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Does anybody remember the preiums that you could order with box tops?
I had an "Atom bomb" ring. It was a ring with a little bomb-shaped thing on top. You could pull one end-cap off the bomb, and hold the opening up near your eye ane peek into it, and see sparkles flying around in there that were supposedly "atoms".
There was also a little plastic car, with a magnet imbedded in the roof, and if you wore the accompanying ring (also with a magnet in it), you could amaze your friends by waving your hand over the car and making it move. We had magnets, instead of iPods, to amaze us with high tech.
There were "decoder" rings, whistles, badges, etc, with a rotor like on a combination lock, to align letters and understand the secre code message announced at the end of probrams like Roy Rogers. They kept changing the code, so kids had to order new ones.
I also ordered a ring that had tiny mirrors imbedded in the edges of it, so no assassins could sneak up behind me. And a ring with a magnet in it, so I could suspend the ring on a string from the rafters up in the ceiling, and purloin incriminating paper-clipped documents off the table when the conspirators glanced away for a moment.
I ate a shipload of Wheat Chex and Rice Chex when I was a kid because I needed the boxtops to send away for "Navy Frogmen." You got four of them, although one is all you ever needed. They were plastic, toy soldier sized frogmen in scuba gear, except their feet ended in a pedestal rather than in flippers. The base of the pedestal was hollow and the deal was that you filled it with baking sode. The weight caused them to sink to the bottom of whatever body of water you selected. While they were on the bottom, the baking soda melted in the water and with the added weight removed, your frogman "swam" to the surface. Real scientific stuff.
My favorite cereal box offer was replica license plates, about 3x6 inches, metal, actually debossed as if they had been stemped by prisoners right there in the big house. They were glued right to the outside of the box, so if you gave your mother a list, you'd never get a duplicate. They were just the right size to put on a bicycle.
In the 40's, the back of cereal boxes were punch-out WWII airplane parts, which could be folded and assemgled into 3-dimesional replicas.
My oldest brother had some plates that looked like what you've described, jtur. I wonder if that's where he got them?
Anyhow, I just searched these pages and didn't see any mention of the one and only Gun That Shoots Around A Corner. This was introduced toward the end of my army playin' days in the mid 60s. It looked something like this.
There was a mirror one could angle to set the sight and it shot red plastic balls all of 20 feet while staying out of harm's way behind the corner of a building or some other cover. It wasn't all that great, or at least I didn't think so because it didn't seem too realistic at the time. Who knew they'd make them for real one day ?
While that electric football game was a gyp, the biggest scam I can recall from childhood was the sidewalk bowling set. It was just what the name suggests, ten plastic pins, a sheet of plastic marked for where to set the pins that you spread underneath them, and a hard plastic ball with thumb and finger holes.
First it was difficult to set up. The plastic sheet tended to bunch up and stick to itself, and was so lightweight that any sort of breeze would lift the corners or fold it in on itself or blow it away. The plastic pins did not balance very well and you had to be extremely careful with your pin setting because one mistake meant starting all over.
So now you finally have your pins set up, you march to the end of the sidewalk, let fly with the ball...and watch it bounding away nearly everytime because of cracks and imperfections in the sidewalk. There is a reason that real bowling lanes are kept so flat and polished, and you learned this as you tracked down your ball in the bushes or wherever its errant trajectory selected.
This was somewhat redeemed by every ball which did manage to touch a pin, producing a strike. The plastic pins were threats to go over without even touching them, so even a near miss would generate suffcient vibrations to cause a collapse.
I had an Uncle who was notorious in our family for being a wretched present giver. He was always late, and it was always junk. One year, three days after Christmas, he arrived with his gifts for my brother, sister and myself. He had gotten us all the same thing....sidewalk bowling sets. One set per family was more than enough since typically you used it once and put it away forever, and now we had three of em.
The most frustrating toy I received was a set of little airpoanes that a mere child could make fly using static electricity. There were about a dozen pieces of tinfoil cut in the shape of airplanes about 5 inches long, and a "wand". That was a 3-foot piece os 1-inch dowell, painted black with a shiny metsl sleeve over the distal end. By rubbing up and down on the wand with a piece of wool cloth, one could generate enough static electricity to repel the foil squadron and theoretically maneuver them in flight. However, if one was careless and brought an airplane into contact with the wand, it would have the opposite effect, and the foil would stick to the wand so securely that it had to be torn to shreds to be peeled off. The thing had the frustration potential to demolish a ten-year-old boy's self-esteem for life, to which I can readily attest.
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