Pointless Toys of the 90s

What if the countless hours we spent playing in our rooms after school were completely wasted?  As a twenty-one year old college student, I would rather be slumbering at slumber parties than staying up all night playing with the toys I begged my grandparents for back then.  Of course, I’m twenty-one, but think about it.  Were we “having fun” only because the joy these toys gave us was all we ever really knew of fun, anyway?

For example: Shrinky Dinks.  You wasted hours away coloring on little sheets of polystyrene plastic with your choice of crayons or colored pencils.  You then spent ten minutes cutting your shape out perfectly with a pair of blunt-tip Fiskars scissors, perfecting each corner to avoid sharp snags on your finished product. You wait 25 minutes for your Easy Bake Oven to preheat and soon enough you were ready to place your soon-to-be charm on the baking tray.  If you’re anything like me, you spent the next fifteen minutes icing the burn on your finger from inserting the tray while you waited for your Shrinky Dinks to mold.  Finally, with much anticipation, you slide the tray out to display your new addition to your pointless collection of Dinks.  If you were smart, you cut a hole to slide it onto your key chain ring, but even if that was the case, what did 10-year-old you do with a key ring?  Fail.

Still not convinced?  What about your old collection of water snake toys?

You know what I mean.  You slide it on your finger and then what?

On that note, how long could you cast and catch your YoYo Ball before wanting to set it down?  You know those were a cop-out anyway.

I hate to admit it but during my doll-phase, I spent hours with my Magic Potty Baby.  Now, not only was it pointless, but it’s just gross.  If you were old enough to feed a plastic baby water from a tiny bottle, you were past the potty training stage.  What are you doing playing with a peeing baby doll?

Depending on how technologically embracive your parents were while you were growing up, you either had your own “real” or battery-operated pet.  This pet, none-the-less was pointless, too.  Take the Tamagotchi, for example.  After being banned in most schools, you couldn’t feed it at recess so instead got to endure the trauma of coming home to yet another LED corpse.  If you were one of the “lucky” ones, you were granted the gift of giving life to sea monkeys.  If you were really lucky, you actually enjoyed squinting into the magnifying glass at your floating specks of absolutely nothing.

Can we even blame Hasbro?  Maybe it’s our own fault.  Still, as a twenty-one year old college student, I wish I had saved my allowance for this semester’s tuition bill.