BS: Products that Never Caught On

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 06:17 PM

Noone has mentioned the Sinclair C5

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: GUEST,Elaine
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 05:55 PM

I must be the young one here (as usual), but I remember Pop Rocks (candy that fizzed on contact with saliva and made popping sounds--is this what Fizzies were?) and Suga Duga (colored, flavored sugar. Yep, that's it, purple grape sugar, red strawberry sugar, etc. I used to eat the stuff strait...)

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: Little Hawk
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 05:45 PM

Speaking of which, Amos...

I walked into Zellers (Canada's version of K-Mart) the other day, and saw a 1/6 scale action figure of....

GERRY GARCIA!!!

I kid you not. Gerry Garcia, complete with his guitar, his faded jeans, his beard, his belly, etc. Not only that, the damn thing really looks astoundinly like old Gerry in his elder days, although I think they trimmed a little weight off him. He's got a fairly big gut, but I believe it was bigger in real life.

This is bizarre. He's in there among figures of Spiderman, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jar Jar Binks, hockey players, weird monsters from cartoon shows, and so on. He's the only musician on the shelf.

How could this happen? And why? The mind boggles.

He looks so cool, I think I might just buy one. :-)

You can, by the way, get 1/6 scale figures of the guys in Spinal Tap (David, Nigel, and Derek), but only by ordering on the Net. They also look surprisingly accurate. Derek comes with a little foil-wrapped cucumber to stick in his pants, just like in the movie.

- LH

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: Genie
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 05:38 PM

Tweets, and Jerry, to me "Fizz" tasted like flavored Alka Seltzer!

Then there were the products that didn't do so hot the first time around but became quite popular when revived and redesigned a decade or two later. The skateboard is one example. (The other one slipped my mind. Stayed up nearly all night to watch the Perseid meteors and just finished a brew, so I'm off to dreamland.)

Oh, I just remembered the other one -- self-tanning lotions. The ones introduced ca. 1960 made you turn orange and smell really funny and didn't wash off evenly.

As for things that never really caught on, how about 3-D movies (with the funny glasses)?

Genie

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 05:37 PM

It works the other way too - for example the genius who realised that that batch of totally useless paper glue could become "post its", and totally changed every office environment into something a lot more habitable and squalid.

Maybe if they'd aimed the licorice popsicles at a goth and vampire oriented youth market they'd have done better. The thing is to recognise the drawback to a product as a potential selling point.

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: Clinton Hammond
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 05:17 PM

Hubba Bubba was GREAT bubble gum!

I'm pretty sure I saw it in the store a few days ago as well...

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: Amos
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 05:05 PM

It just boggles my mind, sometimes, to think of the lives, the hours of mental work, that goes into conceiving of, designing, planning, prototyping, refining, manufacturing, distributing, selling, and advertising some of the absolute shlock crap that is to be found in the market place. Ceramic and plastic models of objects that never existed--molded cherubs with painted cheeks--plastic doodads which need batteries and last an average of 1.33 days---plaster painted replicas of spoons or puppies or whathaveyou---there is so much pure crap out there, and at such a cost of sweat and thought!! And these guys (if guys they are) go home at the end of the day satisfied that they have "earned" their pay. Just mind-boggling!


A

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: Little Hawk
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 03:18 PM

I've got some, Deda. The back yard is full of them. I'll sell 'em to ya cheap! PM me at once...

- LH

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: Deda
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 03:14 PM

I doubt you could find a pet rock any more. Hard to believe you ever could!

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: GUEST,Melani
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 03:13 PM

Once, on a school field trip, we dumped a bunch of Fizzies into a stream just before the teacher came along to lecture on the local flora and fauna. He never did figure it out.

Subject: RE: BS: Products that Never Caught On
From: Little Hawk
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 02:53 PM

8-tracks didn't do terribly well, did they? Then there were Beta movies (as opposed to VHS).

There was the notorious Edsel automobile, now a hot collector's item.

There were some dreadful movies: "Heaven's Gate", "The Postman", "Amerika", etc... (funny, Kristofferson was in two of those).

Furbys didn't do all that well either, did they, considering the hype...

- LH

Subject: RE: Products that Never Caught On
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 12:16 PM

I remember that stuff, Tweets... like drinking warm carbonated Kool-Aid.

Jerry

Subject: RE: Products that Never Caught On
From: Penny G.
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 11:22 AM

Fizzies---late 50's----instant soft drink

Subject: Products that Never Caught On
From: Jerry Rasmussen
Date: 13 Aug 02 - 11:13 AM

As long as there are couple of threads on new cola flavors, we might as well add some not-so-fondly remembered products that were introduced with fanfare,that flopped miserably.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Licorice popsicles(turned your mouth, tongue and lips black and tasted terrible.) Now that I think of it, you looked like the women who wear black lipstick after you ate one.)
Hubba Bubba (a super-sickeningly sweet bubble gum) soda... pink, yet.
Peanut butter ice cream... sounds better than it tasted

For non-food products,:

Liquid solder... airplane glue with silver flakes in it... worked just like airplane glue, but you couldn't use it to solder
Spray can plastic shoe polish... introduced briefly in the 50's... just spray it on and your shoes looked they were patent leather. Put you shoes on and walk down town and they looked like patent leather shoes with cracks in the leather. Considering how popular "crackle" is as a finish in decorating these days, maybe this product can make a comeback... "crackle" shoe polish.

Anybody got any other product disasters they remember fondly. We can probably add blue Pepsi to that right now, and start getting nostalgic. :-)

Jerry