how Pop It exploded in schoolyards

Chronic. You probably remember the famous quote from Jacques Séguéla: “If at 50 you don’t have a Rolex, it’s because you’ve missed your life” ? We could easily hijack it: because today if at 9 years old you don’t have a Pop It in your hands, it’s because you missed your childhood a little. Successful schoolyards, monopolizing almost all the first places in the Amazon toy sales catalog, this malleable object with various shapes, pressed into the silicone, could make you think of reusable bubble wrap.

As with the packaging material, this is about producing “pop!” By pressing small domes, hollow inside. After having fulfilled their sound office, these half-bubbles are likely to return to their initial convex state with a simple pressure of the finger, the explosion can then be repeated hundreds of times. “It’s satisfying! “, my son tells me to describe the pleasure provided by this activity, using a formula that all the children repeat, as if a lexical kit had been provided to them with the object.

Playful approach to existence

On the channel “Carla does her show!” », A young Belgian YouTuber speaking like a teleshopping demonstrator frees those who are not yet aware of this societal upheaval: “Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well. Anyway, I’m fine! If you are on TikTok, you may know that the hot new game is Pop It. But wait, what is Pop It? Pop It is an anti-stress to satisfy yourself. And you can hear that if I blow a bubble, it will make less noise than if I blow two, or three. “

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Even if it recalls an ancestral recreational practice which consists, at the end of a move, in bursting bubble wrap to get rid of the anguish that one had to convey old porcelain vases, the Pop It comes actually elsewhere. From an XXe century shaken by other types of explosions. Before becoming the designer of this amazing game, Theo Coster, now deceased, was first classmate of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. Thanks to a change of name and the good care of a Catholic family who hid him during the conflict in the small Dutch village of Vaassen, this child of Jewish origin survives the Second World War.

In 1955, after a long journey on the handlebars of his Batavus motorcycle, this printer’s son arrived in Israel, where he met a plastic arts teacher who would become his wife: Ora Rosenblat. In addition to a family, the couple created, from the contraction of their two first names, the company Theora Design and embarked on the invention of toys and board games, some of which would become international successes, such as the Qui is it ?, which is based on the spirit of deduction. This creative, amused, playful approach to existence has the particularity of extending into the dramas that the couple is going through.

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