You Are What You Were. Celebrate Retro Pop Culture At Retroland.
Some say it’s hard to keep a good man down. Nothing more true could be said about Army Men: green plastic soldiers fixed to a molded base, which stand defiant in the face of oppression, tyranny, and latent childhood aggression - as they have for over fifty years. Let's take a look back at these valiant toy servicemen from yesteryear.
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More than a half-century before anyone would ever know what a video game was, pinball games reigned supreme in the local arcade and enjoyed a long and colorful history that continues today. But another game emerged back in the 30s, one called a “pitch and bat.” Unlike traditional pinball, these games operated by firing a ball from the center of the machine. Players would hit the ball with the help of some mechanical apparatus and “bat” the ball back towards a plethora of targets and indentations within the playing surface.
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When it comes to throwing around a virtual pigskin, there are a plethora of electronic options available today that simulate the game of football right down to the minute details. The grunting players look remarkably similar to their real-world counterparts, the stadiums are replicated to the very last detail, and the gameplay options allow the gamer to do virtually anything that can be done in a real game. Prior to these technological advances, however, electronic football games of the past couldn't rely on realism as a selling point, but they made up for it with a healthy dose of sheer fun, and some of these games are still beloved to this day. Let's take a look at the formative years of football games and the quirky gameplay that forever etched them into our collective memory.
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For those who wanted a taste of the strategic side of football before they were old enough to actually manage a team of players on the field, came an ingenious way to learn the skills necessary to carry your very own clipboard someday as an offensive/defensive coordinator or head coach. Foto-Electric Football provided all the training you needed - *Bucket of Gatorade not included. Today, we take a look back at this memorable game from yesteryear.
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It sounds like a story right out of Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and it probably contains more fiction than fact - but it’s still too good not to repeat for old time’s sake. In Burma, there lived a poor little shoeless girl named Pogo. Her bare feet made it too difficult to make her daily trek, along the muddy roads filled with jagged rocks, so she could pray at the local temple. Her father finally came upon a solution to her dilemma and fashioned a jumping stick so that she could propel herself over these various obstacles and strengthen her soul without sacrificing her soles. A worldly traveler named George Hansburg happened to witness this miraculous jumping stick in action during one of his trips and decided that the rest of the world could also benefit from Pogo’s jumping stick.
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