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Submitted by mythbusting pyro
What was so fascinating about the Etch-A-Sketch? Most of us can’t create anything worth looking at on it, however, we all aspired to be Etch-A-Sketch artists. It was an iconic toy of the 60’s and 70’s and is still popular today, but we just can’t put our finger on what made this toy such a huge hit.
Maybe we all just wanted to be like this guy:
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I could create Honest Abe.
3 words ’bout the Etch-A-Sketch:
Oh. Hell. Yes.
Awesome! I never could get it to make curved lines, though. Frustrating, but fun.
They posed the question ‘what made this so popular?’ I would have to say that after creating anything (not) worth looking at… you could SHAKE it VIOLENTLY and DESTROY whatever it was…. and not get yelled at by your parents… frankly, if I did that to everything that frustrated me, I would be in jail.
“I’m gonna go draw boobs on the etch-a-sketch!”
“Go ahead, they always come out square!”
My favorite thing to draw on an Etch-A-Sketch was moose. Dunno why. Moose were always my default.
Those antlers must’ve been a bitch.
I could never get the hang of this. I always confused which dial went left and which went right, same for up and down. When I could figure it out, I could make squares. That doesn’t make this toy any less epic, it was! Cheap, fun, small and yeah, that whole, mess up and get to shake it thing!
wow!!!!…
That video was awesome!
Damn, I suck. All I could ever make were crappy staircases.
Squeee. Squeee. Squeee. Damn! Shaka, shaka, shaka……….
I puzzled out how to make circles on these things. Granted, they were mostly lop-sided ovalish circles, but they were still circles. The hours that thing entertained me…ah, youth.
I was the master of the horizon line.
I would always make staircases and square spirals. Sometimes, when I would get really creative, I would make a crappy house.
Yay! Drove me crazy trying to draw on it, but what a great way to pass the time on a rainy day.
Is this guy immune to carpel tunnel syndrome?
Thats amzing full. I doubt that I could do that free hand.
I could make a staircase…
I always hated that it was nearly impossible to make a circle with the etch-a-sketch.
so…that guy is like autistic or something right?
Nah, he just has great knob-dexterity. There’s a trick to getting realistic and “good” stuff on the Etch A Sketch, it’s subtle turning of the knobs at the same time for curves and such. In fact, I’ve gotten to where curvy lines lines are easier to do than straight ones.
Just takes practice and all that and etc.
Ugh. The site’s not letting me post my main comment, maybe because I have outside links.
I wanted to show off some of my Etch-A-Sketch art but I guess the Nostalic Win blog says “No.”
I found it disappointing that when you colored over the screen, you could see the stylus that drew the lines… I dunno, it kind of ruined it for me.
http://xkcd.com/551/
But that’s what I’ve always wanted to do, see how exactly it works, unfortunately, we don’t have one
Don’t forget, the “sand” inside is Thermite. A highly flammable material, often used by the UK series “Brainiac” to melt things.
Its aluminum dust. Half of thermite. You have to mix it with an oxidizer like ferrous oxide (rust) to have thermite.
And while it’s highly energetic once lit, it is quite difficult to get going, requiring something like a magnesium strip or a high temperature torch to spark it off.
oh… I read pantheon, and I thought the guy was going to do a rendering of the actual Pantheon (in Rome) on the etch-a-sketch. Still cool, though.
Whoo-hoo, Etch-a-sketch!
I could only make rectangles. In a spiral.
I’m nearly 30. I still play with Etch-A-Sketches. One of my favorite things to do when is a toy store is to find one of the display Etch-A-Sketches and draw something on it and leave it there for future customers and employees to see (and perhaps shake away in frustration that people are playing with the merchandise again).
I’m not nearly as good as the guy in the video, there, but I’ve done characters on the Etch.
Link from The Legend of Zelda (Twilight Princess Version) , done on a shiny Ohio Art Anniversary Edition. http://shadsie.deviantart.com/art/Etch-A-Sketch-Hero-110807042
And Vash the Stampede from the semi-known anime, Trigun. http://shadsie.deviantart.com/art/Etch-A-Vash-19430485
Srsly, this was my favorite toy as a kid and I still enjoy it. Very WIN.
i still love etch a sketches and i make cool patterns on them im still trying to draw my crush but its damn impossible ARGH!
The guy in the video is incredibly good. I couldn’t figure out why we were getting such weird cropping on the characters (Hey, look, it’s Aquaman’s crotch!) until I saw Firestorm. Given how well he did everything else, it must be amazingly hard to draw faces on the thing.
Oh, and yeah: rectangular spirals were about the only thing I could draw even halfway decently.
When my mother was a kid, she would get so frustrated with the Etch-A-Sketch that she would throw it to the floor, jump on it, then throw it somewhere else, ex. a wall or out of the window. My sister and I, when we were kids, absolutely loved this toy. No idea why, but we loved it.