Trinkets, Baubles And Toys Trivia Quiz

Answer: Super Ball

This amazing ball could bounce to incredible heights, and just keep on bouncing, over and over again. (I had one that I bounced over our very tall house after slamming it onto a GRAVEL driveway! I later found it in a field way behind our house. Imagine if we'd had concrete!)

It took about two years for the company to work out the bugs with the Super Ball. The most problematic was the fact that it was so flexible that initially it had a tendency to fly apart by itself. Once that was mastered, though, sales of Super Ball took off, just like the ball itself!
At its peak, over 170,000 Super Balls were manufactured per day. By the end of 1965 over six million had been sold; however, over 20 million Super Balls were eventually sold. At first, the full-size dark blue-to-black Super Balls sold for ninety-eight cents, but by the end of 1966 smaller versions of it, which came in a variety of colors sold for ten cents.

According to the company's website, a giant promotional Super Ball roughly the size of a bowling ball was dropped from the 23rd floor of an Australian hotel. It bounced back up to the level of the 15th story; then bounced back down again onto a parked convertible. The car was totaled, but the experimental ball was just fine.

Answer: Danish

Both boys and girls played with these so-ugly-they-were-cute critters that had originally been designed in 1959 by a man from Denmark, Thomas Dam.

The fad established by these pot-bellied, bow-legged little dolls was fairly short-lived, but they were revived and marketed again briefly during the 70's and also in the 1990's.

Answer: Lakeside Toys

Lakeside Toys had initially wanted to call their game "Barrel O Fun", but that name was already taken, so they changed the figures from S-shaped hooks made of rubberized wire, and fashioned them into monkey shapes. The Milton Bradley Company (which later became a subsidiary of Hasbro Corporation) eventually took over the manufacture of the game.

The original game, as produced in 1965, came in a cardboard tube, but by 1968 was marketed using the plastic barrels that many of us are familiar with.

Answer: Etch A Sketch

Etch A Sketch is probably one of the best-known toys of the era of the 60's. If you didn't have one (I didn't), you probably knew at least three or four people who did, and they would let you play with theirs from time to time. With it, you could draw in straight lines, and if you were really good, you could almost make what passed for a circle. One controller caused the dark line to go left/right, while the other moved the line on the screen up/down.

The principle was simple. The aluminum powder was scraped off the screen by moving the stylus across it in either direction, and polystyrene beads would recoat the surface with aluminum powder once the toy was turned upside down and shaken.

It was invented by Frenchman André Cassagnes in the late 1950's, but it wasn't marketed by Ohio Art until 1960.

Answer: Twister

Twister became controversial because Milton Bradley's competitors accused them of selling "sex in a box". I doubt that many of us kids ever even considered such a thing, but the controversy lingered, largely due to the fact that human bodies DID come into contact with each other as they tried to place various parts of their anatomy onto the plastic sheet that lay on the floor.

The sheet was color coded, and in order to reach certain positions, bodies would "twist" and wind around each other in an effort to attain their color goals. Usually, all players would just wind up in a tangled heap in the floor, laughing their heads off.

Answer: Whirlo-Way, Flyin-Saucer and Pluto Platter

Fred Morrison, a U.S. Air Force pilot, conceived of the idea of a toy flying disc, back in 1938, prior to his stint in the armed services, where he had been held prisoner at the infamous Stalag 13 prisoner-of-war camp. He later developed several prototypes during the late 1940's, and eventually sold one of them, the "Pluto Platter", to the WHAM-O company in 1957 and they re-named the flying disc "Frisbee".

Through clever marketing strategies (and a few redesigns) WHAM-O achieved stunning success with the newly-named "Frisbee" in 1964.

(Frisbee's name was taken from the Frisbie Baking Company, a Connecticut bakery that manufactured pie plates for their products.)

Answer: Mattel

In 1963, Mattel introduced its "Vac-U-Maker", a machine that molded basic sculptures by heating up thin sheets of plastic with a small hot plate. A vacuum pump was then used to form the softened plastic over various harder forms, which were usually also made of plastic, unless you were like me and "experimented" with everything but the family cat!

In 1964, the Mattel Toy Company carried the concept a step further and began producing "Creepy Crawlers", a toy also known as "Thingmaker".

Answer: The Marvelous Wondergraph

The idea for The Marvelous Wondergraph came from original work done by Bruno Abakanowicz, but was later capitalized on by Denys Fisher. Spirograph, Super Spirograph and (for younger children) Spirotot were all based on the concept of pinning gearwheels to paper; then using colored markers, drawing geometric designs onto the paper. (I don't think that any two were ever alike, much like snowflakes.)

Answer: 1893

"Cracker Jack" was sold first at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
Songwriter Albert Von Tilzer provided Cracker Jack with free publicity when he was released his 1908 song "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" which included the line, "Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack..."

The "prizes" in "Cracker Jack" were not expensive, but boy, were they ever fun to find, somewhere in the box!

The mascots for the snack were Sailor Jack and his dog Bingo.

Answer: 1968

There was a total of three "talking Barbies". The first was introduced in 1968, the second in 1969 with the last one appearing in 1970/71.

Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler, had observed her little girl, Barbara, playing with paper dolls, and decided to give her a more permanent toy. On a visit to Europe, she noticed a fashion doll that had been manufactured in Germany, called "Bild Lilli", and this provided the prototype for the Barbie doll.