Bing Bang Boing
by Ideal - circa 1971-2
This was such a cool nerd toy !
This toy came out in the era of the Ideal ball bearing games. It's tough to explain, so first take a look at this.
Original Ideal TV add for Bing Bang Boing
Essentially you had a bunch of small drums with a rubber surface stretched over the top and ball bearings. You would launch the ball bearings one by one and they would "bounce" off the drum onto the next drum and so on.
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| An original Bing Bang Boing on ebay. Notice that the rubber which stretches over the drums is gone (deteriorated) |
It took real skill and patients to set the drums up correctly so that you could have the ball bearing bounce on all 6 or 8 drums and finally into the collection chamber, where they would then be transported back again to the launcher. While not really saying so, this was essentially a math an science toy, relying on intuition, trial and error and mathematical angles in order to set the drums up properly to have the toy function at all.
Alas, the rubber on the drums would stretch and rip rendering the drum useless. I tried using balloons as a replacement, but this did not work too well. Sets still exist today, but the rubber for the drums have dried up.
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| Original add for Bing Bang Boing. At $9.95 it was a "steal" |
Could you even imagine a toy like this selling today ! ? !......
Think about it, a toy with ball bearings....
15 seconds after it hit the market it would be recalled.
It's a wonder any of us are alive to tell about it today.... :-D
We lead such dangerous lives back then !
A great toy for the engineer/mathematician in all of us :^D
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