Child Of The 1980's

It’s funny how some games have stood the test of time, whilst overs have faded away.  One of the latter is Mr. Pop!, and I’m surprised that it’s no longer available given that it was a lot of fun to play.

Mr. Pop was a cross between Perfection, Guess Who? and Mr. Potato Head.  It was a single player game in which you first had to pick a card that had a picture of a man’s face on it.  You had to recreate that face by inserting plastic pieces of hair, eyes, noses and other facial features into slots on a plastic head.

Sounds pretty easy so far, but you had to do this against the clock.  The plastic face was mounted on a plastic board that featured a clockwork timer (that’s what we like – no batteries!) so to play you wound up the timer and pushed the head back until it clicked into a locked position.  Letting the timer run out caused the head to pop forward, shooting all the plastic face pieces out at the player, which was quite a shock.

The game was intended for younger players, but adults had just as much fun playing it, and quite often were worse than the kids.  It’s a crying shame this game is no longer available as beneath all the fun it was quite educational, teaching concentration, pattern matching and hand eye co-ordination skills.

Whilst Mr. Pop is no longer available, there is an almost identical equivalent called Mr. Funny Face, so if you hanker for a bit of face making fun against the clock, why not check it out. Thanks to Pamela for pointing me at this new version.

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This entry is filed under Toys - Boardgames and was posted on March 9th, 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.