Before there were video games, there was Melvin the Moon Man.
Remco came out with this game in 1959, and to my 10-year-old mind, the commercials were devastatingly compelling. Had to have it! Had to! Look, ma, it’s got Tumblebum dice!
So we finally got it.
Y’know, there wasn’t much to that game. The big selling point was the dice inside this plastic hourglass thing that you spun, instead of rolling the dice on the game board. And you moved these little flat plastic spacemen around, according to the roll of the dice, and collected Moon Bucks. It looked like such a blast on TV, but in real life, it didn’t even challenge my kid sister’s sense of strategy; and she was only four years old.
That may be because there was no strategy involved in it. You just went where the dice told you to go. No choices to make, no decisions. No thought at all.
I wonder why it hasn’t made a comeback.