Are you tired of the Barbies, the Nintendos, the generic gadgets and plastic figures that populate the shelves of Wal-Mart? Well, these little-known toys may just be the coolest ideas for toys ever. If you’re running out of unique toy gift ideas, these could fill in your gaps, and turn out to be the most unique Christmas gifts the kids on your list ever got. For that matter, I’d be glad to get any one of these myself!
Frigits: Remember Mousetrap — building the Rube Goldberg machine, dropping the little silver ball in, and watching it roll downward? Well, this is like Mousetrap, only all silver ball and canals, and you build it on your refrigerator. Frigits may be the coolest toy for anyone over the age of three I’ve ever seen. With special parts to go round the corner of the fridge, launchers, and ways to extend your track off the refrigerator, anyone at home on Friday night can have hours of geekish fun.
Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle — Fly helicopters! Control them with your remote! Shoot down your friends! Yes, these nifty copters use laser technology to shoot each other down. Target, lock, load, and poof! your enemy’s copter drops like a lump of plastic. A set comes with two copters and two remotes for a ready-made battle.
The Electric Plane Launcher is cheap, around $15, and it only does one thing — but my friends, it does it well. This simple gadget launches your own homemade paper airplanes — at over 30 miles per hour. You can’t beat that for simple, cheap fun.
The Radio Control Recon Camera Helicopter — Another remote control helicopter, but this one’s for information gathering instead of shooting down your enemy. It takes surprisingly good video wherever you’re flying it, and displays the images on the center of your remote control handset. At $200, it’s fairly expensive, but then, what’s it worth to be able to sneak around the neighborhood and spy on everyone? I can think of about a hundred things teens could do with this, some of them legal, and some even moral and ethical.
The Hydroflyer — yet another R/C, this one functions as a boat — and an R/C car — and an all-terrain vehicle — and a plane. It . . . is. . . amazing. You can find a lovely video of it on Youtube demonstrating it taking off from water, from grass, from street, and its remarkable speed on every surface. In the air, it can do all kinds of tricks, from a semi-hover to a straight-up vertical shot well over 50 feet up. (Yes, their website is amateurish and poorly spelled — it don’t matter. The toys is really all that.)
Fly Fusion Pentop Computer — I’ve never seen anything like this. The Fly’s been around a year or two, but it’s improving quickly. This gadget looks like a super-fat pen, but it captures everything you write with it digitally for transfer to the computer later. It also does fairly neat things without an external computer like give you help with math homework, spellcheck, translates Spanish/English, or help you write. This is definitely for the studious teen, not the active child, but it’s very nice. The biggest hitch: you have to buy software packages for the different functions at a cost of up to $30 each.
