Thursday, December 6, 2012

Toys of Christmas Past - Part 4 - Skittle Bowl


Skittle Bowl - Aurora Toys - 1967 - 1975



The next item on Memory Lane is Skittle Bowl and the rest of the Skittle family.



This was a bowling game. The ball was attached to a chain suspended off a long pole. You aimed and released the ball and it would swing in an arc like trajectory to hopefully hit the skittle pins.
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Scoring was not done automatically, you had to do it by hand using pencil and a paper score sheet. There were even instructions on how to properly score bowling.

The game of skittles is actually centuries old and is still a popular pub game in certain sections of England.



Later Aurora introduced other Skittle games (with Don Adams of "Get Smart" fame as the pitchman) these included

  • Skittle Pool
  • Skittle Score Ball
  • Skittle Poker
  • Skittle Horseshoes (not kidding, Really ?)
  • Skittle Tac-Toe
  • Skittle Bingo
  • Skittle Tennis
  • Olympic Size Skittle Bowl (6 feet high ! Yikes ! )




Here are some classic Don Adams commercials associate with the Skittle games

Skittle Pool


Skittle Tac-Toe


Skittle Bingo


Aurora also introduced another line of toys based on the use of a pendulum. The ones that I can remember were "Pendulum Pool" and "Pendulum Curve Bowl", yet another bowling game.





and yet another Don Adams commercial.



Skittle Bowl was an extremely fun toy, and I still own an original 1967 version of this game.

Like many other toy companies of the 60's Aurora no longer exists

2 comments:

  1. Dig out your Skittle Bowl set and enter the tournament...

    https://www.facebook.com/events/1414611595456704/

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  2. I still have the 2 player battery operated Skittle Shootout that needs work. A cool moving target that moves across a playing field as both players on opposite sides try to hit the flip-flopping target with their balls so that when the target reaches the end of the playing field it is flipped to the opponent's side. The target was pulled using 16mmm movie film!

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