February 11th, 2009
It’s time we all face facts: the Slinky was a terrible toy. It did three things: it went down the stairs, maybe; it could be juggled in place using your hands; it could get tangled up and ruined. According to this ad, it was also capable of making young children pound the ground with a murderous glee not seen since apes learned to bash in the brains of enemy tribes:
Even the ad admits they don’t do much. They go down stairs, alone or in pairs. You could say that about your parents, too.
The only thing I liked about them was the very thing others hated: they made your hands smell like you’d been giving a robot a deep-tissue massage.
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Yup, Slinky was my introduction to the aroma of spring steel, too.
I could never get it to go down the stairs. And yet I think of it as a classic toy, and will probably eventually get one for my kids. So they can be tormented trying to get it to walk downstairs.
It’s almost as fun as Log…(From Ren & Stimpy)
“What rolls down stairs
and over the chairs
and into your neighbor’s dog?
It fits on your back,
It’s good for a snack,
Everyone knows it’s log.
It’s log, it’s log,
It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.
It’s log, it’s log, it’s better than bad, it’s good.”
You forgot: they make a slinkety sound
You forgot the other cool thing: You could grip it with your teeth and listen to the cool springy noises vibrating into your skull.
Log!!
From Blammo!!
I miss Ren & Stimpy.
The avocado deep shag rug on the stairs=flash from past.
I don’t think my slinky ever worked on shag carpeting as well as the commercial one did.
“Shuffling” a Slinky is a fun experience for a few minutes, but after that it’s pretty useless.
Anybody remember those plastic wall-crawling spiders with sucker feet?
I had many a Slinky in my day, and had a few of the Slinky Jr.’s (made of plastic). They never lasted long, because I would always get them tangled up.
I was thinking of the Log (by Blammo!(tm)) when I read the blog. I’ve always known where it came from, but never saw the commercial.
And I always loved that smell the regular Slinky left on your hands when you played with it for a long period of time.
I also remember those plastic wall-crawling spiders. Throw them up against the wall, and they’d “crawl” down. I think the one I had came in a box of cereal, and it glowed in the dark. I also remember those slime balls that you’d throw up against the wall, and it would ooze down, leaving a stain on the wall.
I’m surprised the Slinky wasn’t engulfed in the forest of shag carpeting covering those stairs.
Still untangling the plastic ones to this day!
Apparently, soldiers in Vietnam found slinkys to be great radio antennas. So they did have one good use.
We use plastic slinkies as bird toys for our parrots. One of them likes to hang on to one end and use it to bounce up and down like a bungee cord.
“I met this wonderful girl at Macy’s. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.”
– Steven Wright
How can you speak so dismissively of Slinky (and in the past tense, no less!) Now I’m wondering why I love them, since it’s true that they don’t do much. But they’re just . .. cool.
Also, they are still around. The kids play with them, and then we adults untangle them. Over and over. It’s part of the cycle of life.
Patrick, the slime balls and crawling hands are now available in coin machines, and are also standard favors at doctors’ and dentists’ offices.
“Jaames
February 11th, 2009 | 8:08 pm
You forgot the other cool thing: You could grip it with your teeth and listen to the cool springy noises vibrating into your skull.”
It takes a slinky to hear that? Then where am I hearing that? Oh yeah, Hopeandchange.
Obviously, you guys have never held one end of a Slinky and spun around really fast to see how far you can get it to expand. Mine stretched quite a bit until I accidentally wrapped it around our rope swing.
Patrick, I had one of those wacky wall-walkers in college, and I used to let it walk down the door to my room to perplex a kitten. When the spider got too close, the kitten would wave a paw at it a couple of times then back away in fright. I left the spider on my desk one night. The next morning I saw that the spider had several arms amputated. Evidently the kitten came upon the spider, seemingly asleep, and disarmed her arch-enemy.
_@_v – i have something called a ’slinky minky’ and while it’s a toy and ‘fun’, it’s…
let’s just say it’s not for a for a girl and a boy and leave it at that.
Slinkies were great! Very fun and therapeutic.
shesnailie:
Is that your slinky minky? Do you have a permit for that? Just climb up into the paddy wagon, please–next to Insp Clouseau, there…
Plastic slinkies were definitely worse than the metal ones. I had about as much success with them as Mel Brooks had with those wooden paddle ball games. I always got a warped one!
Slinky and Silly Putty were staples of my childhood. Both were great things to inspire the imagination. Both also were ruined far too quickly: the Slinky by some buffoon relative who stretched it too far, and the Silly Putty by picking up too many pictures from the funny papers so you could stretch ‘em.
I remember SCTV doing a parody of that commercial, with the Slinky chasing a frightened woman through a darkened house–”Slinky: Toy From HELL!”
That green shag gives me rug burns just looking at it. Green rug burns.
Plastic Slinkies bit the wax tadpole; no two ways about it. Metal ones were great on stairs — if the stairs were the right size. Our basement stairs were just a little too long, so by the fourth or fifth step the Slinkster no longer had the momentum to clear the edge, and it would take two slinks on one step and then roll down the rest of the way. I mean, yeah, it got downstairs, but a can of soup would do it the same way. And yet Slinky is in the Toy Hall of Fame, and the can of soup is not.
http://www.strongmuseum.org/NTHoF/inductees.html
I can still sing the whole damn Slinky song by memory. It haunts me to this day. (And it’s going to take an hour to get it out of my head, now.)
The plastic slinkies make good cat or ferret toys.
You fasten one end of the slinky to the top of a door frame and on the other end you fasten a cat toy, a furry mouse toy mouse is best. Get them interested in the mouse, they grab it and try to carry it away and the skinky pulls it back.
Excitement at first, frustration sets in, and then the sour grapes walk away.
I’m pretty sure that’s my little brother on the left, at the bottom of the steps. Who knew he did commercials?
Slinkies were fun, if pretty much useless. Another thing you could do with them was hold them by one end and bounce them up and down. Every time the other end hit the ground it would make a cool noise, kind of like a video game shooting noise back when video games weren’t very realistic.
As I said, useless. But fun.
We have several Slinkies in the office (both full sized, and the Jr. version). They are very therapeutic when you are trying to concentrate on something.
I like how the Slinky doesn’t even make it half way down the see-saw before falling off.
As for the wacky wall-crawlers, my brother won’t allow his kids to have them any more, since they threw them up against his vaulted ceiling and they have never come down.
Slinkys are known to be great stress relievers. No office should be without one. Really great at annoying your next door cubemate.
It does make you wonder. I was born in the 1970s and…well were the 70s at the nadir of creative thinking. I mean…its a spring. Its an industrial part given to kids becuase, oh, I dont know, they were tired of playing wtih hubcaps (I mean Frisbees). I am sure that 1000 years from now someone will find a slinky in an archeological dig and wonder what type of machine it came from.
Meanwhile, I have to find the Log song for my IPOD
I never had a slinky as a kid – but I have to mention the videoclip by an Australian band Powderfinger which makes excellent use of a slinky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ZkbDbJRk4
The first time I got the idea of wearing a Slinky on each wrist, I discovered how efficiently they removed unwanted knuckle and arm hair. Except, of course, as an aspiring chick magnet, I didn’t want it removed.