You’re not tripping. These actually existed.

Man, I miss the 90s. Discovering the world wide web. Baggy skateboard jeans. TGIF. No smartphones. Alt rock. CDs. Neon-colored clothing. Polo Sport cologne. Nintendo. Going to the mall. Blockbuster. Pizza Hut. Going outside to play and disappearing most of the day with no way for parents to contact you (yes, that happened, and it was awesome).

Life before the internet became mainstream meant you had to get creative to have fun. You might have even had to go outside. Crazy, right? But there was a time — a much nicer time, if you ask me — before everything became digital and took place on a touch screen. There were also some pretty weird games and toys, too. Here are a few of them from the best decade ever — the 90s.

Elefun

Props to whatever genius dropped acid and came up with this game. And for thinking this would actually occupy children’s attention for more than like ten seconds. It never did mine or my siblings. I think the record amount of time we spent playing it was five minutes.

Basically, the “game” was a mini leaf blower in the form of a cute elephant that blew plastic butterflies out of its long snout all over the place. The object was to catch as many butterflies as possible in your little net. Whoever caught the most was the winner.

I guess Elefun was meant to sound like “Hella fun.” Except it was mainly a big pain in the ass to clean up afterward. This game is still available somehow, and makes a great gift for parents you hate.

Mr. Bucket

You might remember Mr. Bucket from his catchy commercial jingle. “I’m Mr. Bucket. Buckets of fun!”

Mr. Bucket needs you to do one thing. Stick balls in his head so he can spit those balls back out of his mouth. This is something Mr. Bucket needs you to do a lot. He enjoys very much, you see, shooting balls out of his mouth. While rolling around on the floor. Yeah, that Mr. Bucket sure was a freak. Always wanting you to put your balls in him. So he could spit them right back out at you. It was totally a normal kid’s toy. Absolutely normal.

Even as an innocent non-innuendo-understanding kid, there was just something not quite right to me about Mr. Bucket. He just seemed off. A little too eager to have balls put in him. I mean, I liked playing with balls too. But not that much.

Mr. Bucket. Buckets of fun? More like buckets of repressed memories.

Domino Rally

Fuck this “game.” Seriously. It wasn’t even a game. I’m convinced it was a psychological torture test some scientist invented to drive kids into therapy.

As the name implies, this “game” involved setting up plastic dominos in various patterns, and then knocking them down. Dominos is an old game, of course, but this game made the dominos cool and hip with neon colors. Some even glowed in the dark. There were various versions of this “game.” But they all only accomplished one thing — pissing you off, because no matter what, you’d always end up knocking down the dominos prematurely, thus ruining any chance at enjoyment. And this was before YouTube or social media where you could have at least uploaded a recording of a successful rally.

Making matters worse, the dominos would always go missing, forcing you to ask your parents to buy supplementary packs. The whole game concept itself was faulty from the get-go. The makers actually expected little kids to spend hours painstakingly setting up precariously-placed pieces of thin plastic that could be blown over with a whisper. Seriously. Hours of hard work could be derailed in seconds by an errantly-placed index finger, a troublemaking sibling, a clomping pet dog, or an oblivious shuffling adult on their way to make dinner or do laundry.

The ancient Greeks had Sisyphus and his boulder to learn about the horrors of futility. We 90s kids had Domino Rally.

Bop It

I still have no idea what the hell this contraption even did. Was it some kind of trivia device? A sound effects machine? A tactile-learning tool that prompted hand-eye coordination? I don’t know and The Great Unsolved Mystery Of Bop It still bothers me to this day.

I do remember there were different variations of this toy thing. All in weird geometric designs that emitted wacky sounds. But the very few I ever saw in the wild as a kid were never used for their intended purpose, and instead were turned into play swords. Or as a baton kids would use to bop other kids over the head with. Hmmm…maybe that was the ulterior purpose of Bop It all along.

Skip-It

Okay, this was actually a really cool toy, although it was really more of an exercise device. It was really simple to use. You looped it around one ankle, and then spun it around, skipping over it with your other foot.

I like to think of Skip-It as the real foreunner to the Fit Bit, or any other kind of health-tracking wearable device. Skip-It cleverly had a counter on it that kept track of how many skips you made. This lead to competitions. All in all, a decent toy.

There was just one problem.

Skip-It was known as a girls toy. They came in pink. But many boys (including myself) were always trying to use because it looked like fun. And because it was a girl’s toy, it was easily broken, even when you used it delicately. The cheap plastic would snap apart. Or the counter would stop working and you had to count your skips yourself. Then you add roughhousing boys trying to show off in front of the girls and you can see where this tragicomedy is headed. Yep, a lot of Skip-Its met their demise at the hands (or feet) of careless young men, and a lot of young women were left bereft of their expensive proto workout trinkets.

Pogo Bal

I actually had to look up what these were called as I never knew. I just always thought of them as the little Saturn-shaped balls you jumped on and hoped you didn’t break your ankle in the process. I’m convinced toy manufacturers in the 90s were in league with the medical establishment, and were just trying to get as many kids injured as possible to drive up insurance rates. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

It sounds insane even describing how you use a Pogo Bal. You step on a dinky little platform which surrounds a rubber ball. Then you try to balance on the ball and jump around on it. Like using a Pogo Stick. Except without a stick and without the fun and ability to balance. God, what a lame toy this thing was. They coudn’t even give the “ball” two proper letter “LLs.” They had to use one “L.”

Even as a kid these things looked dangerous to me. I might have tried using one once or twice, and that was it. I was fine going off ramps with my bike. I was fine crossing stranger’s yards as a shortcut to get home. I was totally fine riding off by myself for hours into different parts of town. But this thing. This bouncy ball of doom. It scared me.

Creepy Crawlers

Girls had the Easy Bake Oven. Boys had Creepy Crawlers. Same idea. Both had a little oven. Both used recipes. Only difference was that instead of making delicious mini snacks, this contraption made groteque little rubber bugs that boys then left lying around to “scare” the girls. I’m not sure why the makers of Creepy Crawlers were trying to perpetuate a gender war. Especially after boys were out there destroying girl’s Skip-Its left and right already.

Overall, Creepy Crawlers was a clever way of making “science” fun, combining creative mold making with entomology. No doubt this game inspired some kiddos to go into biology, smelting, or 3D printing. This was probably my favorite 90s game. It wasn’t really a game, I guess. It was more of just a fun project. The best part was you could make a whole collection of bugs, swapping out different colors to make your own designs. The scorpion models were my favorite. Some rubber composites even glowed in the dark. Creepy Crawlers was that rare playtime activity that was even better than Nintendo (my addiction at the time) or watching TV (my second addiction).

Now that I think about it, I’ve been remembering a lot of these toys and games through a nostalgia haze. Turns out most playtime stuff from the 90s sucked. Did the manufacturers secretly hate kids? Their products were mainly cheap plastic and often got children hurt. Their real insidious purpose seemed purely to separate poor parents from their hardearned money via manipulative commercial campaigns. And putting children in the hospital. These toys and games weren’t fun. They were actually pure evil. Well, not Creepy Crawlers. Creepy Crawlers was solid.