TV News Graphic Fails

More Than Just A Bra......

.....just lift the collar and it's also a hang glider.....

Aqua Dots

 

It seemed like a good idea.....

A kids art toy that made art out of little beads (aka "dots") and it was 2007 Toy of The Year, what could go wrong?

Well, everything.

The beads were manufactured in China and when combined with water, the chemicals did more than make art. When little kids swallowed the colourful dots that looked like candy (as little kids tend to do), and when mixed with water (or saliva) they combined to make what is known as GBH, infamously known as a "date rape" drug. Several kids were hospitalized after ingesting them. Fortunately no fatalities.

They were immediately recalled and parents rightfully began to question toys made in China and to no one's surprise, the vast majority of American toys are manufactured in China. Which is out of the jurisdiction of American regulators and where American toy corporations manufacture most of their toys because of the extremely cheap labour in manufacturing.

The product was reintroduced as Bindeez, Beados and Pixos using a non-toxic formula that was coated with a bitter tasting substance to discourage ingestion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bindeez

Dr. Pepper Gum

The Thompson Twins Vinyl Video Game

 The Thompson Twins were a 1980's pop group, best known for their hits "In The Name Of Love", "Lies", "Doctor Doctor" and "King For A Day"

(....and just for the record, none of them are twins and neither of them are named or surnamed Thompson....)

They were among a handful of '80s pop groups (including Journey, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and The Stranglers) that had their own video games. In the case of The Thompson Twins, their game came on a vinyl flexi-disc in Quicksilva magazine for the ZX Spectrum computer in the UK (and the Timex Sinclair ccomputer in the USA) Both were short lived home computers (as most were in the '80s.)

You had to play this record on your turntable and record it onto a cassette tape. Then play it on the external cassette drive of the computer (sold seperately) and wait for it to load up. Which took a good 10 minutes.

And when you were done, you had a playable game.

The graphics were horrible (but this was also 1984.) and it was pretty much a very lousy text-based video game. But in 1984, this was state of the art.