Dave’s Cool Toys Blog

Archive for the ‘Comment from Dave’ Category

Below is a movie my friend, Rich, and I made a long time ago. A very long time ago.

I apologize for the quality of this movie. The original film is lost forever. This was made by videotaping it with an ancient black-and-white video camera from a projection screen. The video is also very old and I just found it and transferred it to a Quicktime movie today.

Bubble Wrap Turns 50!

Bubble Wrap, the iconic packaging material, turns 50 today, January 25, 2010. It also happens to be the 10th Annual Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day.

Sealed Air, makers of Bubble Wrap brand will be running their factory line entirely in gold today, rather than clear, to commemorate the event.

Originally invented in a garage in Hawthorne, NJ as a textured wallpaper. When that didn’t work out, they tried to market it as a greenhouse insulator. Eventually, they hit on the idea of using it to cushion fragile items and an icon was born.

Why am I mentioning the 50th anniversary of Bubble Wrap in my toy blog? You know why. Bubble Wrap stands with the Cardboard Box as one of those products that is not used as intended, but instead often used as a toy. You know you love popping it. Bubble Wrap has more than two million fans on Facebook.

But what do you do when you are stressed out and would love to pop some Bubble Wrap, but you have none handy? No problem. Just visit the Virtual Bubblewrap page to pop as much as you like (Be sure to try "Manic Mode" to pop at hyper speed).

Want to pop even when you’re not at your computer? Check out the Electronic Bubble Wrap Keychain. You can pop your virtual bubble wrap anytime.

Happy Birthday Bubble Wrap!

Trinity Anderson

On January 4, in Denver, Co, Trinity Anderson was found by her mother, lying limp on the floor next to her chair. There was a USB cable lying next to her which was plugged into her mother’s iPod (or laptop, depending on which report you read). Burnt flesh was found on the prongs of the USB cable and she was hospitalized with third-degree burns on her tongue, palate and lip. She remains hospitalized and has had a traceotomy and administered sedatives and paralytics to keep her still and quiet while she recovers.

A technician spent the day friday at the infant’s home trying to determine what actually happened. A USB cable typically doesn’t carry more than 5 volts of power, far too low to do any damage (which you would know if you’ve ever put your tongue on a 9-volt battery). Apple’s USB cables can sometimes carry a bit more, but it’s not usually considered life-threatening. Life threatening voltage is usually considered over 50 volts.

It seems to me that something more than was going on here than a child putting a USB cable in her mouth. Especially when the other end was attached to an iPod (and not the outlet). Since nobody saw what happened, we may never know exactly what the child was doing when she was burned.

However, this story is a good reminder to parents to be careful about seemingly harmless cables and cords. With all the consumer electronics in most homes today, the amount of cables has expanded dramatically. Many are often left plugged into the wall when rechargeable electronics are in use. While they may seem harmless (and may be harmless) parents should consider taking some precautions with small children to be sure they are safe.

I found these USB Protective Covers on Amazon. While they are certainly not fool proof, and you would still want to keep the cables out of reach, so children don’t swallow the covers, they would still provide a small amount of protection if the end of a USB cable should find its way into a young mouth. They also protect the connectors from dust.

Art Clokey with his creation Gumby.

Art Clokey passed away on Friday, January 8, 2010. He was 88.

If you don’t recognize Art Clokey’s name, he is the creator of Gumby!

Gumby and his buddy, Pokey were first seen as shorts on the Howdy Doody Show.

If you’ve visited my Toy Trivia page, you’d know that the shape of Gumby’s head was inspired by the hair style of Art’s father.

Art Clokey was also the creator of one of my favorite shows (probably because of the name) "Davey and Goliath", which were created for the Lutheran Church.

His creations have been satirized many times over. Most notably, Gumby has been satirized by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live and more recently, Davey and Goliath has been satirized (quite irreverently) by the TV Show Moral Orel.

It wasn’t actually until a renewed interest in Gumby, brought about by Eddie Murphy’s character, that Clokey began to see real financial benefit from his creation.

Art started his claymation career with a student film called "Gumbasia". Check it out…

And for a very strange example of Art’s work, check out the opening sequence to Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine…

Gumby at Dave’s Cool Toys.

World’s Most Useless Machine

I came across this today and thought it was very cool. It is the World’s Most Useless Machine. The guy (I think it’s a guy) who created it built it from scratch. It does only one thing… turns itself off. Check out the video below and if you’d like to have your own, complete instructions are available at www.instructables.com.

If this machine ever gets commercially produced, we will carry it!

Incidentally, I absolutely love the Instructables site. Unfortunately, they recently went to a "pay" system so that you must become a Pro Member in order to see all images, view all steps on one page, or save a pdf of the instructions. Fortunately, the Pro Membership is fairly inexpensive. They also have very intrusive ads on their site. You know the ones…they enlarge over top of what you are reading until you find the "close" button. Hate that.

Anyway, check out the video below of the World’s Most Useless Machine Ever.

Civil War Cannon

One of my favorite items, and also one or our most popular, are Big Bang Cannons. Unfortunately, we have been forced to increase our prices on most of these cannons due to an increase from the manufacturer. Like most products, due to higher costs, they had to raise prices. The last time they had an increase was in 2000, so it is understandable. However, since the price has not changed for 10 years, the increase has been a substantial one.

We are sorry for this increase, but we have kept the prices as low as we possibly can. Subscribers to our newsletter were alerted early to the increase so they had a chance to purchase a cannon before they went up (shameless plug).

All the brass cannons are the same price at this time.

Incidentally, If you aren’t familiar with this great item, don’t miss my Big Bang Cannon information page with all the information you could possibly want to know about them.

Roy E. Disney in the 2000 Rose Parade

Roy E. Disney, the nephew of Walt Disney, passed away today, December 12, 2009. He was 79. He had been battling stomach cancer for the past year. Roy mostly kept a low profile, but on two occasions he led a shareholder revolt against Walt Disney’s son-in-law and Michael Eisner, respectively.

Roy was born in 1930 and grew up in the Disney company. His uncle, Walt and his father, Roy O. Disney were co-founders of the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio just seven years prior to his birth. Mickey Mouse was "born" just two years before Roy.

He worked at Disney as an editor, screenwriter, and producer, but never had the chance to formally lead the company. He nevertheless had a huge impact on the company over the years. His first revolt led to the ouster of his cousin’s husband and the hiring of Michael Eisner. Roy re-joined the board and became the company’s vice chairman and chairman of the animation division. He oversaw the creation of such iconic films as "The Lion King".

Roy amassed quite a fortune through savvy investments in both Disney and other areas, ranking him by Forbes magazine as the 754th richest person in the world in 2007 with an estimate fortune of $1.3 billion.

He once again resigned his board seat and led a revolt, this time against Michael Eisner because he felt that quality was "slipping away from us" at the Disney theme parks. Eisner was replaced by Robert Iger who named Roy a board member emeritus and welcomed him back to company events.

Roy Disney bore a striking resemblance to his uncle Walt. He was also an active philanthropist, supporting the California Institute of Arts, personally matching a gift from the Walt Disney Company to establish an experimental theater space at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and pledging $10 million to establish the Roy and Patricia Disney Cancer Center at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.

He will be missed.

GI Joe poster

We watched G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra this past weekend and I was most disappointed with it. Aside from the fact that I was slightly surprised with the amount of violence and profanity in a movie that is based on a child’s toy, it just wasn’t a very good movie. Too many villains, too many things blowing up, too many sound effects, and visually a mess.

I recently read an article that blamed the demise in recent years of Disney’s animated film juggernaut on the fact that parents began to feel exploited by Disney. Many parents began to feel that the long list of animated films such as The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, etc. had become nothing more than a tool to sell merchandise to children and parents, cranking them out each year just for the sake of toy and video tie-ins.

It certainly is true that not only Disney, but all major movie studios strive to have films that tie in well with toy and merchandise. In some cases, effects and gadgets are written into films just because they would make a great toy, or the toy already exists.

Years ago I remember hearing the little creatures from the original Star Wars trilogy referred to as "the oh-so-merchandisable Ewoks". That didn’t work out too well for George Lucas (if that’s what he had in mind), since parents didn’t flock to the store to buy plush Ewoks, but he has certainly made up for it with subsequent movies.

	A quiet moment in GI Joe when nothing is blowing up.

The article I read wondered if the recent trend of big-budget movies aimed at boys such as Transformers and G.I. Joe may have reached its end for the same reason.

I have always disliked marketing that tries to make you feel inadequate if you do not have the entire line, summed up with the statement "collect all 37!" Licensed merchandise plays upon that by having an entire line of characters from a movie, the full complement of children’s sheets, or limited edition items such as Disney video’s that will only be on the market for a few months. I don’t like feeling manipulated.

I recently posted about Toy Story 3, and this got me thinking a bit about Pixar and their films. Pixar has had a string of film success that is unprecedented. I love Pixar. Now this may be partly because an old friend of mine worked for Pixar for a while (prior to Toy Story) and their CEO is Steve Jobs, also the force behind Apple Computer. But is it also because of the wonderful films they produce and the talent and creativity at the company. Many years Pixar has released the only great "G" rated film. I know this from experience trying to choose child-appropriate films for middle school band trips.

But Pixar’s first film, Toy Story, was almost made for merchandising. That may have partly been because the very new medium of computer animation lent itself well to animating toys. But the movie, either by accident or design, reinvigorated some classic toy lines such as the Slinky and Mr. Potato Head. One anecdote about the Toy Story movies is that Pixar wanted to include Barbie in the first Toy Story movie, but they were turned down by Mattel because they didn’t expect the movie to succeed and didn’t feel they needed them. By the time they made Toy Story 2, Mattel was calling Pixar to get Barbie in the film. The point is that Pixar certainly capitalized upon Barbie in the film.

On the flip side, the recent Pixar film, "Up" was nearly un-merchandisable. There really were very few opportunities for toy tie-ins in the film. Pixar seems to have elected to concentrate on making a good film rather than concern themselves with merchandising.

Pixar is now owned by Disney and they are making Toy Story 3 (something Pixar fought against for many years). Will Pixar eventually succumb to the temptation of cranking out films in order to drive merchandising? It will remain to be seen.

	Pushalong wooden toy

At Dave’s Cool Toys, we do not carry any licensed toys. We prefer toys that are not tied to the popularity of a movie franchise. We don’t concern ourselves with fads or worry about what is "hot" this year. Some of the toys you can purchase on our site have been in-stock for 14 years, since we first started out. Some of them have been around long before that, but are now hard to find in the giant big-box toy stores. Sometimes toys we loved have become fads, but that’s not our fault, so don’t hold that against us. Many of our toys are also low-tech. Batteries die, electronics stop working, video games get old. But a great wooden toy can last for generations.

My AntWorks on day 35 (shown here in light with the Illuminator)

It’s been a while since I posted on the progress of my AntWorks. Today is day 35 since my ants arrived and went into their new home. They haven’t been very active for quite a few days, so there wasn’t much to post about. They are no longer tunnelling, and we’ve had quite a few ant deaths. I count about 12 ants left alive in our little "colony".

As you can see, they built about 10 tunnels through the gel. They also cleared out quite a bit of tunnel area in the bottom of the AntWorks. There are two small starter tunnels that I first created that the ants completely ignored. You can see them on the top towards the right.

The ants haven’t been quite as active in general recently. They spend most of their time in the bottom cavern area. Even so, there is usually at least one ant in the top area, on the "surface". This has prevented me from being able to clear out the dead ants, as the ones in the top try immediately to escape when the top is open. Within a few moments of opening the top, the ants in the tunnels race to the surface as well.

	Now’s our chance to escape!

In the photo on the right, you can see all the deceased ant parts that are on the surface. I had the lid off for only a brief moment to take this picture and one ant escaped and had to be pushed back into the AntWorks. You can see two live ants attempting escape in this picture.

If you’re thinking of purchasing an AntWorks colony, you may be thinking to yourself "it’s cool, but I don’t want to deal with all the dead ants. That’s really gross". Well, I can see your point, but that is also part of life sciences. The ants do die. It is also interesting the way the ants bring their dead companions to the surface and usually bury them. They seem to have gotten a bit lazier about burying them now, but in the past, they had them quite well buried in the gel chunks that they had moved to the surface. One thing this illustrates is how well the gel provides for the ants as food, water, tunneling medium, and burial material.

The carnage!

As for clearing out the dead ants, I have heard from a student that was part of the original Ants in Space program with NASA, and she assured me that I could refrigerate the ants to slow down their metabolism without harming the ants or the gel. I knew it wouldn’t harm the ants from the first day, when we refrigerated them to put them in the AntWorks, according to the directions, but I wasn’t sure what would happen to the gel. But this information has given me the courage to try it.

I refrigerated my AntWorks for 10 minutes, but when I checked my ants, they seemed more active than before! How strange. So I left them in for a bit longer. It took almost 25 minutes before they began to show signs of slowing down even a little. So, I took them out of the fridge, and took the top off, but they were still pretty active, and I had to really hurry to get the little body parts out. I wasn’t able to get them all because a few ants kept coming to the top and trying to get out, so I got out what I could quickly and closed my AntWorks up again. Since I was rushing, I didn’t get any pictures of this, but I took a picture of the bits I did manage to get out.

Cheating? You decide.

This is my pumpkin. Or Jack-O-Lantern. Well, maybe I can’t call it that. It’s not my final one, we will be carving them, probably this weekend. But in the meantime, I figured, why not decorate it? I think I read about this idea in a magazine a few weeks ago. Can’t remember which one. But I just rummaged through our recycling bin and cut facial features from magazines, then mixed and matched them. They are glued on with rubber cement, so they will come off easily when it’s time to carve. Looking at it now, I should have put the mouth upside down. My wife felt it was cheating and said I still needed to carve it and take off the face.

The tunnels are multiplying

I didn’t post over the weekend, so there has been quite a bit more progress on my ants tunnels. These ants weren’t very imaginative so far, making their tunnels along the bottom and corners of the AntWorks habitat. But now they are branching out and making some more complex tunnels. You can see the partially complete tunnel they’ve been working on today (although it doesn’t have any ants in it in this picture). It is about halfway down in the gel, sticking up from the curved tunnel toward the right of the photo. It comes off the tunnel in the back and goes forward through the gel until it hits the plastic front. After I took this picture, the ants started enlarging the end of that tunnel. There were 3 ants all working on it at the same time.

You can’t see it in the picture from the front, but they have also been tunnelling through the gel piles that they have made on the top of the "surface" So I’ve taken a photo from the top, looking down to try to show them. The surface is quite bumpy from all the holes and tunnels.

	Cross Tunnels

At the bottom of the AntWorks, they have created two cross tunnels, which look like a little cavern when you look in from the front or back. I’ve tried to get a picture of it here, but it didn’t show it too well.

I think I’ve had 2 casualties. I’m pretty sure there is a dead ant encased in the gel pile in the upper right. When there are no ants on top I’ll check on it and remove whatever is there. There also seems to be a dead ant in the bottom tunnel. Hopefully, they will bring her out.

Tunnelling through the gel piles

The ants mostly seem to congregate in the bottom-most tunnel, where they are all hanging out in most of my pictures.

The instructions tell you to open the lid once every week or so. For the writing and photography of this series of posts, I’ve opened the lid much more often than that. I didn’t think it would matter, but I have noticed that the gasket around the lid has begun to get smooshed up a bit, which could cause trouble if it got worse, so we won’t be opening it up quite as much and I’ll be more careful with it when I do. I would suggest following the guidelines that came with your AntWorks and not removing the lid as often as we have.

Today our ants are tunneling again in their AntWorks home, so I’ve uploaded a video of their new tunnel. They are just about to break through. Once they do, they will create a sort-of Grand Central Station with 5 tunnels all converging in one spot. This is lit with the AntWorks Illuminator.

They look like ants from up here!

My ants haven’t been doing much tunneling. It’s been a bit cooler here so maybe it’s due to the temperature.

I thought there was a dead ant in the gel on the top, but when I dug down a bit into it, it was apparently just ant poop. You can see the dark spot in the picture here, just above the ant in the middle of the picture. This picture is looking down from above through the lid. There was also a bit of condensation on the lid which I wiped off. You can also see down through the tubes in this picture.

Speaking of the lid, my sister-in-law expressed concern that her cat might knock over the AntWorks and let them escape. So I thought I’d mention that the AntWorks is not glass, but plastic, and the lid fits on quite tightly. It could not be accidentally knocked off and it actually takes a bit of prying to get it off.

Since I didn’t have much to share in the way of new tunnels today, I thought I’d post a video I came across which shows what happened to someone else when their AntWorks gel pulled away from the side a bit, and two curious ants got stuck between the gel and the wall. I really don’t know how this could happen. The gel is very tight (it seems like it has been poured in as a liquid and set-up inside the container) and it would take something serious to pull it away from the side. Perhaps they dropped it. It’s a long video, but you could zoom ahead to see the outcome.

Ants with mood lighting.

Our ants haven’t made much more progress today, so I thought I’d attach the AntWorks Illuminator to their habitat and see if it gets them in the mood to tunnel.

The Illuminator is very cool. It slips right into the base of the AntWorks and has 4 blue LED Lights in an array which light up the gel from below. This turns the AntWorks into the coolest night light in the universe.

The other cool thing is that as the ants pass above the lights, they cast shadows in the gel, which looks kinda eerie. If they are active, the lights look alive.

You can’t see it in this picture, but the ants seem to be tunnelling in the gel mounds they created "above ground". There is what appears to be an ant encased in the gel. Not sure yet if it’s a dead ant that they entombed, or if it’s just an ant that’s sleeping in a tunnel. Otherwise, the ants are tunneling upwards in one corner again. They now have a tunnel all the way across the bottom connecting four vertical shafts.

We have tunnelage!

Our ants in the AntWorks continue to build their tunnels. They even connected the one that goes behind to the straight vertical tube, giving them a little shortcut. Now they are extending the tunnel that runs along the bottom of the AntWorks.

There’s some discoloration of the gel that the ants deposited at the top. Some may be ants in the top showing through the gel, but I believe some of it is ant poop in the gel. I’m not sure what I can do about that. Every time I take the lid off, the ants scurry to the top and get very excited. I suppose you could put it in the fridge and slow the ants down, but I’m not sure what that would do to the gel.

	Experiment patch

Advertising for AntWorks says that it is "based upon a 2003 NASA Space Shuttle experiment". Well, yes, it is, sort of. The experiment was part of the Space Experiment Module (SEM-14) on board STS 107 (Space Transport System mission 107). Unfortunately, this was the Columbia mission that disintegrated in orbit, so the experiment was not recovered after the flight. It was not exactly a NASA experiment, however. The experiment was part of S*T*A*R*S (Space Technology And Research Students), which allowed students from around the world to fly experiments on the Space Shuttle. The Ants in Space experiment was conducted by the G.W. Fowler High School in Syracuse, NY, which is very cool.

		Image from onboard Columbia showing the ants progress on their tunnels in space
	STARS module prototype

The gel was developed in order to see how ants tunneled in the weightlessness of space compared to ants on earth. If they had used sand or earth for the experiment, the tunnels would have collapsed on the return trip due to the extreme G-forces. It also wouldn’t have allowed them to see the tunnels as clearly. The ants in space were released into the gel to begin tunneling at the same time as ants on earth in an identical module so that they could compare their progress. Although the experiment did not return, they did determine that the ants in space made tunnels faster than those on earth. And that they were a bit more erratic.

Back here on earth our ants’ tunneling has seemed to slow a bit. They also seem to be sticking to the corners and bottom at the moment. Hopefully, they will create more tunnels in the middle soon. This morning I watched one ant work quite hard to bite off a chunk of gel while her sisters kept nudging her from behind. It looked like they were impatient with her progress.

Incidentally, all the ants that you receive are all female. In fact, almost all the ants you ever see are female. Male ants are only created as needed by the queen for reproduction.

Tunneling along the bottom of the AntWorks	You can just see the area where the ants have connected the tunnels as they cross paths