Gooey Louie

I know that kids are supposed to love boogers, but even as a child when this came out I was pretty disgusted by it. And it's not cause I'm a girl, cause I loved lots of gross things, but this...this just seemed gross for no particular reason other than to be gross, and while I'm not against something that's gross for grossness sake, something about it just rubbed me the wrong way. Other than discovering there's a bakery in St. Louis that sells a butter cake with the same name, which I will never eat based on principle alone, I can say that I wasn't really able to track down who originally made this game or why, but perhaps that's for the better. Don't know if I want to know who the people who crafted this monstrosity were, really.

It's an extremely simple game, very much like Mr. Bucket (who will also get his own write up at some point, believe me I have a LOT to say about that guy) wherein there's really only one task at hand and it's all sheer luck if you win or lose. The goal of the game is simple; pull the boogers from Louie's nose and if you pull the wrong one, his eyes and brains pop out. A rather extreme reaction to what seem to be very minor sinus issues, but hey, everyone deals with allergies differently, right.

I remember the commercial for this thing. It aired ALL the time when I was a little girl. I swear that at one point it aired at least once every single commercial break. In essence, it's concept is actually fairly similar to say Jenga, wherein it really depends on a whole lot of luck whether or not the piece you've just removed causes the whole thing to implode. I guess little kids were too dumb for a game where you stack blocks of wood together in order to form a tower. We were too busy playing with Lincoln Logs, after all. And let's just try and ignore how phallic the "brain" appears to be on this toy, alright. Not even going to touch that one with a ten foot pole. Louie and his martian dick brain can be analyzed by someone much riskier than I.

My only real belief in why someone thought this should be a thing that exists is because someone watched their kid pick their nose, thought "hey, kids like to pick noses, we can exploit this!" and exploit it they did. I don't know that I ever knew any kids who had this, then again I didn't really have many friends, so perhaps that was the reason why. We played a lot of board games in my house, my stepsiblings and I, but we rarely, outside of perhaps Mouse Trap as that's a classic, went for anything with a physical gimmick like ol' Dick Brain here. I looked him up on eBay and he can be had for fairly cheap if you want to either relive your own horrifying childhood or simply traumatize a new generation of kids.

The 90s, not gonna lie, despite being a really cool and artistic decade, were also full of gross out humor, especially in childrens media. And, it's not surprising why, exactly. Kids are disgusting little cretins who like disgusting stuff. But some of it, such as this, I think went a bit TOO far and was more over the top, thus somewhat ruining the appeal. Like I said, I never ever saw this in anyones game closet, so who knows how well it did, and I don't see it on the shelves today when I visit the local Walmart and look at the game isle, so, again, who knows the numbers on it. Someone much more dedicated than I could likely dig those up, but I'm me and this is what we're dealing with, so suck it.

Gooey Louie is, despite everything I just said, a great reminder of a time when you could get away with literally anything in marketing. When a childs world was filled to the brim was explosively weird creative concepts, before the early 2000s when stuff got super watered down again for a while. But more importantly than its artistic achievement, it stands as a testament to someone thinking to themselves, "I wonder if kids would buy a game where you pull boogers out of a plastic nose" and proved they would.

God bless capitalism, man.