Dave’s Cool Toys Blog

Rainbow Flibpook is Back!

They’re Back! Yes, we have Rainbow in Your Hand Flipbooks back in stock. We got a bunch in, but they sold out pretty quickly last time, so get yours before they’re sold out again.

Dave’s Cool Toys may be the only place in the world you can get the Rainbow in Your Hand Flipbooks at this time. The publisher in Japan is even out of them. So when we are sold-out it may be a while until we can get more in.

I’ll be posting a video of this on YouTube shortly, so watch for it.

A great video for us older folk who remember some of the classic video games.

"Pixels" by Patric Dean .

My friend, Rich, recently alerted me to the coolest flipbook he found on the web. I loved it and had to have one for myself, but they were only available from one website in Japan. Since Dave’s Cool Toys only sells toys that I think are very cool, I imported the flipbook from Japan and as near as I can tell, we are the only place in the US that they are currently available.

	Masashi Kawamura

Rainbow in Your Hand Flipbook

The flipbook is called Rainbow in Your Hand. Most flipbooks create the illusion of a little movie when you flip them. Rainbow in Your Hand instead creates the 3-D illusion of a rainbow floating above the book when you flip it.

Each page is printed front and back with the visible color spectrum on a black background. When you flip it as shown in the photo, the flipping pages with the image of the spectrum are what creates the illusion as they fly past.

It’s very creative and was the brainchild of Masashi Kawamura, a Japanese art director. He created it as a personal project. Rainbow in Your Hand also won the NY Art Directors Club Silver Cube award.

It seems that Rainbow in Your Hand works best against a black background as shown in the photo. I’ll get a video up on YouTube as soon as I can shoot it.

Our best selling Big Bang Cannon

What happened to our cannons?!

If you were on our site recently looking for Big Bang Cannons, you might not have been able to find them. A helpful customer called to say that they were not displaying.

Well, I’m not entirely sure what happened, but for some reason they all disappeared.

The good news is that they are back now. So if you had wanted to purchase a Big Bang Cannon and couldn’t find them, they are back now. If you haven’t seen them, check them out.

Sorry!

pCubee 3-D display

3-D is very hot right now. Lots of movies are coming out in 3-D. There are TV’s coming that are 3-D. There’s a ton of 3-D stuff online. I even found a 3-D tattoo! (although not a very good one).

But this 3-D device is very cool. It was created by a group at the University of British Columbia and it’s called pCubee. It’s a 3-D interactive display that doesn’t use any kind of 3-D glasses. It has 5 LCD panels arranged into a cube (there is no display on the bottom) and it uses "head-coupled perspective rendering" and the principle of motion parallax to render a 3-D environment inside the cube that you can interact with by moving the cube or "poking" things in the cube with a stylus.

The way I understand it, it uses the position of your head to alter the image as you move the cube so that you perceive 3-D from the way the image changes as your view of it moves.

Unfortunately, it is only a prototype at this point, but hopefully we’ll see some cool game system in the future. In the meantime, check out the video below.

Little Tikes Smash N Mash Picnic Sand Toys

Toys R Us is having a Buy One Get One Free sale on Little Tikes toys. Buy one Little Tikes toy and get a second of equal or less value for free up to $29.99. This offer expires 3/27/10, so you’ve got to hurry!

And, if you order $100 or more, they are also offering free shipping (excluding video game hardware, software & accessories).

Choose from lawn mowers, spiral sprinklers, dolls, strollers, bath toys, toddler swings and much more. Hurry as this offer expires 03/27/2010.

Measuring snakes on my desk

Sometimes my job is very surreal. This morning I find myself measuring rubber snakes.

The other day we had an order for the Amazon Tree Boa (my favorite of the snakes we sell). When the customer received it they felt that it was far smaller than was on our website. The description on our site lists the guy as 56 inches long (which is what the manufacturer says). The customer measured it at 50 inches.

I try to be as accurate as possible in describing our toys and I never just use the description the manufacturer uses because I don’t like "puffery" (with apologies to Domino’s) and don’t feel they are always adequate. So I do research, I check out the toy myself, sometimes I play with it, and I write my own descriptions.

Well, after measuring the Amazon Tree Boa myself, I found he fell a little short of 56 inches. Yes, it’s true, I’m not perfect. I measured him at about 51 inches from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail. I used string to measure every twist and turn in his body, then measured the string.

So, this morning I have updated the description with a slightly more accurate one.

And I spent my morning measuring a plastic boa constrictor.

Humunga Stache mustache for dogs

This is one of the greatest dog toys I’ve seen. If it really works as it’s supposed to.

It’s the Humunga Stache Dog Toy. The idea is that your dog holds the ball in his mouth and it creates the very funny illusion that he has a comical cartoon handlebar mustache.

Yes, your dog can look like Snidely Whiplash.

The manufacturer warns that it is not a chew toy and is only a fetch toy (I assume because dogs could chew off the curly-cues on the ends). They also come in different sizes to accommodate most dogs.

Humunga Tongue chew toy

And, if the Humunga Stache isn’t funny enough for you, you can get the equally comical Humunga Tongue Rubber Dog Toy It operates on the same basic principle, with a ball that dogs pick up in their mouth, giving the illusion that they have a cartoon tongue hanging out of their mouth.

This is just too funny.

	Rear Gear

Not weird enough for you? Then maybe you need Rear Gear butt covers for your cat or dog. Yes, you heard that right. It’s a little cover that clips onto your pets tail, hanging down and covering up their butt so you don’t need to see it when they are running around. I swear I am not making this up.

Mousetrap (game)

After my last post of the video my buddy and I made, I thought I’d follow it with another video I just discovered that I really liked. This is OK Go’s video of their song This Too Shall Pass. They created a very complex Rube Goldberg-like machine that took up two stories of a warehouse in LA. It was built by the band and members of Syyn Labs and took several months and about 60 people to create It was shot on February 11 and 12, 2010. It took about 30 people an hour to reset the machine after each run. It took 60 takes to get just the right video with most of those takes only lasting about 30 seconds till something went wrong, stopping the production.

This video brought back memories of my childhood and the game Mousetrap
. In retrospect, I have no idea how you were supposed to play the actual game. We would just build the mousetrap and activate it.

It also brought back memories of the old MTV and some of the great music videos they used to play back when they had something to do with music.

Be sure to watch the video below in high def if your computer can handle it. You wouldn’t want to miss any details. Why are the band members wearing coveralls with paint spatters on them? Watch to the end to find out. Scroll down after the video for more (spoilers).

This video is even more amazing when you consider that there are a few points where the "machine" is synced with the music (the drinking glasses, window shades, etc.). And, did you notice, it’s one single camera shot (that’s some cameraman!).

A few details I noticed (spoilers)…

The pile of smashed TV’s, presumable from practice runs.
A previous paint-splattered background paper on a wall with 4 band member outlines.
A few moments when you can catch the guys running to their next position (just after the typewriter between the wooden background, just before the file cabinet falls).
A cameo appearance of their famous "treadmill" video.

Oh. Yes. And it’s not a bad song either.

Just before posting this I discovered a "making of" video series! Here they are…

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.

Here’s a new Toy Story 3 Trailer. Be sure to watch in HD if you can. Enjoy!

TV Hat being worn by one of the girls in their booth at Toy Fair

We made our annual trek to New York City this past Sunday to attend Toy Fair. We saw lots of very cool things, many toys that are not a good fit for Dave’s Cool Toys, some toys that I don’t quite get, and some that never should have seen the light of day. I also saw some "must have’s", which we’ll be carrying in the near future.

One item we saw that I think fits into the "really?" category is the "TV Hat". Also, apparently, called the "As Seen On TV Hat". This is a visor that you wear. You put your iPod Touch, or iPhone into the far end of the huge visor, turn it on, put the TV Hat on your head, and watch movies through the Magnification Lens positioned in front of the iPod.

OK. As I see it, there are several problems with this device. The first and most obvious is you look like a dork wearing it. The second, is it doesn’t seem to stay on your head right. Third, the magnifying lens didn’t seem to work very well. Fourth, why do you need it? It’s not like watching an iPod is that much work. And the visor covers your field of view, so you can’t really do anything while you’re watching it. As you can see in the picture of the girl selling them at Toy Fair, she is supporting it while simultaneously holding the part around her head taut, indicating that it really doesn’t even fit right. It also seems a little too difficult to get set up and get your iPod or iPhone back out to use it.

	The inside workings of the TV Hat showing the Magnifying Lens.

The instruction sheet for the TV Had says "Do not use this viewing device if you are subject to claustrophobia, panic in tight spaces, have spinal or neck injuries, or with heavy phones". It also warns "Do no use while driving, bicycling, running, or in motion". "…discontinue use if you experience neck fatigue, blurry vision, or any discomfort". "Prolonged use may cause fatigue".

The TV Hat retails for $19.95, so at least you won’t go broke buying one.

The TV Hat did have one suggested use that might be worth it. It might be useful for video producers for use with a video camera monitor in bright sunlight when you can’t see the camera viewer. I’m not sure how you would use your iPod for that, but if you can get it to work, it might be useful for that.

Many, many years ago I had a great little toy. It was a small top that you spun on a black base. It didn’t float like the Levitron. But it had a great trick of it’s own. It would spin for days! My friends thought it was the coolest thing when they would see it in my room (yes, we were dorks). But it WAS amazing. The top didn’t just sit there spinning it bopped around on the base and sometimes it would spiral around toward the center.

Many years later, when I started Dave’s Cool Toys, this cool little top was on my list of toys I wanted to carry, but I couldn’t find it. But recently, one of our suppliers began to offer it and we recently added Top Secret to our line of cool toys. Of course, the minute they came in, I took one for myself and it’s been spinning on-an-off ever since. My kids love it.

HOW IT WORKS: No, it’s not perpetual motion. It cheats by using a hidden battery and circuitry.

This is how the manufacturer explains it on their website:
"Top Secret" consists of a spinning top with a radially oriented magnetic field and an associated base that houses a conductive coil. When the top spins past the center of the base, its changing magnetic field induces a current in the coil which momentarily opens the switch to the battery resulting in powering up the electromagnet. The electromagnet then delivers enough torque to the spinning top to allow it to speed up and spin away from the center. Since the electromagnet is only engaged when the top crosses near the center of the base, one 9 volt battery can last for over a week of continual use!

I do not know too much about electronics, and my eyes sort-of glazed over when I read this. But, here’s the way I understand it. There’s an electromagnet in the base run by a 9 volt battery and a magnet in the top. The base is concave, so it slopes down in the middle. The electromagnet turns on when the top gets near the center (when it’s slowing down). This turns on the electromagnet, which spins the top faster and sends it on it’s way until the next time.

My friend Richard added "it’s exactly like a brushless DC motor where the armature is free to roam about." Yes, Richard was one of those dorky friends. Still is.

More importantly, it’s a very cool toy. Check it out here.

And check out a short video I made of it below.

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!