Catholic Answers’ Jimmy Akin and host Cy Kellett take a nostalgic trip back to the 1970s—a time of questionable toys, bizarre TV shows, and zero safety regulations.
Transcript:
Cy: Magikarp sounds like how people say magic harp.
Jimmy: How many people actually say Magikarp these days?
Cy: I think there might have been one in the.
Jimmy: I know, I know. There’s a Magic Flute. You know, there’s an opera about that.
Cy: That’s so funny that you think of the opera and I think of the Saturday morning TV show with. With Jimmy. What was his name?
Pufnstuf
Cy: HR Pufnstuf Yeah.
Jimmy: He’s your friend. When things get tough, I All the.
Cy: Don’t do it, Jimmy. I know you know all the words to the HR Pufnstufsong. I actually am kind of tempted to have you do it, but don’t do it.
Jimmy: Okay? I’ll do whatever you want. I’m a mechanical boy, like a mechanical toy.
Cy: I was enjoying it. I was kind of getting into it.
Cy: By the way, if you’re young and you have never been exposed to HR Pufnstuf, and you don’t know why people our age are weird, because this is what we watched on Saturday morning. Sid and Marty Krofft was a CIA conspiracy against the Mile or something. I don’t know, man. It was crazy. I had forgotten about click clacks.
Jimmy: Yeah, we should explain. Just before we came back on, we were talking about wild stuff from the 70s, and Cy mentioned avocado-colored household appliances.
Cy: Yeah.
Jimmy: And I mentioned all the dangerous games that we had that were then pulled off the market. And we both, at the same time, said lawn darts, which were these. They were about a foot long, as I recall, and they had a metal core with plastic fins, and you’d throw them and aim at targets on the lawn.
Cy: They were knives for children to throw at each other. It was. That’s what it was.
Jimmy: Yeah. And I think adults played lawn darts, too. But when you get kids running around and you’re throwing pointed metal objects, you know, it’s like this is like a little game of javelins with children running around, but also click clacks.
Cy: What a click clack was. It was kind of like a bolo, but there were two plastic spheres, hard plastic, that were connected by a cord. And you’d hold the cord in the middle and you’d swing it back and forth so that the two plastic spheres would clack into each other twice with each swing. And so you’d be going, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.
Cy: And a. Okay. This is a noisemaker, which is going to annoy parents, but kids love noisemakers.
Jimmy: Yeah, but the real problem is you’re gonna hit someone with those hard plastic spheres, you may hit yourself in the head. You may hit another child. You might deliberately throw it at another child to hit them. So. Well, there are some kind of dangerous toys.
Cy: I think that it’s Australians. That there’s some kind of weapon where they put two balls on the end of a string and you throw it.
Jimmy: Oh, that’s a bolo.
Cy: Oh, yeah. Okay. So of course that’s what we tried to do. Be like, hey, run down the street and I’ll try to see if I can get these around your legs. So children are knocking each other’s brains out with heavy plastic balls. The 70s was awesome. It was awesome.
Cy: After this, we’ll throw lawn darts at each other. Amazing, amazing time. But then the fun thing was then you could get in the station wagon with no seat belts and just play sports in the back of the car.
Jimmy: Just in the back of the car.
Cy: Rumble around in the back of the car while you went on a drive with no air conditioning.
Jimmy: Did that all the time. I should correct myself. It’s not bolos, but bolas that are the throwing weapon that you could use to, like, if you’re a gaucho in South America, you could, you know, catch an animal by throwing a bola at it.
Jimmy: We also had another thing that I really. Look now. We had some toys that got taken off the market that I don’t think they needed to like. There was one toy that I really liked that was. It was called a Thing Maker. And what it was was a. It was a little light bulb powered oven. Basically. They had the Easy-Bake Oven for girls, and they’d make little things that were.
Cy: Was that for girls?
Jimmy: I was not aware of that.
Cy: Well, I love Easy-Bake Oven.
Jimmy: All right, go ahead.
Jimmy: Primarily for girls, but they also had an equivalent for boys that were primarily for boys where you could take these metal trays and pour goop in them. And they had these bottles of goop and then you put that into the Thing Maker and it would heat it up and cause the goop to solidify as this kind of rubber. And you’d make these little creatures. And they had like Creeple People was one of them. And it was these little creepy looking characters that you could make.
Jimmy: And I loved playing with the Thing Maker and the Creepy Crawlers and Creeple People that I made with it. But because those little metal trays got hot, they ended up taking it off the market. And I think that was maybe a little. I mean, it’s not meant for 2-year-olds or 4-year-olds. But I think older children could play with that without it being a problem. Once you learn, you gotta have a little patience and restraint while it cools down.
Cy: Children can deal with heat. Like sometimes we under. Like for all of human history, children have been dealing with fire and heat. Like, if you’re responsible, they can deal with it.
How are they gonna learn if they don’t burn their fingers once in a while?
Jimmy: You know, there also was another that I really liked that was. This would have been late 60s or very, very early 70s. But there was a kind of plastic goop. It was thicker than the goop you’d use with the Thing Maker, which was. Had a consistency before it was baked. Kind of like glue.
Cy: And then you make a frog or something out of it.
Jimmy: You’d be all kinds of cool stuff, little monster something. But there was another kind of goop that came in a tube and this goop was thicker and more rubbery just out of the tube. And what you. And it was all kinds of different psychedelic colors. And what you do is you’d squeeze out a little bit of this goop onto the end of a straw and then you take the straw and blow into it and the goop would inflate and you would have your own custom-built goop balloon with an irregular shape and all these psychedelic swirly colors on it.
Jimmy: And then you pinch it off and you could play with your balloon. And I thought that was really cool too. But apparently the goop was toxic or something the way they made it.
Cy: Get over it.
Jimmy: Oh, sorry. Yeah. And so they ended up pulling it off the market. But I thought it was fun.
Cy: Yeah. And we. Did you, did you ever get the opportunity as a child to make a tie-dye shirt? This was also a big thing. You get a. Magically a white T-shirt turns into an actual fashion statement. Like it was a wonderful adventure making the tie-dye T-shirt.
Jimmy: I didn’t have that as a child. My parents were a little too square for that.
Cy: Oh yeah.
Jimmy: But I do actually have a tie-dye shirt now. But these are ones I bought, not ones I made. I first got a tie-dye shirt because I thought they were looking interesting. But I first got one when I was in grad school in college, at least this first one I remember.
And I had had some toe surgery for an ingrown toenail and I needed to wear Birkenstock sandals after the toe surgery. And no, there’s a method to my madness because in grad school, I was assigned as a teaching assistant. And I had, I had, you know, longish hair and I had a beard. It wasn’t as long as it is now, but I had longish hair and a beard.
And I was assigned as a teaching assistant in grad school in the philosophy department. And so I was assigned to teach Introduction to Philosophy. And I did very well at it. I had my faculty, you know, student evaluations were top of the department, and they actually gave me an award for teaching.
And I remember one day one of my fellow grad students who was also a teaching assistant, he couldn’t make it to one of his classes and asked me to sub for him. And he was not the clearest communicator. And so I went and I taught his class. And this was towards the beginning of the semester and I had, like, several students come up to me after the class eagerly saying, are you our new instructor now?
Cy: They understood you.
Jimmy: So. But one of the challenges, because I wanted as part of this course to do Intro to Philosophy, I wanted to cover philosophy of religion. And I wanted, and this was a state school, this was University of Arkansas, so this is not a religious school. And I wanted to be able to present religious content in a way that would not trip sensitivities for students that were, you know, hostile to Christianity or things like that, because, you know, young people.
And so what I did was I got out my Birkenstock sandals from my toe surgery and I bought a tie-dye T-shirt and I put on the tie-dye T-shirt. And then I go in and teach philosophy of religion. And I can talk about religion without looking like Jerry Falwell. And it worked.
Cy: Yeah, yeah. There are advantages to being a hippie. You can talk about stuff that the guy with the tie on can’t talk about.
Let’s take a break. The 70s was both better and worse than, and now I’m recalling better than people remember it. It had some. Yeah, it was a real mix. Not so good for Patty Hearst. But for the rest of us, there were click clacks.
We’ll be right back with more Jimmy Akin right after this on Catholic Answers Live.