Electric Football

I recently read the book "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid", by Bill Bryson. What a hilarious read. Listening to the audio book while riding my bike I wonder what people thought when they saw me break into a laugh for no apparent reason. I found it particularly amusing since it covered the author's childhood in the 50's and early 60's, so I could relate to so much of what he wrote about. I'm sure I can harvest several blog posts by this read, today's being the first.

About 1960 my brother and I received an electric football game as a Christmas gift, one like the photo below:



This was the era before computers and video games, so we are talking state of the art high tech for 1960, and Barry and I were so excited. The actual playing of the game was not so easy, though. You would line up your players into offensive and defensive formations, then the offense would decide which player had the ball, and turn on the electric vibrator. The players had these plastic tabs on their feet bent in such a way that they moved forward. Generally. But not always.

When a defensive player touched the ball carrying player then he was down. The offense could opt for a forward pass, and a small spring device was used to fling the small felt football towards a downfield player, but it was very rare that the ball would hit the player for a completion.

When I think back on the experience it all seems a tad ludicrous. Did we actually enjoy playing the game? I don't know, I'll have to ask my brother Barry what he remembers about it.

I got this from wikipedia:

In Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir," the author describes electric football as "The worst toy of the decade [the 1950s], possibly the worst toy ever built...it took forever to set up each play because the men were so fiddly and kept falling over, and because you argued continuously with your opponent about what formations were legal and who got to position the final man...it hardly mattered how they were set up because electric football players never went in the direction intended. In practice what happened was that half the players instantly fell over and lay twitching violently as if suffering from some extreme gastric disorder, while the others streamed off in as many different directions as there were upright players before eventually clumping together in a corner, where they pushed against the unyielding sides like victims of a nightclub fire at a locked exit. The one exception to this was the running back who just trembled in place for five or six minutes, then slowly turned and went on an unopposed glide toward the wrong end zone until knocked over with a finger on the two-yard line by his distressed manager, occasioning more bickering." (hardcover version, page 113)