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poster.) One hundred toy soldiers for $1! (They were flat plastic.) Torment your brother with onion gum, 20 cents! (It tasted awful but not a lot like onions.) Learn to throw your voice with a 25-cent booklet! (We ended up throwing the booklet across the room instead.) Try X-ray Specs, a hilarious optical illusion, just a buck! (They made things look kinda fuzzy but never did let you see through that cute girl’s sweater.)
    Some comic book ads wanted you to sell something—usually greeting cards or Grit —in hopes of raking in extra cash. Others just hawked products you had never heard of but suddenly had to have—Sea-Monkeys and Charles Atlas’s strength-training program were classics. The ads made at least as strong an impression on a kid’s mind as the stories of Archie and Veronica did.
    Sure, most kids were smart enough to know that you weren’t going to turn into a muscleman by buying Atlas’s thirty-two-page pamphlet, that brine shrimp probably didn’t wear crowns and play basketball, and that Mom was so going to ground you if you slipped that fake-blood-producing soap into her sink. But they were so tempting, and if you had a little allowance money and access to a thirteen-cent stamp, well, who didn’t send away for one or two? The anticipation of waiting for the mailman alone was worth the buck.
    X-TINCTION RATING: Gone for good.
    REPLACED BY: Kids’ comics today mostly advertise . . . other kids’ comics. The goofy gags and products they once hawked can be found at stores like Spencer Gifts, but it’s just not the same.

Connect Four
    W E were freaks for tic-tac-toe, playing it everywhere—on scrap paper, on chalkboards, on frosty school-bus windows. So in 1974, when Connect Four came along, we immediately recognized it as three-dimensional tic-tac-toe and couldn’t get enough.We spent hours dropping checkers into the stand with a satisfying thwock , trying to line up four in a row while preventing a pal from doing the same.
    Talk about tension.You’d nonchalantly try to distract your friend from figuring out her one remaining block, blabbing about nothing, tapping the checkers on the table, impatiently convinced you were about to slam down Checker #4. Then out of nowhere, she’d swoop in and finish off her own row in a spot you hadn’t even seen coming. AAUGH! Damn your powers of misdirection, Jeannine!
    It was a feeling perfectly exemplified in the game’s infamous commercial, in which bowl-haircutted brother gets beat by his crafty sibling. You remember it. “Here, diagonally!” she crows, as he sinks into defeat and delivers the classic line: “Pret-ty sneak-y, sis.”
    Thankfully, the game had an ideal built-in way to let off steam: its quick-release latch. The crashing sound of all the checkers hitting the table at once was almost as satisfying as “accidentally” kicking over your sister’s Lincoln Log tower. It was as close as kids could come to giving a family member the finger. Pretty sneaky is right.
    X-TINCTION RATING: Still going strong.
    FUN FACT: In a popular You Tube clip, Kanye West and Jonah Hill play Connect Four to a soundtrack ofWest’s own music. “This is like chess for dumb people,” cracks Hill.

“Convoy”
    B REAKER one-nine, you got your ears on? Kids had no idea what CB chatter meant, but it sure was fun to pretend, holding a Romper Stomper to your mouth like it was a microphone and blabbing about “putting the hammer down” and “bears in the air.”
    We discovered the citizen’s-band phenomenon when C.W. McCall recorded the 1976 hit “Convoy.” You didn’t have to understand the exotic new language (what in the world was a “cab-over Pete with a reefer on”?) to immediately fall in love with the romance of the eighteen-wheel lifestyle. “Convoy” told a classic tale of fighting authority, with the truckers crashing