DEATH TO TOY FADS

[LadyAndreca]

We did something like that when I was in camp as a kid, except that we hung a string down into the melted mess and made psychedelic candles out of them.

(We used mostly plain white wax, with the crayons added for coloration; I don't know if pure crayons would make a decent candle as is, might melt at too low a temperature or something. They burned yellow no matter what color the wax was, which was a bit disappointing...)

We tried making a candle with just crayons once. It doesn't really burn...but we have this really cool 6" rainbow pillar crayon now.

[ShootMePlease]

Hahahahaha!!

I was at Wally World yesterday picking up last minute things. I happened to walk by the sporting goods section and lo and behold - guess what was sitting all by itself on top of the live bait refrigerator ? A Zhu Zhu hamster. I picked it up, laughed and showed my Dad. I told him I was going to walk around the toy dept. with it to see how long it would take someone to notice it. Took about 10 seconds. I gladly handed it over to the folks who asked me where I had found it.

[Magpie]

it's like an easy bake oven for crayons. You can put your crayola crayons into it (broken ones, etc) and melt them into twisty colors therefore recycling them.

It's a neat idea. That's on our top 20 hottest toys this season too.

But.... it has the same fundamental flaw as a real Easy Bake Oven. That's what the real oven is for! Or the toaster oven if you have one of those. My mom had a half-dozen size muffin tin (i.e. 6 regular muffin wells rather than 12), and we'd throw all our broken crayon bits into the wells and make fun multi-colored crayon cakes. (I wanted an easy bake oven as a kid, and my mother told me that I wasn't allowed to have one, I could bake in the real oven instead. But I'm not bitter at all...()

[DGoddessChardonnay]

But.... it has the same fundamental flaw as a real Easy Bake Oven. That's what the real oven is for! Or the toaster oven if you have one of those. My mom had a half-dozen size muffin tin (i.e. 6 regular muffin wells rather than 12), and we'd throw all our broken crayon bits into the wells and make fun multi-colored crayon cakes. (I wanted an easy bake oven as a kid, and my mother told me that I wasn't allowed to have one, I could bake in the real oven instead. But I'm not bitter at all...()

So I'm not the only one who grew up without an Easy Bake Oven.

My mom's theory on that was: why use a play oven when you'll soon be old enough to learn how to use the real one in the kitchen.

[Magpie]

My mom's theory on that was: why use a play oven when you'll soon be old enough to learn how to use the real one in the kitchen.

Wow... I was spoiled... She didn't even make me wait. Granted, the rule was if I made cookies or whatnot I also had to do extra dishes to make up for it, but I was allowed to bake when I was really young (not on my own of course).

[simplyanother]

I never had an easy bake oven either, so I missed out on the joys of baking with a light bulb.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

I never had an easy bake oven either, so I missed out on the joys of baking with a light bulb.

It all worked out in the end though . . . by age 6, I'd learned how to boil water on the stovetop and cook Kraft Mac & Cheese - standing up in a chair b/c I was so short, I couldn't quite reach over the top of the stove.

[LadyAndreca]

I had an easy-bake oven, but I don't know why. I don't recall asking for one. I was certainly old enough to make cookies (with some supervision to make sure I didn't try to double the chocolate chips or something) and knew my tablespoons from my teaspoons by the time I got it. Plus real cookies and cakes tasted SO much better than the mixes...

As I recall, mostly I used it for sneaking sweets when there weren't any in the house or I wasn't supposed to be having them.

[Broomjockey]

But.... it has the same fundamental flaw as a real Easy Bake Oven. That's what the real oven is for!

You might be able to get away with a toaster oven, but the point of an Easy Bake Oven is that it's safer for a child to use independently. It's small, so any mishaps are also measurably smaller. Children are sometimes clumsy. A large oven has a big enough surface area to probably *kill* a child if they stumbled, or leaned over incorrectly and fell on the door when it was at 450F and open. At the least you're going to have horrible burns over significant portions of the child's body.

[ditchdj]

I personally dont see what's so freakin' great about these Zhu Zhu Pets. My wife came across one in a returns bin at Toys R Us and bought one for our six-year-old because she said she wanted one after hearing other people near her talk about them and seeing them on TV. Just seems like another generic toy to me and she only played with it for a few hours.

[mikoyan29]

I personally dont see what's so freakin' great about these Zhu Zhu Pets. My wife came across one in a returns bin at Toys R Us and bought one for our six-year-old because she said she wanted one after hearing other people near her talk about them and seeing them on TV. Just seems like another generic toy to me and she only played with it for a few hours.

Is there enough with them to drive a cat nuts?

[jjllbb]

Is there enough with them to drive a cat nuts?

I bought one for my cat and......SHE IGNORES IT.

le sigh.

So I was stuck playing with it. And guess what. It broke after a week. It just stopped moving. And it's not the batteries because it still makes the creepy chirping noises.

awesome!

[Rubyred]

I really don't get what the big deal over these things is.

I was in Toys R Us a week or two ago getting presents for my daughter (she's way too young for Zhu Zhu pets) and I just happened to be walking by the table as they put out about 300 of the things. I grabbed two thinking that either one of my friends kids would want them or I could sell them on Ebay.

All several hundred were gone within 10 minutes.

Sure enough, one of my friends wanted them for her girls (9 and 11) and payed me double what I payed (even though I told her not too) all the while telling me repeatedly that I had saved Christmas and she had all ready been to Toys R Us like 6 times looking for them.

BTW...When I got the stupid things home I took a better look at them and realized that they don't really actually do anything.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

So Thursday night we got our first shipment of those....things in well over a month. Guess corporate thinks it's safe again to sell them in store.

They all went on an endcap in toys.

As of today that endcap was still 95% full. Guess those...things were either entirely a Christmas fad, or it dawned on people that buying them amounts to a dry cornholing, as RK so eloquently put it.

[ditchdj]

Yeah my six-year-old has one and only played with it for like three days and that was it, just like any other toy.