Remember the
Island of Misfit Toys in the old,
fuzzy,
stop-motion version of "
Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer"? The one with
Yukon Cornelius and that nerdy
elf dentist? The one where they fled to the Island of Misfit Toys, where toys nobody wanted went and were ruled over by that
weird lion king? Who doesn't! But something never sat right when I watched it every year at
Christmas time, and I finally figured it out...
It's the water gun. You know, the one that squirts only jelly. It's silly, really. OK, you've got the 'Boat That Won't Float'. That's understandable. No one wants a boat that doesn't float. I mean, even if it's a submarine, if you're a kid, you're not going to want to dive in after it when you're done playing with it. Now, you might say, why don't you plug the leak? Well, how many kids do you know that are going to fix a toy boat well enough that it won't take in water? You can't expect a kid to fix his own toys, especially if they're broken right out of the box.
The same goes for the 'Train With Square Wheels'. You might say, "Why not just round off the wheels?" It's not always that easy, especially if your child doesn't have access to a belt sander and a circular saw. Oh, OK, I hear you saying, "Why doesn't Dad do it?" Folks, if Dad was any kind of Dad, he wouldn't have bought 'Train With Square Wheels' in the first place. Would you trust power tools to the guy that got rooked by The Square Wheels Company? I think not.
So we have these shoddy, abandoned toys, all sitting on this island because no one loves them, and we have this water gun that squirts only jelly. Now, I know these toys are of very primitive intelligence, but if they can sing the Misfit Toys song, they can pretty well figure out that the squirt gun is in a preventable situation. It should just fill itself up with water next time! Stupid squirt gun! It took that trip all the way to the Island Of Misfit Toys for nothing, and now its passport is probably expired. I'd like to see it try to get back into the States now, an unlicensed firearm with no identification!
What I really want to know is what stupid kid didn't like the fact that it squirted out jelly? Do you know how cool that would be? A squirt gun that squirted jelly? With most squirt guns, the hole is barely wide enough to squirt the water, let alone jelly. If you could squirt jelly, who knows what else you could shoot out of that thing! What a kick-ass toy! Imagine how much fun the 1993 Mets would have had with that thing! Train With Square Wheels... Boat That Won't Float... they can just stay there on that silly island, ruled by an ugly lion with an iron fist. But I want the water gun that squirts only jelly!