Thursday, March 29, 2007

Did Anyone Actually BUY This? pt. 16


Well, it'll give the kids something to match the tank they bought earlier. Is Haliburton running Toys-R-Us these days?
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2 comments:

Gib said...

You might enjoy the beginning of this piece:
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000136.html

December 30, 2007 at 3:20:00 PM CST
Bunche (pop culture ronin) said...

I'll never forget this, no matter how long I may live: when I was seven years old (I'm pushing 43 now) a kid I played with up the block showed me this ad and was psyched that his dad was going to buy it for him. Even at that age I thought it was odd that a kid could buy a fully-functioning Polaris nuclear submarine from the pages of a comic book, much less for so low a price, but I was happy for my friend and shared his anticipation as he waited weeks for the sub to arrive.

Then came the magic day when he excitedly called me up and told me to haul ass to his house so he could show me the sub. I biked over and when he opened the box all that was within was a cheap piece of cardboard with the acpect of a submarine printed on it. It was little more than a glorified fort that a kid could have made from discarded moving boxes and such, in fact it wasn't as good as something a kid's imagination could have come up with. Once the fact that he'd been ripped off dawned on my pal there was dead silence, eventually broken by a slow, escalating moan of "WaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!" that only a truly disappointed kid can make when they first come face-to-face with the fact that adults are liars who don't care at all if they screw you over, and probably laugh while they do it, thousands of miles from retaliatory bags of flaming dog shit left on their porches. I had my own such moment of realization some months later when I purchased one of those sets promising eleventy-jillion soldiers, tanks, howitzers, etc., and they turned out to be brittle, flat pieces of crap that shattered if you looked at them the wrong way.

Caveat emptor, sucker.

February 13, 2008 at 4:38:00 PM CST

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