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May 2, 2023 38 mins

Another classic toys edition is at your collective feet. Today, we dive into the soft, padded world of NERF!

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and this is Stuff you should Know. Another toy edition.
We haven't done one in a while.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Classic Toy Edition.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Yep, I love these NERF that's right.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I was just got back from spring break, so I
wanted to do a couple of things, and this is
NERF relevant, But I got to see a bunch of
LA pals and I wanted to give a special shout out,
which I'm sure you will agree with even though you
didn't see them to the Randazzo clan. Our old buddy
Joe Randazzo, who we met many years ago, is still

(00:51):
a faithful listener, as are his kids. Oh yeah, they
listened to the show. They've called me and yelled and
left messages yelling all us about the show before.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
But we finally got to hang out and Ruby got
to hang out with their three kids, Cormac, Gus and Hazel,
and they even spent the night at our rental house.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
A couple of nights.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
By themselves, no with Joe and the whole family did
oh okay, And we just had so much fun and
those kids are so much fun and so big hellos
to all of them.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Very nice.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
But the reason I mentioned NERF was I was we
went down to Venice Beach did a lot of touristy stuff,
and I wanted to show Ruby the skate park there
because she's used to seeing the kids at the local
skate parks who are like, like literally can't even ali
basically yeah. And it was like, Ruby, it's like your
mind's going to be blown when you go to this
skate park at Venice Beach because these like this is

(01:45):
where it was born, and they really know what they're doing.
And it did not disappoint. There were some these three
dudes that were just crushing it, these two kind of
young teenagers and this one guy that looked like he
was probably in his late twenties, and they were trying
to outdo one another and goofing around with one another,
and it was just a big fun show, Like I
could watch that for hours. And one of the guys,

(02:06):
the older guy, kept making fun of the kids, saying,
you're doing these nerve tricks. You're doing these nerve tricks.
Oh yeah, And I couldn't figure it out if that
just meant like, it's like a kiddie version of a
real trick.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Is kind of what I figured.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
He meant, Like a nerf ball is like a kiddie
version of a real ball.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Very nice segue, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
I think that's probably what he meant. But it was
just so funny. Look at you with those nerve tricks.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Could you tell what he was criticizing specifically, like what
they were doing that was making him say that.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
It looked like just sort of little more basic stuff,
like they were coming out of the bowl and doing
different things and then like landing on the flat surface,
And anytime they just did sort of a basic thing,
he'd say, get out of here with your nerve tricks.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Were they landing on their feet or on their skateboard.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
On their skateboard? Oh okay, but they would like kick
a leg out and then land on the skateboard.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
Or something like that and call it a nerve trick.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
I mean, trust me, dude, I would I couldn't even
run around this thing, much less do it on a skateboard.
But this guy was so good man, and everyone was
so good and it's just amazing to see them.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Do that stuff.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Very highly recommended. If you go to Venice.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, I can imagine. I've never gone to see.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
That, but I'm going to now it's amazing.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
So let's go back to your segue.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Nerf nerf.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
There's a lot of questions about nerf chuck in particular
what nerf means and not just in skating terms, in
the original form even. Okay, so for example, some people
say it was French for nerve. Obviously it makes total sense.
It's not true at all. There's other people who say
it stands for a non expanding recreational foam. That's not

(03:45):
true at all, but you will see that all over
the internet as fact not correct. Instead, it's got one
of the cooler origin stories. They are most interesting origin
stories for a word that no one really knows where
it came from.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Yeah, and if you're in some part of the world
that's right now saying what is nerf, we should just
quickly say that it's a toy brand made of soft
foamy products, and we'll kind of go through the history.
But you know, they started with balls and then now
they make all kinds of stuff, but it's you know, spongy,
soft foamy things that you can throw and not hurt

(04:20):
somebody with.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Wow, that was some professional podcasting just now.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
But the origin and this is something I remember when
I was a kid because we had nerf bars on
our jeep. It started out as a racing thing, like
if you bumped up against another car in a race
that could they might call that a nerf And they
eventually started putting this metalwork on the outside of the
cars to prevent damage if you hit a car like that,

(04:46):
and those were called nerf bars, and today they're still called.
Like if you have a like I have a pickup
truck that has nerf bars, And instead of having a
little tiny step, you know sometimes big trucks and jeeps
and things, you'll have a step to step into the car. Sure,
instead of just being a little step, it's a big
round bar that extends sort of the length of at

(05:07):
least the door two doors if you have a two
door or a four door I guess mm hm. And
they still call those nerve bars.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Does it say yeehaw every time you step on it
to get in the truck?

Speaker 3 (05:17):
It really does.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
I'm familiar with nerf bars is like those anti roll
bars like you were talking about on your dad's jeep
or something like that. Those can especially if you have
like a soft top or a no top like jeep
and you have a roll bar over your head to
keep you from dying or the jeep from crushing you.
If it rolls over, it can still hurt pretty bad

(05:39):
because that's a metal bar, even if it is hollow,
and if you go over some bumps and you hit
your head on it, that's a problem.

Speaker 3 (05:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
So people started figuring out very quickly in the advent
of off roading that you could put foam padding on
those bars, and that's where nerf bars came from, this
idea that foam path could prevent some sort of injury.
It became like kind of wetted to that idea of nerf,

(06:07):
which was originally just a little bump. And that's apparently
where the actual the name comes from. That's the origin story.
It was a marketing person who was familiar with that
term and just brilliantly thought to apply it to these
little foam balls that can't hurt anybody because they're too light.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah, they are.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Generally there's all kinds of nerve products, but generally we're
talking about polyurethane foam.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
It's got a.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
Little thin plastic coating that kind of keeps the foam
from breaking down as much and gives like a NERF
arrow like better flight characteristics. But it's basically all it is.
It's a very low tech thing. The Grabster helped us
with this, and I think, very astutely kind of argues

(06:53):
that that's part of the appeal of NERF is that
it's a very low tech product and sort of like
a frisbee times, it doesn't have to be something fancy
to really endure in the toy market.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
Yeah. I think that that's one reason why NERF has
just hung in there for so long, because they're just
they're very prolific, but the stuff they make is it's just,
I don't know, it becomes like iconic here in the
United States like it definitely did from the beginning of
the seventies till the mid nineties. Yeah, I think it's

(07:24):
kind of gotten less like a huge cultural thing over time,
but it's become more niche and I think just as widespread,
but just not quite as like pop culturally.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah, I would agree with that.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
So one other thing about the word nerve, it's kind
of experienced a rebirth among gaming communities apparently back in
I found the actual origin for this, chuck.

Speaker 3 (07:50):
You're ready sure.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
In the late nineties early two thousands, there was a
massive multiplayer online role playing game called Ultima Online and
when they they launched it, for some reason, the swords
that you used were way more devastating than any other weapons,
and so the developers were like, this is a problem.
Everybody's just using swords and it's not really fair. So

(08:14):
they went in, they fixed it. They put a patch
in there, and swords suddenly became less devastating, and players
complained that it was like hitting one another with nerf
swords now, And so nerf became a word for anything,
especially in games where the developers go in and like
downgrade its effectiveness essentially.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
So like they should have nerved Bo Jackson and Techmobile.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
Because he was unstoppable?

Speaker 1 (08:40):
Was he?

Speaker 3 (08:41):
Oh man?

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah, it's sort of a legendary thing. Is that in
the original Techmobil or I don't know if his original, but
bo Jackson was you couldn't stop them, and like if
he played the Raiders, you know, you would have to
instill rules like bo Jackson can only carry the ball
like once every five plays or something. Oh really, yeah,
because he was just built faster and better and you

(09:02):
could like score almost every time he touched the ball.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
I mean, that's an appropriate person to make like that, for.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Sure, But it was so gamed. It was just like,
you know, it wasn't even fair.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
But yes, to circle back to your original point, that
is an excellent use of the term nerve.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
The nerf that we know in love was invented by
a guy named Rin geier r e y n Geyer
for Reynolds. Yeah, that makes sense. And he invented Twister,
so he's got a couple of big time pop culture
games under his belt. Yeah, and he was forming a
company and he wanted to design a game where kids

(09:40):
could throw rocks at each other. And so they made
them obviously at a foam, and they had this packing
foam and this technique that they used cutting that foam
with heated wire. That worked out pretty well, and he
wanted to sort of gamify it, like I said, and
not just you know, make it a light ball that

(10:00):
you could just throw at each other. But that was
kind of the hit from the from the get, which
was you could throw something at your little brother and
not get in trouble because it wouldn't hurt, it wouldn't
break a window, and they took it to basically everybody.
I think Milton Bradley passed on it, Parker Brothers bit,
but they said, let's just do the ball, like, we

(10:22):
don't need some dumb game around it. And that was
the very first thing. It was a ball in a
box and it was a Nerf ball, and off to
the races.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah. The first ad copy said throw it indoors. You
can't damage lamps or break windows, you can't hurt babies
or old people.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Eeah, okay, that's very It got weird.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
And then on the package itself they called it the
world's first indoor ball, and it took off like a rocket.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah, like a Nerf rocket. This is nineteen sixty nine,
big success. Hard to get good numbers, like with a
lot of products, it's really hard to get like great
numbers sometimes. But I've seen anywhere from like three to
four million of those sold in that first year.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
It's astounding. Yeah, it's just a round Paula eurothane foam ball.
That's it. That's all to They just put it in
a box with and made it pretty colors out of
it and ragged on old people, right and babies. It
was a hit, So that's right. That was nineteen sixty nine,
I think when the first NERF ball came out, So

(11:28):
they didn't actually start innovating themselves, I should say they
they knew a good idea where they saw it, and
they saw it from a pair of guys, Fred Cox,
who was a place kicker for the Vikings, and a
businessman named John Maddox, and they had a very good
idea that took nerf into the next dimension.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah, this is pretty funny story actually, because John Maddox
wanted to build a game, like a field goal kicking
game where they had these little portable goalposts and you
could go in the art and kick field goals just
like the pros do. And he went to Fred Cox, who,
like you said, was a professional kicker for the Vikings,
and he was like, here's what I want to do.
But here's the deal. Is like, this ball can't go

(12:10):
too far because yards aren't huge, and so we should
make it like a medicine ball or something, but shaped
like a football so they can't kick it very far.
And fred Cox was like, that is not a good
idea kicking a big, heavy ball is really stupid and
you could get injured very easily. He said, why don't
you do something super super light and very low density

(12:31):
and soft, so it doesn't matter if you can kick
it far, it's not gonna hurt anything.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
Well, plus it won't go very far because it's foam.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
Yeah, I mean it would. I mean you can kick
it in her football pretty well.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
Okay, all right, calm down.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
I love it, he said, calm down when no one's
not calm. It's a good bit. Uh so, I don't
even know where it was. Oh yeah, So he's like,
let's do that. And so they created a mold injection
mold in the shape of a football, filled it with foam,
and they took it around and Parker Brothers again said,

(13:12):
we don't need this dumb game. No one wants to
kick field goals. It's like no one wants to be
a kicker. That's really boring. Let's just sell the ball,
and they licensed it from them because they were trying
to work on a football, but that heated wire cutting
thing couldn't make a good football. They had never thought
of injection molding, so they said, great, we'll use your idea.
And then in seventy two, the NERF football and NERF basketball.

(13:35):
I had both of these.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
Very early in my life.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
I probably had the maybe fourth generation of these, or
maybe first generation, but I got one in by the
time I was probably four years old, and that was
it for about two decades.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, you could say that there was also some pretty
iconic stuff. It just wasn't as big as the NERF
football or NERF ball. Like NERF tabletop pool remember that.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
Yeah, and I had like a ping pong I think.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah. There was also the NERF boomerang. The three from
that was NERF. Those things came out in the meantime,
but Ed puts it like that, and I think some
people would probably agree, like, yeah, they didn't have any
massive mega hits, And even if they did, the point
is that in the nineties NERF got essentially completely reimagined

(14:24):
as a as a totally different toy company. And I think, Chuck,
if you ask me if I can toot my own
horn a little bit here, that was a quality cliffhanger.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
I just set us up for beepp.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
Okay, so let's take a break and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Jogging job, all right, So you set the stage that

(15:07):
NERF was about to rebrand, and they rebranded indeed in
a big way, from a company that makes fun balls
to a weapons manufacturer. Basically true, but there's a story
behind this. In nineteen eighty seven and NERF has bounced around,
they're sort of the stuff you should know of toys.

Speaker 1 (15:30):
And I thought the same thing.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
They have been owned by virtually everyone, I think except
for Parker Brothers or no, no, no, wait, they were owned
by Parker Brothers.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
Yeah, they weren't owned by Milton Bradley.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
Milton Bradley, right, so they in eighty seven they were
part of Kenner, part of General Milton Mills, the same
as Parker Brothers. And I think then Kenner was purchased
by Tonka. In ninety one, has Bro bought Tonka. So
NERF kind of endured through all those changes as we
as NERF as Yeah, stayed NERF, just like we stayed

(16:04):
stuff you should know. And you know, at any point
someone could have come along, one of our company owners
and said, let's change the name.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Yeah you know, yep, I know for the host dangerous,
it's a dangerous time for sure.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
But there's another toy company that plays in called Laramie
and a gentleman that my daughter met recently. What I've
wanted to do it a full episode on Lonnie Johnson.
But they did their first little you know how you
you do a little oral report. They did their first
ones in second grade during Black History Month and one

(16:40):
of the kids' profile Lonnie Johnson. And he is still
alive and is local. And they took Atlanta. Yeah, they
took a field trip and met with Lonnie Johnson.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
That's awesome. So yeah, this guy is he's a bona
fide inventories in the Inventors Hall of Fame for a
number of reasons. But his his whole thing that he's
been trying to do all these decades is to come
up with green energy solutions, long before anybody ever used
the word green to describe things like energy solutions. And
in nineteen eighty two he was actually coming up with

(17:09):
a cooling device. I'm sure Ruby knows all about this, probably,
and the cooling device that he was going to use
would replace the free on cooling device for a refrigerator,
so get rid of free on. And there's something happened.
There was a malfunction somehow and a really pressurized blast

(17:30):
of water shot out of one of the tubes he
was using, and rather than like kick over his equipment
and like start shouting in the air, which is what
most people do, he saw a new opportunity. He was like, Hey,
I just figured out a way to pressurize water really
easily and simply, and I'll bet you could make a
really cool squirt gun out of that.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Do you know what's funny is no one before Lonnie
Johnson that ever saw a pressurized stream of water shoot anywhere.
Thought kids love this, right, like it had happened before
He's he didn't see the first stream of water being shot,
but he was like, hey, man, that's like the coolest
squirt gun ever.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
So, I mean I think that's why, you know, someone
like Lonnie Johnson is a sort of genius and has
like such an inventor's brain, right, they see the world
differently exactly.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
And he he was like, I want to test my idea.
I'm going to build a prototype for my daughter and
give it to her, set her loose on the neighborhood. Yeah,
and I think she was. She just probably very quickly
became the boss of the neighborhood right with her new
what eventually we come to be called a super Soaker,
but was originally a power Drencher.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah, so Laramie, this toy company I mentioned, they weren't
very big. They licensed his idea as the Power Drencher,
like you said, was rebranded in ninety one as the
super Soaker. And in the meantime we'll jump back to
Nerf here. Between eighty seven and when the super Soaker

(19:02):
comes along, they had started making weapons, things like, you know,
a bow and arrow, like a NERF bow and arrow.
The very first thing they ever used and you can
still buy these on eBay, was called the NERF blast
a ball in nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
It was like a pop gun.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
Yeah, It's just a tube with a handle and you
could just pump a ball out, a little Nerf ball.
And so they were getting into sort of the NERF
gun business. But it was really when Super Soaker was
purchased by Laramie, rather who owned the super Soaker was
purchased by Hasbro, when those two worlds kind of all

(19:41):
of a sudden, we're under the same roof. They said,
wait a minute, this whole idea of using pressure to
increase force and range and accuracy with water, we can
use with NERF as well, and then all of a sudden,
the NERF gun they don't call them guns as a company,
they call them blast. The NERF blaster became the new

(20:03):
thing in a big way.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
Yeah, that's what NERF went all in on. The first
thing they came out with was the Nerve sharpshooter, and
that was actually powered by a spring, but it's still
considered the first Nerve blaster. They also came up with
a bunch of other ways of shooting a foam missile
or projectile out of a NERF gun, including Lonnie Johnson's

(20:25):
way of compressing air and then releasing air forcefully. And
that's it. Like the whole company just completely changed and
became that because they got so popular so quickly.

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, and it kind of, you know, ed makes a
good point. It kind of aligned with a bunch of things.
It aligned with the nineties, which was you know, remember
everything was just extreme back then. That was the big
buzzword in toys and sports and everything else. And it also,
very sadly, also met with the rise in gun violence

(21:00):
in this country.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Well, not just that there was a big problem with
people who were playing with toy guns getting killed by
the cops. There were actually three kids aged thirteen, sixteen,
and nineteen who were killed in a six month period
between nineteen eighty seven and nineteen eighty eight because police
had mistaken their toy guns as real guns and killed them.

(21:22):
And so NERF was like, Okay, these are not guns,
and the ones we're designing aren't going to look anything
like guns. They're going to look like a cartoon toy
conception of what a gun would look like in the
hands of Roger.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Rabbit right in space. Because a lot of these looked
more like sort of laser space guns than you know,
gun guns, or at least they did for a while.
And this, you know, NERF gun culture sort of rose
in lockstep with gun violence in this country post nine
to eleven all of a sudden, and adn't heard this

(21:59):
expression before.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
I use it tact to.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Cool military cosplay gear and that whole esthetic of like, hey,
let me sort of dress up like I'm in the
army or I'm in the Special Forces or something. They
started putting sniper scopes and ammo clips and all this
pseudo military gear alongside these nerve or as part of

(22:21):
the NERF line, Like if you look up some of
these guns, the Centurion Blaster. It looks like a sniper
rifle or an assault rifle with a you know, a
bipod stand, but it's got these big, bright colors. You
started be able to mod these guns yourself. So NERF
started saying, well, hey, wait a minute, what if we

(22:42):
started our own modding, which they did starting in two
thousand and three, when they had these like tactical rails
built in where you could attach other things to it
to make it look more like a weapon, or you
could attach guns to other guns to make like this
super gun or a super blaster and stuff like that.
So all of this stuff was sort of I don't

(23:04):
want to say taking over the brand because they were
they were also pushing it at the same time, but
that became the big thing in nerve.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yeah, and I have the impression that the NERF moding
community they're modern guns because that's what NERF makes. But
they're also modern guns because they play like in NERF
battles in NERF Wars, and you use guns for that.
So they're making it their own. So I'm sure there's
a hardcore, over zealous, like like gun culture subculture to it,

(23:34):
but the impression I have more is it's more tinkerers engineers. Yeah,
almost like reformed steampunk people. Yeah, yeah, it's not. It's
not to say like there's this like dangerous, ominous subculture
that's just waiting to rise up. Those are the people
who modify real guns. These are these are people are
playing with NERF guns.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Essentially, right exactly.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
Just wanted to point that out. There's a distinction there is.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Uh, you go look up the NERF Titan, which I did.
It's essentially like a gatling gun. It is super cool
and fun and it you know, Adam Savage has a
fun video where he modded one in his little shop
to I think he modded the uh I'm not sure
if it was the Titan or not. It was which

(24:22):
was the one that has like one hundred rounds that
could hold of these little nerve.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
That's the rival Nemesis.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Okay, so he modded I guess a rival Nemesis to
have like a one thousand pellet clip and then shot
at a guy in a dinosaur costume in his shop.
And it's kind of a fun video on YouTube if
you want to go check that out. The great Atam Savage.

Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yeah, the yeah, that one is amazing looking. It looks
kind of like the remember the gatling gun in.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
A editor oh Predator Yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
That sound it's like that. Basically, it's the NERF version
of the Predator gatling gun.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
Yeah, which is what they do.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
They look at whatever cool space gun or real gun
they're using in the movies, NERF will come along and
make one basically, and they've also extended that to stuff
like licensing deals with gaming companies where they like, you
can get like a real NERF Fortnite gun or something
like that.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
Yeah, which are pretty cool looking. On also that whole
NERF mod community, they of course have lots of like
explainers and step by step and how to videos to
mod your own. There are people who made a livelihood
out of that. There's a guy named out of Darts.
His name's Luke Goodman. He's kind of a guru in

(25:45):
that whole sense. There's a company called Spitfire Products that's
on Etsy and they make entirely from scratch NERF sniper
rifles that are three D printed and it looks exactly
like something NERF would produce, Yeah, but they came up
with the designed themselves. So there's like a like the
people who are into it. Like I was saying, when
NERF releases a new product, it's not like all of

(26:06):
America knows about it, but the people who are in
the NERF like are really, really in the NERF now
more than people were before. It's like they took all
of that widespread but relatively shallow enthusiasm it concentrated it
much more deeply, but in a more narrow band.

Speaker 3 (26:22):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah, so you want to take a break.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah, let's take another break and we'll talk about some
of these NERF games right after.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
This and jugging job.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
I appreciate you talking doubly fast on behalf of me
trying to make up for my halftime speak.

Speaker 3 (27:03):
What do you talk slow?

Speaker 1 (27:06):
Yeah? I do. I feel like I feel like I've
been talking slower than normal lately.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
How about you, I feel like you're talking in normal speed.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
Okay, great, I feel like you're talking faster too.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
I don't feel like I'm talking faster.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
I could just be losing it. I do want to
say chuck before we get into it. I feel like
it'd be silly if we didn't mention that Hasbro is
the company that made our stuff. You should know trivial
pursuit game. Oh yeah, even oh wait, we'll disguise it
as like a humble breck, just full disclosure. You know,
we don't want it to seem like we don't want anybody.

(27:38):
We don't want to come out and seem like we're
playing secret favorites.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
We're part of the NERF family.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
I guess too. Huh, totally. I love that.

Speaker 1 (27:46):
So there's a lot of games that people play with
nerves specifically, but also in general. And one of the
things that people love to play with NERF guns are
these huge battles that can last hours, sometimes days, sometimes longer,
and can evolve many hundreds of people in some cases.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Yeah, it seems like one of the more fun because
it's worked its way into the cosplay community. Of course,
as they mod these and steampunk these things up, you
know that's going to happen, and you know you're if
you're looking for a cool like cosplay outfit, a NERF
you know that's like paramilitary or something. NERF is a
pretty obvious place to start because like you're already halfway there.

(28:26):
Just get out some cool mods and some paint.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
But what if you're into like zombie and post apocalyptic stuff.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
What do you do then, well, friend, then you play
Human v. Zombies. It is a It sounds like a
lot of fun. Sometimes they can incorporate like other elements
like capture the flag and some things like that into it.
But HVZ is when you have one zombie initially a
bunch of humans. They are wearing two different colored bandanas

(28:55):
to distinguish one from the other. And I want to
play this humans can it'd be like it would be
in real life. You can shoot a zombie with you know,
from a distance with the NERF gun, but a zombie
has to actually touch you, you know, mocking the bite.
You know that you would have to get in person

(29:17):
up close from a zombie in order to turn you
into a zombie. Whereas and you know, of course it's
eventually gonna flip. The more zombies there are, the fewer humans,
you know, imagine that it starts growing exponentially, just like
in zombie movies. But if you're a zombie and you
get hit with a NERF bullet or arrow or whatever,

(29:38):
then you just have to sit out for fifteen minutes
and you're back in the game. And these games can
be huge. It can be hundreds of people and they
can last like a weekend.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah, and like you're tracked online by moderators and the
college campuses if you haven't guessed by now or yeah,
frequent sites of human versus zombies. Sure, battles, right, god bless,
I think just battles in general. But because there's so
many people and everybody's all up on everybody else. In
addition to the NERF guns, they'll often have NERF melee weapons. Yeah,

(30:09):
why not, like battle axes and swords and maces. And
NERF made a lot of these, and now you know,
anytime that starts to get discontinued, they become like more
expensive collector's items.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
But I was looking, Chuck, if you if you look
up like new NERF stuff that you could buy, like Target,
a huge consumer of the stuff. You should know book
that we put out. They're pretty affordable. Actually, I mean
they're not nearly as much as I thought they'd be.
I thought I would have thought like these, Yeah, I
would have thought, like a NERF like machine gun, it

(30:42):
would have been easily one hundred dollars and twenty dollars. No,
they're like forty fifty bucks for like a big full
size one. Yeah, I think they get you with the
AMMO maybe.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
Ah, yeah, sure, the.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Amma's a little expensive, but you can also buy off
brand stuff online for much cheap. Two.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
I hear, yeah, Whammo, what about them? Well, it's just joking,
like the off rand Ammo would be called Wamo.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
But oh yeah, it's like, why did you bring Wammo
into this? They're a totally different toymets.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
What if frisbees have to do with it?

Speaker 1 (31:15):
Do you remember that movie Gotcha with Anthony Edwards?

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Oh? Do?

Speaker 1 (31:18):
I that's kind of what this reminds me of. But yeah,
back then, the kids pull up a chair and listen
to a yarn spun by some old old guys. There.
Rather than nerf guns, there used to be low powered
paintball guns that were all the thing in the mid eighties.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
Yeah, and laser tag remember that?

Speaker 1 (31:38):
Yeah, laser tag Man. I got cornered by somebody wants
in laser tag and he just kept killing me over
and over again. I shouted at him stop.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
Did he stop?

Speaker 1 (31:48):
I don't think he did, or maybe, but he still
shot me a few more times before he did, just
to show me he wasn't listening to me.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
And that person went on to be the BTK Killer.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
There was also that movie tag the Assassination Game. Do
you remember that?

Speaker 1 (32:06):
No?

Speaker 3 (32:07):
I don't remember that.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Gotcha was more popular, I think.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
Yeah, but it was the same premise, right, like Anthony
Edwards thinks he's playing like a paintball game, but he's
actually caught up in international intrigue.

Speaker 3 (32:17):
I think. So.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
It was no Cloak and Dagger. I'll tell you that.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Mmm, the great Dabney Coleman.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
He was an amazing actor. I'm sorry to get off
track here. I know we don't do this very often,
but I saw Cloak and Dagger recently, saw nine to
five not too long ago. Some other A couple other
movies I can't even remember because he just pops up
in the most random places.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
But modern problems, Ah.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
I don't remember that. One out of time I think
was one where he's a cop who finds out he's
dying erroneously and he tries to get himself killed so
that his wife can get his police pension for dying
in the line of duty. I don't know, he just
can't do it. It was a good one. It's cute,
cute considering he was a cop who was trying to
get to get someone to kill him.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
Yeah, but he was.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
He's just an amazing actor. Like just so underrated by
me as a kid. Now that I'm an adult, I'm like,
this guy was good.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah, loved Abney Coleman.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
All right.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
So the future of NERF. Their main slogan since the
nineties has been it's a NERF or nothing. And they still,
like you said, are coming out with new stuff here
and there. They are now coming up with their ammunition
is a little firmer than before. They're starting to come
out come out with things that aren't quite foam. It's
a little more like rubber. I imagine that hurts a little

(33:36):
bit more. I think even one of these guns is
banned in some of these games because you know, it's
sort of like not quite as bad as a paintball,
but you can, you know, it can get a real
sting with the range of some of these. I think
they advertise a range of like ninety feet for some
of these, whereas in our day, well in our day,

(33:57):
it was just it was just footballs and basketballs. Or
when they started coming out with the little the little
you know, sucker darts, you know, those things they shot
in an arc, you know, not much velocity.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
They went wide, real wide.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
Yehude.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, it's definitely increased tremendously. And then that whole moding community.
One of the things they're into is increasing accuracy, power distance,
all that stuff. And one of the things I think
that NERF has really been smart about is that they
know what their customers are doing with their stuff, and
so they respond in kind. Like they found out people

(34:37):
were modding their guns, so they put up tactical rails
to make it easier to mod They found out people
were playing humans versus zombies, so they came out with
a whole line of like post apocalyptic zombie guns and
chainsaws and baseball bats and stuff like that, all branded
like NERF Zombie. And I feel like I didn't realize
that that was going on, but now that I see it,

(34:59):
I just think it's really smart, and you don't see
that very often among a company in a way that's
not like exploitive or going for a quick buck or
something like that. They seem like they're really genuinely responding
because they put like real thought into all their products.
I did not find a single person online complaining about

(35:20):
NERF and its products, not a single one, And I
think that that's so rare that I mean, I.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
Like NERF now, yeah, I mean they're a smart company.
They've got partnerships with the NFL with games, like there
have been NERF first person shooter games. They now have these.
I don't think there are many of them yet. The
NERF Action Experience Centers, which is like a big you know,
the big indoor playgrounds are such a huge thing now

(35:49):
for kids, like trampoline zones and stuff like that. But
NERF has their own. I think there's one in oh
where was it a saw somewhere in Asia, but there's
now one I think being built in the UK, one
in New Jersey. Like this is sort of the next
way for them.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
Hong Kong, London, New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Was it Hong Kong? But yeah, you got the right point.
But yeah, these action Experience centers seem like kind of
the next big thing for them is you know, not
only do you have their products in there, but you're
charging a kid whatever nineteen bucks to come in and
play for a few hours.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
Sure, kind of like a Lego land or something.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
Yeah, although that has rides and things, doesn't it?

Speaker 1 (36:34):
Uh? Yes, it does. It does sticky rides.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
Okay, I've never been little kids.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
Yeah, everything's very sticky. Well, you got anything else about.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
Nerve No, let's let's wrap this one up.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Okay, Well we just wrapped it up because Chuck said so,
which means, of course it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
Uh, you know what, We're gonna forego listener mail. I
believe this is coming out right before our tour, so
this is a last ditch effort in real time to
get people to buy tickets. We May fourth, we're gonna
be at the Warner Theater in d C. The very
next night, May fifth at the Chevalier and Medford, mass

(37:14):
right outside of Boston, and then May six at gorgeous,
legendary Massy holl in Toronto. I believe we've moved a
lot of tickets in Boston, but DC and Toronto are
kind of lagging, so plenty of great seats. We'd love
to see everybody on this spring tour. We're going to
be coming out again in the fall. But this is
if you're in the Northeast, this is your chance.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yes, and you can get tickets by going to Linktree
slash s y s k L I n K t
R dot E E slash s y s K. It'll
take you to all the tickets site you need to
go to to come see us. So come see us, everybody.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
All right?

Speaker 2 (37:50):
Sounds good to me. Can't wait to get out there,
and we look forward to seeing everyone in DC, Boston
and Toronto.

Speaker 1 (37:55):
Agreed. And if you want to get in touch with
us in the meantime to tell us how much you
can't wait to see us in the Northeast, we'd love
to hear that. You can send it as an email
to stuff podcast atiheartradio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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