I was heartbroken when my Sea Monkeys™ never grew up to look like the pictures in the ads.

My dad later explained that they appeared to be brine shrimp. This was a real growing up experience.

I bought a binocular with an attached dart launcher when I was a kid.
I kept wondering how far could I aim with the so called powerful lenses, and how much injuries I was going to cause to my victims...

Poor me...

In fact I got a binocular which lenses were no more than round cut transparent plastic, with no magnifying power at all, and a spring based launcher between the lenses that made the dart (with a suction in the point) jump like a drunk cannonball-man for 2 or 3 feet forward.

Then I spun it by its string and threw it as fast as I could. Almost killed a pigeon! Hooray!

Ha, great video, reminds me of the "decoder ring" segment in "A Christmas Story."

My mom never let me have comic books when I was a little kid, since they were for "illiterates" -- the only place I got to read them was while waiting for a haircut at Becky's Barber Shop, which had a stack of them in addition to the usual magazines.

But man...I wanted the $1.98 "Build Your Own Hovercraft" kit SO badly. And in tandem with the 25-cent X-Ray Spex, I'd be able to float around looking through women's clothes, then zoom away before I could get caught. If only I could have clipped the mail-in coupons from those comic books....