Tag: toys

Halloween 2020: Use this Candy Cannon to hand out candy safely

You could either join all the mouth breathers trying to figure out how to disseminate candy safely this year or you could get with the program and buy this candy cannon.

And if you have a dog, bonus. Because it’s not actually a candy cannon: it’s a $20 dog tennis ball blaster from Nerf.

Now, I’ve tested this thing with various types of candy. Good candy. Like, name brand candy. Don’t be a cheapskate. Don’t be that house in the neighborhood. Here’s what works well.

Fun-size Snickers: great. Fun-size Milky-Way: also great. M&Ms: very cool if they come out right. Like some sort of majestic helicopter blade that melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

Kit Kat. Not good. Not good at all. Do not – I repeat – do not shoot Kit Kat’s out of this thing. They’re fragile. What should do with Kit Kats? Set them aside and shove them down your gullet on November 1st like a normal person. Kit Kats are delicious. Keep them for yourself.

The Candy Cannon – er, Nerf Tennis Ball Blaster – costs $20. You can buy it here.

 

The ahead-of-its-time Barbie Digital Nail Printer

In 2009, the Barbie Digital Nail Printer was ahead of its time. That was the first thing I learned.

The second thing I’ve learned, in retrospect, is that if you wanted your videos to get watched in 2009, you should have been reviewing Mattel stuff.

Case in point: at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, which I covered when I was with CrunchGear, the video above of me half-assedly demonstrating a product pulled in the second most video views – roughly 46,000 – of our entire time at the show.

The most views – at 126,000 – goes to the Mattel Mindflex video we did. It was some sort of game featuring a ball that you controlled with your mind. In 2009.

So that, plus a printer that printed designs directly on your fingernails. Both by Mattel. Both in 2009. Both way ahead of their respective times.

For a bit more context, we also interviewed Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine at the show. That video got 13,000 views. Mattel wins.

The Barbie Digital Nail printer, sadly, is no longer with us but you can take a closer look at an old one in all its glory on Amazon.

And just to underscore how ahead of its time this thing was, current digital nail printers on Amazon are asking in the high hundreds to low thousands of dollars.

This Barbie video itself is not great – poor sound, shaky camerawork – but it goes to show that you don’t need a perfect video to drive views.