site: www.getafreemonkey.com
BTW - printing out a full color copy of one of the ads and framing it makes a great, cheap gift for someone! I also use the Rasterbator program and made a six frame montage of the Charles Atlas ad.
I was the dumbass kid who loaded an envelope with nickels and dimes and sent it off for the x-ray specs. About a month later I got the envelope back in the mail, torn, empty, dirty, with a footprint on it. I was devastated. Someone somewhere earned a bunch of bad JuJu ripping off a dumb kid.
I think I would have killed someone for the gorilla suit they used to advertise in the comics. I don’t know what the hell I planned on doing with it, I just knew I needed it to complete my hollow existence. Never did get it, though.
I remember, circa 1979, ads in various sci-fi fandom magazines for “Working laser gun blueprints.” I’ve often wondered if they were pure fantasy or if they simply emitted (non-coherant) light. The coolest thing about the (reduced to illegible) plans that were pictured was the Flash Gordonish housing for the electronics. I wonder how many kids had the means to machine or mold that? 
Also, Battlestar Galactica Colonial Pilot jackets. I really wanted one of those, but they were too expensive. Then I saw one – they looked too cheap and crappy to make a good Halloween costume – but were marketed (and priced) as the real deal. I would have been so choked.
I got a giant Frankenstein monster from a comic book – anticipating scaring the bejesus out of my friends. It was a big balloon with a single-colour print of the monster on it. Bummer.
I bought Sea Monkeys.
They were cool.
Lived for over a year (not each one, but the colony).
Actually, I thought they were all dead and didn’t touch them for a couple months until my mom mentioend them and showed me they were still alive!!!
We finally fed the last 4 to my brother’s fish tank.
(by the way, I knew before ordering them that they were brine shrimp and did not look like little people)
I diid Sea Monkeys, but never got them to hatch.
Did the Magic Grow Rocks. Those work, and are kinda cool.
Selling seeds! I loved that one. Didn’t sell very many. I had lots of fun trying to grow all that stuff myself though.
The one cent kids seed packet from Gurney Seed Company was fun. You got all sorts of flowers and vegetables you hadn’t seen before.
Never got any of that stuff. I could see what a rip-off most of it was, even as a kid (I think Mad Magazine helped cultivate my cynical outlook). My favorite of the stupid adfs was the “Werewolf Whistle” sold by Captain Company in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine – it was so obviously a cheap siren whistle, and they were trying so hard to tie it in to monsters, somerhow. I almost felt sorry for them.
One of the few things I did try was the Famous Artists School. A guy much older than me on the next block was an unbelievably good artist, and he’d tried it. They sent a guy out to interview him. So I tried it. They sent a guy out to interview me.
Now, I certainly wasn’t modest as a kid, and I thought I was a fair artist. But when they sent a guy to interview me – who clearly wasn’t in the same league as that other guy – even my sense of reality had to kick in. They’ll take anybody who responds, I realized. And had nothing more to do with them.