Bop It

Ah, the Bop It.

A timeless 90s childhood classic. I remember sitting with my best, and only, friend in elementary school in his bedroom as we spent hours trying to master the techniques and challenges the Bop It offered. We wanted to be Bop It masters. Sadly, I was never given a Bop It of my own, likely because...well, let's face it, it's kind of annoying. That repetitive music, that ear screeching voice and the grating sound effects. Bop It was hands down one of the most auditourially obnoxious toys around. But, I loved it nonetheless whenever I was given the chance to enjoy it, and likely because of its repetitive nature. In a similar vein to Simon, which I also covered previously, it's another sort of memory mimic game, but a lot more fast paced and, in my opinion, nowhere near as challenging unless you get really far in and things get really quick and hard to follow. Whereas Simon is challenging because you have to memorize and then repeat back a sequence, Bop It just mixes up its 3 core elements repeatedly to you until you eventually don't respond fast enough and lose. But for someone like me, I wish my parents had gotten me one, because I love repetition because of my autism.

I rewatch the same episodes of TV shows nonstop, I listen to the same songs repeatedly and I have a very limited diet that I prefer to stick to. Because of this, I really like stuff like Tetris where it's the same formula time and time again because I don't like change. So something like Bop It was right up my alley, honestly, as it allowed me to socially acknowledge and not be ashamed of my repetitious behavior.

Bop It was originally patented in 1996 by Dan Klitsner and licensed to Hasbro and was widely popular right out the gate. And its appeal appears to be timeless, as it's since, to this day, continually spawned reboots, re-releases and remixed versions, though most of the more current models and concepts don't share the exact same idea as the original. It has sold over 30 million units worldwide. It's a fairly basic toy that I'm sure everyone knows how to play but even if not I'll go over how it works right now real fast for you uneducated plebs. Essentially a voice tells you one of three commands - Bop It, Twist it or Pull It - and you have to do these as soon as they're said or else you lose. If you do everything correctly, you get points for each action performed right until you reach 100 points and thusly win. Like I said, pretty straight forward.

FUN FACT: More current models, mostly ones since 2008, will announce "I'm going to sleep" when the toy shuts off, which is either terrifying or adorable, depending on your view of robots and their burgeoning self awareness.

Bop It also really encapsulates the mid to late 90s aesthetic likely more than any other toy I've covered from that time period. Ranging from its color scheme to its overall futuristic design itself, this thing really felt like "the toy of the future" simply because of how it was colored and molded. It's simplistic yet not so overly simplistic that it's uninteresting, and its minimalist design is really perfection. That color scheme is also absolutely soothing honestly; blacks and turquoise with a bit of purple and a splash of yellow. It's like old school Taco Bell made a toy. Overall, Bop It is obnoxious, repetitive and aggressively demanding and I wouldn't want it any other way. It's really a timeless classic as far as I'm concerned, far more than other similarly titled toys like Skip It are. The Bop It is enduring and long lasting, and it wouldn't surprise me if one day it winds up in the Toy Hall of Fame, if only because its legacy is impossible to ignore.

And I don't mean it has a legacy in the sense of something like Mr. Potato Head or whatever, but just in the sense of its longevity. Anything that manages to survive to the modern age where it has to compete with digital devices - despite being a sort of digital device itself - deserves praise and recognition in my book. That means it's tapped into something that is something so primal within us that we can't let it up and die no matter how many years pass us by.

I for one know that as soon as I have the cash money, I'm going to hit eBay and find a Bop It of my own to finally fulfill a childhood dream, and if the Bop It just happens to be possessed and tells me to kill and kill again, well then who I am to disobey? It knows everything, after all. It is all knowing, all mighty, and impossible to ignore.

All hail the Bop It.