There was a brief time when the toy company Worlds of Wonder seemed like a truly magical place, a Willie Wonka-inspired (just check out those initials) toy factory that produced state of the art playthings that looked for all the world like minor miracles. Teddy Ruxpin “changed everything,” as they say. Finally, children could have a teddy bear that talked to them instead of just laying around in a heap most of the time. You could easily imagine Worlds of Wonder producing new and better toys year after year until by 2000 every child with the means would have their very own life-sized C3PO to boss around. It kind of didn’t work out that way (the company folded in 1990) but at least we had Teddy!

Or did we? In the light of day, Teddy was a boon companion, a joy to play with, a best friend. But there was a side to this bear that wasn’t so pleasant–when the batteries got low the toy exhibited a tendency to turn itself on at any time and emit terrible noises the Worlds of Wonder engineers had fashioned by recording the death throes of poisoned crows. The children, an entire generation of sweet innocents, didn’t know that the toy’s designers had meant it to be a “fun” way of telling them it was time to replace the batteries. All they knew was that they would wake up in the middle of the dark night to see their beloved Teddy’s eyes furiously snapping open and shut like castanets while his mouth emitted cacophonous shrieks. They would scream, wet the bed, faint and basically be scarred for life.

A supposedly new and improved version called Furby was released about ten years later, but anyone who has ever heard even one syllable of the Furbish tongue knows that these hairy plastic vermin were no “improvement,” but an even more insidious agent of devilment targeting our little ones.

It is no wonder the Millennials are are every bit as maladjusted as Generation X.

Colored in shades that made them the perfect physical embodiment of Wyler’s fruit drink flavors, Wacky Wall Walkers stuck around about as long as a pitcher of ice cold Wyler’s on a hot summer day, but you have to admit that they were quite the concept. Kids love to throw things–whether it be snowballs at cars, eggs at houses (Justin Bieber keeps this tradition alive to this day) or an unwanted baby brother or sister out the window. Wacky Wall Walkers were kind of a benign form of therapy that allowed children the world over to get this potentially dangerous urge out of their system without harming any property or lives.

And really, who hasn’t dreamed of owning their very own miniature octopus? You didn’t even need a tank of water for it! Of course they only actually stuck to the wall about one-third of the time, although the success rate was higher if you flung it against a mirror, so if your parents were one of those “swinger” types with a bedroom tricked out in mirrors all over the walls and ceiling you could maybe get your money’s worth out of these. Because the sad fact was, when you finally did get it to stick to something the odds of it actually “walking” its way down, instead of cowering in a lump for three seconds and dropping straight to the carpet, were pretty low, too. Speaking of carpeting, I seem to remember these becoming covered in nasty, adhesively-debilitating fuzz almost the instant they were pulled out of their packaging.

So basically Wacky Wall Walkers were completely useless. Still, they were deemed cool enough to have their very own Christmas Special and you can’t say that about most toys!