One
of the most frustrating things that can possibly happen when you are
a child is getting a toy and having it not work properly, or get
broken after a certain amount of time.
I'm
sure we've all been in situations like that. I'm sure that we've all
had a wheel fall off of our roller skates or skateboards. I'm sure
that those of us who owned a Nintendo remember blowing into the
cartridges when they refused to play in the machine. And, I'm sure
that many of you were upset when the light bulbs burned out in your
Lite-Brite toys or Easy Bake Ovens.
Of
course, those were all things that couldn't be helped...well, unless
you were incredibly rough with your toys and caused the damage
yourself.
Now,
what happens when you get a toy that you're dying to play with, but
have absolutely no idea how to get it working, or how to set it up
properly to guarantee yourself hours of fun? In these cases, the toy
may very well be manufactured with the greatest of care and ease, and
there isn't a single thing wrong with it. It's the owners of the
toys themselves who can't figure it out.
I
can think of a couple of examples to try and illustrate what I mean.
You know those Rubik's Cubes where the goal of the puzzle was to
arrange it so that each face of the cube was a solid colour? It's
been 30 years since they've been released, and I still can't seem to
figure them out. Or, those model train sets. Some people have a
huge hobby of collecting train sets, and designing model train
tracks...but the one and only train set I ever owned was a nightmare
to complete. I don't even know if I ever managed to get the whole
thing set up one hundred per cent correctly.
And
then there's the subject of today's blog topic. It is a toy that I
probably owned at least three or four of at any given time...and it
is a toy that for whatever reason, I could not figure out how it
worked.
We're
going to be talking about the small, but mighty yo-yo.
I
know what some of you must be saying. The yo-yo is a classic toy.
How could anyone have a hard time with a yo-yo?
Well,
I did. I was a...well, um...a yo-yo with a yo-yo...and no, that's not me. It's a good representation of how horrible I was with a yo-yo though.
I
mean, certainly most kids learn how to master the most simplest of
moves that a yo-yo was capable of performing. The classic up and
down motion. Well, do you want to know how old I was when I mastered
the up/down technique? EIGHTEEN. It took me eighteen years to learn
how to use a yo-yo the correct way. Looking back on it, I'm a bit
embarrassed to admit that, but I just wanted to prove the point that
in this case, it wasn't the yo-yo's fault.
Needless
to say, learning the various tricks that can be associated with
yo-yos were an impossibility for me. Instead of walking the dog, I
was killing the dog. And, don't even get me started on the yo-yo
trick “around the world”. I even think that Blair Warner from
“The Facts of Life” did a better job with that trick than I
did...and if you've ever seen the episode where she performs that trick, that should give you an indication of how hopeless I was with
a yo-yo.
Despite
this, I still admit that I find yo-yos to be fascinating things. I
certainly admire people who can do elaborate yo-yo tricks, and deep
down, I wish I could find a way to perform them too. But with my
luck, the yo-yo would turn against me and strangle me to death if I
tried.
The
history of the yo-yo is a fascinating tale though. The earliest
surviving yo-yo reportedly dates back thousands of years to the year
500 B.C. The materials that were used for the body of the yo-yo were
terra cotta skin disks. If you look at the image below, you can see
a painting of a boy playing with a yo-yo that was taken from the
outside of an ancient Greek vase. The reason behind using the terra
cotta disks were symbolic. They were used to ceremonially offer the
toys of youth to certain gods when the child came of age.
And
why was the toy named the “yo-yo”? Admittedly, the history
behind the name has conflicting theories. The most widely believed
one is that the name came from the northern Philippine Ilokano
language word. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary seems to confirm this
definition, so I'm going to go with this one. But another theory is
that the word yo-yo was actually a Tagalong word, which meant “come
from” or “return”.
So,
that's your history lesson on how yo-yos were created. However, it
took thousands of years before the toy became popular in North
America. James L. Haven and Charles Hettrick, both of Cincinnati,
Ohio, took out a patent in the United States for an improved version
of the toy, which was also referred to as a bandelore. This occurred
in 1866.
A
few decades later, in 1928, Filipino-American Pedro Flores started up
the Yo-Yo Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara, California. The
business started up small, with just a dozen handmade toys, including
yo-yos, but by the following year, Flores had opened two additional
factories in Los Angeles and Hollywood, California, which employed
600 people, and produced over 300,000 toys each day!
Entrepreneur
Donald Duncan took notice of the yo-yo fad, and he purchased the
Flores Yo-Yo Corporation and all of its assets, including the Flores
name. The name “yo-yo” was registered as a trademark in America
in 1932, and Duncan's first design of the yo-yo was called the Duncan
O-BOY. Duncan reportedly paid more than a quarter of a million
dollars to invest in the company (which was almost unheard of, given
that it was smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression). Even
more unheard of was that the investment that Duncan made ended up
being very profitable. By 1946, Duncan's wealth had skyrocketed as a
result. That same year, he opened up a factory in Luck, Wisconsin,
which prompted the small town to call themselves the “Yo-yo Capital
of the World”.
Duncan's
yo-yo design was so successful that it ended up being inducted into
the National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York in 1999.
Of
course, Duncan's success didn't come without its controversies, and
certainly the biggest one that he faced occurred in 1965. That year,
the Royal Tops Company claimed that the word “yo-yo” had become
commonly used within the English vocabulary, making Duncan's rights
to the name redundant. To everyone's surprise, a judge sided with
Royal Tops, and the fallout caused Duncan's fortune to plummet. It
caused so much damage that the Duncan family was forced to sell the
business to Flambeau Incorporated in the late 1960s, which had
manufactured Duncan's plastic yo-yo models for a decade prior. The
company is still in operation as of 2012.
In
fact, yo-yos are just as popular as ever. It sounds surprising,
given that we now live in a world that is filled with iPods, mobile
phones, and XBOX 360s to distract teenagers. There is something to
be said about the power of the yo-yo, however.
Did
you know that there is a massive online following of all things
relative to the yo-yo? I didn't know this either until I did some
searching around online. And the discussion and obsession over
yo-yos aren't just limited to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even
Pinterest. There are several online groups devoted to yo-yo news,
sharing new tricks, and exchanging yo-yo themed merchandise. Some of
these sites include the following;
And
those are just FIVE of many sites devoted to the yo-yo.
Then
there are the various yo-yo contests that are held all over the
world. Perhaps one of the most famous events is the World Yo-Yo
Contest, which has been held annually since 1992 (although the first
ever contest was held sixty years prior, in 1932). As of July 2012,
the current yo-yo champions are;
Marcus
Koh – Single Hand String Trick
Shinji
Saito – Two Hands Looping Trick
Hank
Freeman – Two Hands String Trick
Naoto
Okada – Offstring
Takeshi
Matsuura – Counterweight
Takahiko
Hasegawa – Artistic Performance
TRIVIA:
That second name on the list is no stranger to yo-yo championships.
Reportedly, he has won TWELVE titles!
So,
that is my report on the ups and downs of yo-yos. I certainly didn't
have much luck with getting my yo-yo to do much of anything, but the
one thing that I can say is that yo-yos are not going away. They
never really left. Why, if I live until the year 2100, I bet yo-yos
will still have a place in this world.
Although,
in 2100, I'll be 119 years old, and will likely not be alive to
collect on that bet. Oh well, c'est la vie.
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