Saturday, February 19, 2022

Plastic pups, inchworms, and marvelous mustangs: ride 'em, kids!


This plastic pup isn't up to the standards of OTHER plastic pups of the day: Gaylord (a basset hound who SLOWLY walked up the stairs) or Digger the Dog, built on a similar model but faster-moving. The sight of all these spastic plastic fake canines juddering along the street like so many rickety old card tables is quite bizarre. You can give it commands, which is pretty strange, given that you are commanding pieces of molded plastic jointed together. 


OK then, I wasn't going to do this, but here it is, GAYLORD, the more realistic fake dog who actually DID things. Not many things, but things. I wanted one of these, of course, but never got one. All I remember getting was a Dino the Dinosaur from The Flintstones, and I am not even sure it worked.


Digger the Dog was significant because it had a Mom who asked where her tot was going, and he answers in a nasal Queens voice, "A walk with Diggah, Mahm!" Sounds like a young Christopher Walken, who actually did do commercials back in the day. But that was way longer ago. I wonder sometimes what ever happened to these kids - I guess, they grew up and maybe even died. What a thought.


And since we're dealing with plastic toys, we can't leave out Inchworm, upon which you bounced up and down and hardly got anywhere. The theme song is pretty strange, because it seems to be, "Inchworm, GOD KNOWS/I take you with me everywhere I go/Inchworm, I'm telling you true/Inchworm, I love you!" God knows??


OK then, one thing is leading to another, and this one - I KNEW I wanted this one, because I would get on just about anything and pretend it was a horse. Marvel the Mustang has a very strange jingle: "No winding, no batteries", followed by a little girl saying, "What horse do?" Kind of a grammatical nightmare, but I guess it meant "What horse has batteries, after all?" Since I never had a Marvel, I 'd ride strange things. Once it was a stair railing outside a fundamentalist church, which drew a few stairs, oops, I mean stares. Once it was a sawhorse. And, I swear, I took the legs off a metal TV tray, climbed inside it, and pretended THAT was a horse.


But there's one more, Blaze the Galloping Horse, a knockoff of Marvel the Mustang. I wanted this one and never got it either. It was back to the TV trays.