He left out the miniature cameras, complete with foil-wrapped flim.

I never got one, I spent my quarters playing Asteroids and Defender.

-l

/old

i used to buy eggs from that chicken machine. bucaww

Fruit-shaped gum is teh ghey...

Whoa. I can't believe I got booted off the team for Mr.
Businessman. Pfft! I bet I'll get respect once I get that
Harvard diploma from the prize machine.

He didn't get any Homies??? WTF?

I once saw a claw machine in Japan that offered live crabs if you could grab one with the claw and drop it in the hopper. No idea how you were supposed to deal with the crab once you grabbed one, though.

Pfil

You cook it and eat it. They also have them with lobsters.

Of course, those claw machines (ufo catchers) have a cult status in japan, along with these kinds of insta-toy dispensers.

I have several of those LED things that the "Blinky Rings" are made of. They're cheaply constructed, and I had to make several shims with washers and insulate the sides with heat shrink tubing and replace the batteries before they would work properly. I paid $4 each for mine. Next time I'll just go find a candy machine to buy some.

My empire grows with every passing whim...

er something like that...

Personally i never used too many of these things, but the chicken machine is definitely the king here.

/wasted youth

I had nearly forgotten the chicken machine!!

Come on Lobster Harmonica!!!

Those 25-cent bouncy balls provided endless joy for me and my friends.

I used to buy one, walk outside to the parking lot and say "Hey, wanna see a magic trick?"

I'd then throw the ball as far as I could, never to see it again.

Wasn't much magic, but it never failed to get a laugh.

Not bad for two bits.

I love Homies. I have all the series, except for the new bigger ones, the cars, the 10 inch models, the big bobble heads, the plush toys...

I was considering being amused until I saw it was sponsored by the RespectCopyrights people. I love being threatened by corporations as I look at Fark sites.

desolationrow

Heh, fix that by installing adblock extension in firefox. I dont see any adverts more then once now. (I also suggest the flash animation blocker for more advert blocking.. and the image tools to block images from entire servers)

bludstone

My firefox is pro in most cases, but for some reason it doesn't like connecting to Fark. It just says it can't find the server. Totally lame.

It'll connect to a few links, a few message threads, and just crap out. I'd hate to think what's wrong with my computer.... :(

Mmmm, sweet sweet lead toys.

/dude should buy the chicken machine

Much as I love the machines, I love going direct to the source and BUYING the toys they put in the machines... That way I get what I want, and can sell the rest of the crap at the flea market for 50 cents a piece. :) And at an average price of $12 for a BOX of the stuff, I can make a HUGE profit.

wow...I haven't seen a Chicken Machine in 20 years. The Big Star (became A&P, then Harris Teeter, then went defunct and got absorbed by Kroger, who'll eventually become wal mart I'm sure) grocery in the little town I grew up had one of those. It was obnoxiously loud and worth the quarter (to a five year old) just to make it make a lot of noise.

there used to be one at a pet store that had a /real/ chicken, and you'd put a coin in it and she'd bock-bock and dance around and then get a treat, and you'd get some kind of plastic-egg prize. I'm not sure how the hell they got the chicken to do stuff...for all I know she could have been dancing around because it electrified the floor of her container when you put in a quarter. I think I feel guilty now for playing with that thing...

Anybody else remember one of these?

"I should try again..."

Separated at birth?

Wasn't there a gold egg? with a super-special surprise? Oh man. I had totally forgotten about the chicken machine. good times.

It's pretty amazing that he couldn't figure out how to make the raver ring function properly. I got one at the grocery store and it worked fine...you don't press down, you twist it.

And I think it's cool! I feel like Captain Planet!

The beloved chicken machine! So happy to see that thing again!

And I do believe there was a "golden egg". Or it advertised one on the side, but I know I never saw it.

If anyone knows how to contact him, there is an egg-vending machine (chicken variety, but with bunny--although it is changeable) on ebay.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=13716&item=6117578927&r d=1&ssPageName=WDVW#ebayphotohosting

"I'm looking for some sailors..."

Anyone remember the Pez vending machines from years back? They used to dispence the Pez in little white cardboard boxes.

SO MANY POPUPS

There was also one with Fred Flintstone spinning around and saying Yabba Dabba Doo very loudly. Then he'd lay an egg. (All right, I suppose it was meant to be a dinosaur egg.)

Anyone notice the bug dispenser on the second page? Plop in a quarter, and the machine feeds a cricket to the little quail at the pet store. Strange, but very amusing.

there was a chicken machine in a bowling alley 15 miles north of Peoria...in Chillicothe, Illinois...aptly named "The Chilli Bowl".

Aaaah, the memories. I am actually still a regular investor in the plastic egg machine market, and I have plastic rings from my childhood which still look like absolute treasures. I also used to frequent a chicken machine in the tiny grocery store in the tiny little berg I was raised in. It used to have a game where you got something special if you got a gold egg, but alas, I never got a gold egg so I haven't a clue what this prize was. (The vending machines-cum-games thing is pretty common in my area. Gumball machines at stores and movie rental places have "get a black/foil wrapped gumball and get a free rental" game, and at movie theatres they have a similar game although the prize is usually a small popcorn or something.)

My favorite machines are either the stickers with the snarky, Hot Topic T-shirt-style phrases on them (like "The voices in my head think you're weird"), or the $1 machines at the movie theatres that have the characters inside little plastic display domes. (My favorite I ever got would be either Moe from the Simpsons or Alien Stitch, complete with blasters, from Lilo & Stitch.) The glowstick machines are pretty cool, too, and I've only got one dud so far (it was supposed to go into a ring). I am also the reigning champ at the claw grabber machines. (My goal is to master a Japanese UFO catcher machine. The prizes are amazing, featuring plushies of popular anime or video game characters that go for roughly $30 apiece if you bought them yourself, but the machines are the most insiduous design known to man and impossible to get the hang of, revolving entirely on mashing buttons that I am still not clear on what each button does.)

Also, there are Mexican equivilants of "Homies". They're called "Mijos", and I usually pick them up at Toys 'R Us.

You pick up your hos at Toys R Us?

Buy your crappy toys in bulk & save!

www.orientaltrading.com

(I'm sure there are other sites out there, but this one is my fav)

Thanks, ilyag!

/felt lonely for a while

Man, I had forgotten about the absolute joy for about thirty seconds one could get as a five year old with a couple quarters and a grocery store vending machine. I remember getting slime completely annihilated all over one of the logs outside of the laundry mat, how my friend got in trouble at school for thinking he was a badass and holding a kid down at school with one of those toy guns (the M16 with the removable - for some reason - barrel) and holding it under his chin, saying "I swear to God if you tell anyone about me eating boogers I'll shoot you". We could even get metal cap guns (the paper roll caps) from those vending machines. Do they even sell cap guns any more??
And one time, in third grade, I taped one of those crappy rings with the plastic "jewel" in them under the desk of the hot girl in my class along with a cryptic note that, if she just thought hard enough about it, shewould know it came from me, the most romantic guy of all time! Then she asked me if I taped it there, because I was the creepy kid that was totally in love with her and too afraid to just ask her out and she knew it because I kept doing creepy shiat like taping rings under her desk and slipping cryptic notes in her coat pocket, and I of course denied it because girls were gross and I was scared shiatless of them.
Then Justin Queen, that smug little bastard, said he taped it under there and they started going steady. That smug little bastard.

I gotta go cry myself to sleep. Again. Thanks a lot, XE!