TIME Magazine's Top 10 Toy Crazes

POGS

Furbies for their trembling beaks.

fucking loved POGs. Plus it makes me feel warm inside seeing that Simpsons episode with the ALF POGs and no-one else knows what they are. I only knew like 2 other people to play them with as a kid.

Is everyone just going to vote for what was big when they were nine?

xiu xiu pets

Did you know you were going to shoot
off the top of a Cabbage Patch Kid
And look across her cabbage down into her seams
And see into her stuffing

no one played with pogs but everyone knew what they were WTF

Is everyone just going to vote for what was big when they were nine?

nah I voted POGs because they are the most inexplicable. little discs with images on them - what kind of "toy" is that? It doesn't even have the "conceptual joke" angle of the pet rock, its just useless crap.

Some young owners were driven to care for their (Tomagatchis) around the clock, even in school, prompting administrators to ban them.

Things teachers got upset about before texting existed.

nah. tamagotchis and beanie babies were much bigger when i was 9. and they both sucked. furbys were kind of cool because i never had one and thus didnt have to put up with them constantly. none of them were poisonous though, wtf zhu zhu kill the children.

Pogs you stacked up & hit with a slug of metal, a game you could play with one-year-olds.

My parents would not let me play Magic: the Gathering bcz it was "Satanic," I got to hang out in the pog ghetto with peeps still carrying tubes of pogs four years after the flame had burned out.

I was most proud of my pog with a clip art of Spock on it, a nice little synecdoche for my lack of a social life in 1997.

yeah wtf no pokemon cards on the list.

I was nine in that toyless decade void between Cabbage Patch Kids and pogs.

Went with Tomagotchi because they were awesome. I'm thinkin bout bringin it back. I dropped mine on the floor and the whole thing died.

Oh man the lead headline of the Zhu Zhu pets site: "Mr. Squiggles Exonerated!"

They are pretty cute, if I was a prepubescent girl I wld be all over Santa with mad requests for one.

I dropped mine on the floor and the whole thing died.

surprised you didn't drown the thing

I remember Mighty Morphin Power Rangers being the freak thing one season

Rubik's Cube craze was pretty fun while it lasted. That's the earliest one I'm old enough to remember. Seeing guys on TV who could do it in like 30 seconds behind their back was pretty amazing to me at that age. Common approach to "solve" it among kids I knew was to take the thing apart or remove the stickers and reassemble in the finished position.

Are we supposed to be voting for the best or the most baffling?

And then they came out with the 4x4 super cube, as if there was a big outcry for a harder Rubik's cube. Just to make everyone feel even dumber, I guess.

xp

remember all the knock off rubik's cube things? there was a pyramid and a long rod with a chain on it

this is the point where I brag about being able to solve a Rubik's Cube in 25 seconds when I was a kid, right

xp: MISSING LINK was my JAM tho, that one I actually solved without resorting to an outside source

the pyramid was super easy

The Rubik's Snake was actually pretty fun, because it didn't have just one right answer. It was like origami, with different shapes you could make.

MISSING LINK--yes it was easy

the only way i solved the rubik's cube was when my cousin called me and said, "you can just take it apart." LOL that's what i did.

I have to say I love the character design of Tamagotchi bcz they are so weird.

http://img125.imageshack.us/img125/452/chartredo2ir8.gif

esp. love all the ones with beaks

It always made me so mad that my sister could solve the rubik's cube without taking it apart.

They're like the Neanderthal cave painting precursors to Pokemon.

I resorted to buying a book that gave step-by-step instructions to solve it.

xp

Fishville is the new tamagotchi. So tired of wife taking my laptop away so she can feed her fish before tey die.

Rubik's Cube is the first craze that I remember, apart from some particular brand of stunt kites ("Parker Kites"?). Anyway, some of these crazes are age specific or only really caught on in a distinct subset of kids, but the cube fascinated everybody, children and adults. And seemingly everyone had one - either an original or a knock-off version. Songs were even written about the cube (like "Mr. Rubik" by the Barron Knights).

And then they came out with the 4x4 super cube, as if there was a big outcry for a harder Rubik's cube.

I have one of those. They are basically impossible for anyone with a normal mind to solve. I couldn't do it - I ended up taking the thing apart with a screwdriver pretty much like the original 3x3.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Rubiks_revenge_solved.jpg/180px-Rubiks_revenge_solved.jpg
I also had a "solve the cube" book for the 4x4 - even understanding that was hard, it was like a text in 3D spacial geometry translated from Japanese.
Also for those 21st whiz-kids who find the 4x4 just to easy...
http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/products/front/b1d8_v-cube_7_supercube.jpg
And ThinkGeek have a few others which are even stranger (12 sized cube anyone?)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/brain/whereisit.cgi?t=cube&sortby=score&sortorder=desc&sorthow=num&dispstart=1&dispnum=all

Rubik's Cube - always got play value outside of craze/nostalgia.

no buzz lightyear no cred

i keep on wondering if it's worth it, as an adult, to go back to the rubik's cube, or is my brain too old and retarded to do it.

Tried our old one at my mom and dad's recently and I don't have the patience for it any more.

Rubik's cube is pretty great tbh but even following youtube tutorials I've never completed mroe than two thirds of mine.

Would like this poll to be about the worst so I could vote the fuck out of furby.

wow I misread that

you shouldn't do that to a toy, imho

Think you could with the deluxe Furby

floating with a Furby

i keep on wondering if it's worth it, as an adult, to go back to the rubik's cube, or is my brain too old and retarded to do it.

there was one at a house I was staying at a couple months ago but I couldn't get more than two sides done. also just saw some kids on the train last week playing with one (the older kid had clearly mastered it - they took turns with the younger one scrambling it up and the older kit solving it, he did it a bunch of times in 20 minutes).

pretty cool toy imho

(I have never completed the Rubik's cube deliberately, have chanced on a solution from the top 2 slices completed position.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Rubiks-clock.jpg/180px-Rubiks-clock.jpg
^^^ I had one of these, Rubik's Clock, 9 clocks on each side. Worked out how to complete it as well.

Yeah, we had the clock, and the snake, and the pyramid, and that barrel shaped thing with the sliding pieces that was really easy.

nah I voted POGs because they are the most inexplicable. little discs with images on them - what kind of "toy" is that? It doesn't even have the "conceptual joke" angle of the pet rock, its just useless crap.

pogs are no different then lots of trading cards sets. a lot people collected cards only for the cool pictures and they looked nice in their glossy pages. My simpsons pog set had its own glossy pog pages in a binder where I kept all my Marvel card sets. Furthermore the game of pog was actually kind of fun. Flipping the whole stack of pogs every time took some skill (no "one year old" could do that). Plus you get to keep your opponents pogs by winning which is pretty nice. The most addictive thing about pogs was digging through the pog stands at malls and finding the best looking ones. I still own one set of pogs - a chrome road kill series.

I got my dad this for xmas last year:
http://i.techrepublic.com.com/blogs/sudokube.jpg

One of the saddest sights I ever saw in a K-mart, sometime in the late '80s: A huge table full of unwanted Cabbage Patch dolls, all of 'em black and on sale for a coupla bucks each.

The most addictive thing about pogs was digging through the pog stands at malls and finding the best looking ones.

I feel so embarrassed when I think of how long I made my mom wait at the mall while I searched for all the pogs with skulls and yinyangs on them

by the way, spiked slammers, not as good as the regular slammers fyi

Oh man I remember when pogs got banned from my elementary school because our principal thought it was gambling. I remember being all "whatever" about it because I had just discovered something way more awesome... Magic: The Gathering.

Congratulations on going to a school even more Mormon than mine.

I had no idea what Zhu Zhu Pets were (aside from the fact that they were huge this Christmas) until I just now watched the commercial. They actually look pretty fun. I probably would've wanted some when I was nine. Which I'm sure would've thrilled my dad to no end.

googly eyed rock!

voted for rubiks

beanie babies the worst of the bunch imo

Somehow we got talking about toy fads over the weekend and we learned that, apparently, Beanie Babies are actually sort of becoming a "thing" again. In that some of the are actually worth $$$ again to certain collectors.

I forgot to mention that I really loved the rubik snake, but only as a weapon to smack other kids with. It was fierce.

It could be made into the shape of a gun not dissimilar to the blasters on the original Battlestar Galactica.

voted pogs cause its hilar that a game where u gamble lil cardboard disks temporarily displaced video games as the post popular toy

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Rubik's Cube, obviously. The biggest explosion of pure abstraction into the public consciousness between Jackson Pollock and Tetris.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I got a 5x5x5 Rubik's cube for Christmas today.

so i just tried out a fidget spinner and i don't understand the craze

Time left out hula hoops, troll dolls, hacky sacks and Frisbees in favor of Bratz Dolls, Zhu Zhu Pets, and Furbys? Nonsensical!