Skip It!

Ever fancied owning a toy that eerily resembled a ball-and-chain? It's fairly plausible parents saw the comparison and immediately swarmed toy stores in droves, begging to own this tedious yet endlessly entertaining device designed to keep their child in one spot for an absurdly extended period of time. The apparatus was mind-blowingly simplistic. A plastic ring that fit around your ankle was attached to a ball that spun 360 degrees as you skipped over it. It was essentially the poor man's jump rope, except that it cost a whole lot more and you couldn't play with a friend. I guess you could call it the lonely man's jump rope.

Skip-its burst onto the scene with a series of commercials that aired during Saturday morning cartoons and alongside favorite Nickelodeon TV programming. I remember this ad so vividly from my own childhood, but watching it again just makes me want a Skip-it all over again:



While the market was ripe with cheap rubberized imitations, nothing could stand up to the ingenuity of the Tiger Toys original. The most prominent and celebrated feature, as described by the above commercial:

"The very best thing of all! There's a counter on the ball! So try to beat your very best score! See if you can jump a whole lot more!"

Seeing if I could jump a whole lot more became the most important thing in the world, as suggested by the hypnotizing slow motion ad. I would park myself in the front of my driveway, strap that godforsaken flimsy piece of shocking pink plastic to my foot, and skip myself till I could not breathe (or until that pesky ball bruised my ankle so much that it inflated to the size of an overripe eggplant). That counter became the bane of my (and all of my neighborhood friends') existence. There was no worse admission of failure than having to press that "reset" button.

I do, however, appreciate the way that commercial shows ways that you can make this lonely solo exercise in tedium a group effort with one person spinning and one person skipping. This was pretty much never the case. Use of the Skip-it was generally relegated to times at home when your family was desperate to get you out of the house but couldn't find you a playdate.

Watching this quintessentially 90s toy commercial, it makes me wonder what happened with these kids and the singer behind the catchy Skip-it jingle. Do you think these people have this gig buried on their show-biz resumes somewhere? Bringing it up at high-profile auditions?

"Well, I've never done feature films, but I was the vaguely multicultural background kid in a Skip-it commercial back in '91. You may recognize me from that."

But I digress. The genius of Skip-it was not in its brilliant ad campaign or flashy features, but rather in its simplicity. It's hard to imagine the technologically inundated children of today occupied with such a monotonous exercise. Then again, it's probably more difficult to imagine our current multi-tasking blackberrying selves being satisfied with standing alone on a driveway somewhere, jumping with no goal other than to jump. These days, we'd probably be skipping it with a bluetooth wedged in our ear.

Unfortunately, it's too late to revive our beloved childhood toy. Ever since Hasboro Toys sucked in our once beloved Tiger Toys (the original manufacturer's of the Skip-it), things have never been the same. I leave you with these photos of the sad, sad, state of modern-day skipping toys. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.