At Flashbak: You’ll Burn Your Fingers! Remembering Mattel’s Strange Change Toy

My latest article at Flashbak remembers the great (but finger-scalding...) toy: The Strange Change Machine (Mattel; 1967).

Here's a snippet and the url: (http://flashbak.com/youll-burn-your-fingers-remembering-mattels-strange-change-toy-1967-30791/ )

"File this one under great toys that kids of the twenty-first century would nver be permitted to play with. 

Why?

Because Mattel’s Strange Change Toy Featuring the Lost World (1967) is, essentially, a hot plate. 

Here, a child at play takes tiny square “capsules” and deposits them on the hote plate (preferably with tweezers) as it grows hot. 

After a while, the heat makes the capsules unfold into the forms of strange monsters and creatures.

Then, after the shapes have formed, you put the monsters in a “compression chamber” (really a vise, operated by a wheel) and squeeze them back into their tiny capsule form.

Not as fun as Minecraft you say?

Well, I grew up with this toy, though it arrived on the market a few years before I was born.  Still, my sister and I spent many hours burning our fingers while trying to help the capsules form into giant ants, or dangerous dinosaurs...."