You know, we all love to reminisce about the toys from our childhood that we loved. But if E! News has taught us anything, it's that everyone loves a good train wreck!
(Case in Point) So what about the childhood toys that sucked? In the arts and crafts sector of 90s toys, we can think of nothing on earth that sucked worse than RoseArt industries. Specifically, of course, we are talking about RoseArt Crayons.
The slippery, waxy consistency of these sh*t-sticks always resulted in an overly slick picture, often with small clumps of the crayon left on the page. One annonymous account of a scarring experience with the crayons:
"My Parents were going out for the evening and I was left with the babysitter, Tracy. She thought it would be a fun idea to color together...A "Little Mermaid" coloring book, if I remember correctly. I was fairly excited until I saw that b*tch pull out a 16-pack of RoseArt colors. Well, that clearly wasn't going to work, so I went to my closet to find my 64-pack of Crayola's, complete with such beautiful hues as Jungle Green, Cauliflower, and Cerulean (which no one knew how to pronounce, but loved all the same). Well as it turns out, my brother had left them at our grandparents, and I was pretty much s.o.l. No coloring went on that night, I know that for sure."
Children whose parents were less well-off were forced to submit to their parents thriftiness with the use of the greasy crayons as their primary coloring source. "The Crayons just plain sucked," claims Tyler Peterson, 20-year old resident of Tomah, Wisconsin. "They were soiled in grease to the point that your fingers would turn colors even through the paper on the crayons." The labels of the crayons were also made of wax, meaning that when the crayons broke in half the paper could hardly follow suit, leaving you with several pieces of waxy, unlabeled crap (see below).
After hearing these and other heartbreaking confessions, it was very difficult for us to say anything positive about the RoseArt brand, it's developers, or their immediate families. In fact, it saddened us to learn that Rose Art is STILL the #2 manufactuerer of crayons worldwide. But, we also learned, the Rose Art execs haven't been wasting their time as a constant runner up to Crayola. They have developed a niche market of their own:
HIPPY KID TOYS!!!
Clearly, Rose art is targeting parents who are total hippies and buying toys that they want to get stoned and play with while their kids are in bed. Exhibit A (above) black light fuzzy posters. Exhibit B:
Yes, that homemade candle spells "Love".
Hmm...what's something else our hippy demographic will want their love child to have on hand when they're high?
Right, of course. here's some other weird stuff that I dug up from the world of Rose Art:
A Weaving Loom??? Well anyways, we could have sworn we could find some much better 90s RoseArt crap crafts but apprently they have covered their tracks very well. We couldn't find hardly any trace that the company even existed outside of the realm of waxy-@ss crayons and apparently (now) toy dolls. I was going to give them credit for this treasure:
But then I realized that was Ohio Art, fabulous makers of the Etch-A-sketch, not Rose Art. Rose Art made this cheap imitation of the Twirl-O-Paint:
Gah. So Typical.
