So, today, you all have video games. But I had “Winky Dink” – the first interactive television game, 5 decades before Wii. First, you had to buy the Winky Dink box set which included “magic crayons”, a special cloth and a “magic window” – a pliable, vinyl plastic “film” that stuck to the television screen. Otherwise, you couldn’t play “Winky Dink and You” with the television program which was on the air 1953-1957 on CBS. There were only 3 channels back then – ABC, NBC and CBS.
For a kid, this was a mad race to “Get ready…get set…Go”! You got out your Winky Dink vinyl plastic “magic window” which clung to the TV screen creating a vacuum thanks to miracle of static electricity. Sounds good, yes? No. Not good.
The problem with the Winky Dink TV screen cover is that you could never get it to be smooth which is a BIG problem if you have to use your “magic crayons” to draw on it. I can promise you that Winky Dink was invented by a psycho fiend somewhere to frustrate millions of kids – manic to get it ready for the show. On, off, on off – over and over trying to smooth out the wrinkles. Too late! Show time!
The television show was based on having kids “connect the dots” on their Winky Dink screen with the magic crayons, that, at some point, actually formed a picture by magic – theoretically. My pictures always looked like a finger painting via kid hooked up with electrodes. Trying to connect the dots over an ocean of vinyl wrinkles could turn one in to a zombie, vacant eyes, slobbering idiot.
One Saturday morning, I was late preparing for the show. I zoomed out of bed, put my robe and slippers on and raced down the hall to the living room 20 feet away. It was freaking freezing. We had gas area heaters with real flames and a Folgers coffee can (sans coffee) filled with water to put humidity back in the air. You couldn’t leave them on at night lest a dollop of fire pop out and then – POOF – a life sentence to grandparent’s hell with moth balls and fake teeth in dirty glasses of water! Yikes!
So, I’m wrapped up on the floor with a comforter wrapped around me like some giant “pig in a blanket” – warming me against the arctic chill in the room.
I turn the TV on. It takes 3 minutes to form a picture. And then it starts. “Hey, kids. It’s “Winky Dink and You” brought to you by Ovaltine. Are you all ready to play “Winky Dink”? Get ready…Get set…Go!!! I was drawing furiously, determined that I was going to end up with an actual picture of something that even an alien could recognize. I must have gotten a good night’s sleep. I was in the groove. Beautiful pictures – like from a museum even – exploding out of my magic window at me. I had found my calling. The next Michelangelo had arrived.
And then it hit me. I had forgotten to put my magic Winky Dink screen – perpetually wrinkled vinyl plastic – on the TV. Yes, there it was – an “Etch-A-Sketch” forest of colored grease marker lines all over our black and white TV. It looked like a Rorschach test drawing by a psychopath on schizoid day.
I began to have an out of body experience. Of course, no one had ever heard of an out of body experience except the Pentecostals at a revival meeting under the Big Top on Sundays. And Easter.
Time stopped. I became lightly dizzy. My eyes glazed over. The Winky Dink TV host was moving his mouth but I couldn’t understand what he was saying in such an animated way. The room began to take on the effect of a mirrored room in the “fun house” at the circus midway. I started to float.
Mom was the first to arrive at the crime scene. She saw me in a catatonic state which looked normal to her given her family background. Then, she noticed my work of art. It’s not a good idea to surprise a manic depressive person. It makes the loop da loop at Play Land on Broadway in San Antonio look like a train track through west Texas – straight as a string. No reason to put curves in the track through Marfa.
She spoke one of a dozen canned lines rehearsed over years and years of parent training which now issued forth from her lipstick smeared mouth. “Your fathers gonna’ give you a whuppin when he gets back from the VFW meeting’”. I didn’t need to be told. I knew what was coming just like the fair maiden tied to the train track by the villain knew the train was coming on Page 37 of the script.
Actually, truth be told, it really wasn’t my fault. It was an engineering design fault perpetrated on unwitting victims like me to generate billions of dollars for the psychoanalysts of the future at $160 for a 45 minute session and no answers. But they could tell by the faraway look in your gaze that you had been Winky Dinked!
Although we would revel in the kids television shows of the 1950’s including classics like “Sky King”, “The Lone Ranger”, “Flash Gordon”, “The Howdy Doody Show”, “Captain Kangaroo”, “Kukla, Fran and Ollie”, “The Mickey Mouse Show”, “Andy’s Gang”, “The Buster Brown Show” with Froggy and Midnight and a million Looney Tunes cartoons – “Winky Dink and You” created a secret, hidden message in Baby Boomers of today. One day, like the plague of the 17 year locust – all we BIG kids will have a Manchurian Candidate moment as Jack Barry draws one particular set of dots on our magic Winky Dink window.
“Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!”
Stay tuned!
See YouTube for a 9 minute excerpt from “Winky Dink and You”. It’s a riot!
