Better Than An iPhone

That's great that I can watch entire episodes of Bones or Ugly Betty on my cell phone...no, really it is! But I'd trade all the technology in the world to get my hands on one of these Color TV Set toys again. This was, hands-down, one of my favorite toys of all time growing up! Inside the tubes on the right were long strips of paper with a comic-style story printed on them. You would attach one end of the strip to one of the blue dials and the other end to the other dial. Then you'd slide the dials into a tray with the TV Set cover on it and turn the dials advancing the comic story or "show" frame by frame! Oh, such fun! Seriously, I used to play with these things till the paper scrolls just wore away to nothing!


And this set pictured here is pretty sweet with some of the Hanna-Barbera gang on it. I'm pretty sure I had this very set. Notice how the characters on the packaging are a bit off-model. Back then, toy companies only had to pay for the rights to reproduce the likeness of a character...nowadays the images have to be approved by the animation studio to make sure the characters look right.

Still, this toy is so much low-tech fun it's really a shame that kids today won't even know the joys of spending 45 minutes loading a vertical comic strip into a little plastic machine to read it frame by frame!