Snoopy vs. the Red Baron Board Game
I’ll finish out the week with one last reference to Snoopy and the Peanuts gang. One of the board games I had as a child was the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. In it you launched marbles down a ramp through a replica of the Red Baron’s airplane. These marbles would fly off the end of the ramp towards Snoopy’s doghouse. The object of the game was to open up the doghouse by lifting it on its hinge, and catching as many marbles as you could. Your opposition would then take their turn at it. The one with the most marbles was the winner. Not very much to it at all, but it was one of the few instances where you could have a toy of Snoopy as the great World War I flying ace. I haven’t seen this actual game for years until 2004. I was working in Washington DC for a week, and had some time off to head over the the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. While touring the museum I came across an exhibit based on the Red Baron. In the display case was none other than a complete, original copy of the board game I grew up with in the 70′s.
Personal Media Device (Back in the Day)
Since yesterday’s post about the Peanuts Gym, I thought I would carry on today with the same Peanuts gang theme. Before I do, I want to mention that Ben uses an iPod Touch that I acquired when I bought my new Mac last year. I gave it to him & filled it with TV shows, cartoons, some of my iPhone games, etc. Last night he was sitting there watching the Clone Wars movie for the umpteenth time on the Touch. It made me remember what we had for a personal media player back when I was a kid.
Back in 1975 I received the Snoopy Drive-In. This toy took cartridges with 8mm film encased in them, and played them back on magnified viewscreen. It’s basically industrial audiovisual put into an attractive kid-friendly shell. You had to manually crank the film cartridge to make the film go. There was no sound to these films either. I think I had 2 Peanuts gang movies to go with the Snoopy Drive-In.
This is what personal media was to me as a child as my 10 year old proceeds to switch from watching the Clone Wars to a Discovery Channel show I downloaded for him about Apollo 13. Boy have times changed.
Don’t forget. You can go portable, too. When I didn’t want to be bogged down with the Snoopy Drive-In, I could switch my bulky cartridge to the Snoopy Movie Time. See the images below.
Peanuts Gym
Hi all. The Retroist over at www.retroist.com
posted yesterday about the Snoopy Sno Cone Maker. It got me thinking about other Snoopy toys that I grew up with in the 70′s. One particularly came to mind. Jump in the wayback machine and head back to 1971. That’s the year the Peanuts Gym came out. I always called it the Snoopy Swing Set, but apparently that’s not the official name. The gym consisted of a slide, standard swing, face to face swing, and a motorcycle-style swing with a plastic propeller on it depicting Snoopy’s flying ace biplane. Also, at the top of the swing was a plastic board with a hole cut into it depicting Charlie Brown and his ball glove. You could throw a ball through it for target practice. I was never good at that.
What, if any, kind of themed swing set did you grow up with?
***An addendum to this post***
Just wanted to update this post a bit. In keeping with the theme of the captainscast website, I decided to span the generation gap between father and son. I talked to my son Ben regarding the Peanuts gym and what I grew up with for a swing set. I am pretty proud of this aluminum structure. His reaction to it was lukewarm at best. He comes from the newer generation that has been raised with Little Tikes plastic super-fortresses, or the even more impressive wood-built playsets with rock-climbing walls, rope swings, and motorized gun turrets. Just kidding about the gun-turrets.
