The Toy: An Airplane Shooting Gun.
Although I intend to always have a picture of the package, if possible, I didn't, when I first came up with the idea for this series of posts, know that I was going to intend to do that, so I didn't take any pictures of the package this toy came in.
I was going to post the package so that when you went to your Dollar Store, you'd know exactly what to look for, but that seems kind of superfluous because this toy is An Airplane Shooting Gun, and there aren't very many of those. So even without knowing what the package looks like, just look for any package of toys with both a couple of small airplanes, and a gun:
The Construction: The airplanes are about an inch long, and made of foam rubber - they're soft and bendy and the only part of them that could possibly put an eye out is that little plastic piece on the front -- but it's there, so Moms, you can be confident that even with this toy there will at some point be someone shooting it directly into someone else's face over your objection.
The gun itself is plastic, and that's a rubber band in there -- but I couldn't find any way to remove it, and even Mr F (Official Tester of the Airplane Shooting Gun) couldn't manage to break it, and he is super-strong.
How It's Used: I just realized that because I don't recall the official name of this toy, I gave it the "Airplane Shooting Gun" name, which in retrospect sounds like a gun that's meant to shoot airplanes. But that's not the case at all. The gun -- awesomely -- shoots airplanes at other things:
You know what makes America so crazy to the rest of the world and so excellent to us? It's our refusal to allow a category of things to simply remain discrete. We have airplanes, and we have guns. (Lots of both.) Why not leave things at that? Might as well as "why not fake a moon landing" or some other stupid question. This is the country that dug through mountains to build a transcontinental railroad using our bare hands*
*(Well, the bare hands of a bunch of immigrants we'd also underpay.)
and we are not bloody likely to just let a bunch of airplanes and guns lay around without ever trying to combine those two things.
America (TM):
The Land Where It's Never TOO Insane To Try That Thing, At Least Once.
The Land Where It's Never TOO Insane To Try That Thing, At Least Once.
What you do is you put the airplane on the gun, as shown, and then, depending on the kind of person you are, you do one of two things:
1. Everybody else in the world except me: Pull the rubber band back, latch it, and get ready to shoot some airplanes at some things!
2. Me: Pull the rubber band back, watch it snap up, try again, watch it snap up again. Do that two or three more times in case doing the exact same thing somehow yields a different result. Go get Official Tester Mr F back to where he's supposed to be standing because he's gotten bored and wandered away. Look at the package to see if there's instructions. Think to yourself "For God's sake, I went to law school. I can do this."**
**They did not teach loading an Airplane Gun in law school. I'm pretty sure. I mean, I skipped a bunch of classes, but still...
then go get Mr F again, and finally out of sheer luck latch the rubber band behind the trigger mechanism, and hand it to Mr F:
How It Works: Tolerably well -- the gun does shoot the airplanes, which fly (probably by brute force rather than any aerodynamic abilities on their part) about 8-10 feet, including straight up onto the top of your blinds where you won't be able to find the plane for about 3 days and will, briefly, wonder if the plane disintegrated when Mr F fired it...
... disintegration being a pretty common quality among Dollar Store Toys, actually...
...and they don't shoot hard enough to actually put an eye out, but they do shoot hard enough to cause a fight about getting shot in the face.
The Review By Mr F and Mr Bunches: Mr F fired the gun, and I reloaded it (with only slightly less trouble) with the second airplane, and he fired that one, too, but then got bored a third time and wandered off while I looked for the first airplane (I did in fact not find it for two days.)
Mr Bunches liked it a lot more -- it got a laugh out of him, and he played with it for the better part of 20 minutes that first day alone. Clearly, Mr Bunches is American through and through, instinctively and genetically understanding how fun it is to have superior firepower like this.
Mr F's wandering away worries me a little. You can't teach someone how important it is to have an Airplane Gun. They either get it or they don't.
Final Grade: A solid A.
2 comments:
That's pretty good, but you could probably make a paper airplane to fly that far for less than $1, though my paper planes tend to suck and go about two feet before looping around and crashing. Oh the humanity!
i want one of these right now.
Post a Comment