Talking Football

My friend Ed and I got into an email thread the other day about the toy football games we had as children.

It seemed every kid on the block had one of the Tudor electric football games. In short, it was a vibrating piece of sheet metal styled as a football field with bleachers and a scoreboard you could attach. The mechanics of the game were designed to propel plastic football player figurines up and down the field. 

My version of the game had Jets Vs. Raiders (The Heidi Game). Ed's was Cowboys Vs. Colts (Super Bowl V). The guy across the street had Green Bay vs. Cleveland.. Maybe it commemorated the last NFL Championship Game (1965) before the Super Bowl era?

Anyway, it was fun to get together with your buddy and set the game up and decide which teams would play. The set up was really the fun part. The game itself never captured as much interest.

Fast forward some years and Santa brought a modern version of the game as a gift for Paul and it commemorated the Tennessee Titans Super Bowl appearance against the Rams - Super Bowl XXXIV.

My dad enjoyed playing Cadeco's "Hall of Fame" football game. In that version, the two players chose offensive and defensive cards.  You slid those cards into an opaque slot and then turned on a lightbulb under the field. It shone and revealed the outcome of the play.

We spent many hours enjoying that one.

The game that started the Ed thread, however, was Mattel's NFL Talking Football. He sent me a link to a video capturing much of the essence of the game.

Talking Football was manufactured to resemble a transistor radio with associated game pieces to track plays and progress. On offense, you selected a disk that featured the play you were calling. You'd place it into a slot in the unit and your opponent spun it to a spot "calling" her/his defensive alignment. Then, you plopped the disk in and an announcer gave you the play by play call for that outcome.

Here's one I remember by heart:

"Handoff to the halfback; lateral to the quarterback. Flea-flicker pass. TOUCHDOWN!"

Funny how quickly it comes back all these years later.

As Ed went through the video, he noted another of of our favorites is featured at the 4:26 mark of the video. You can fast-forward to that part to hear it yourself, if you like:

"Fumbled...high in the air...up for grabs...the defense gets it."

For years, we've remembered the day the batteries on my player were running low and, so, the announcing took place in slow motion! 

Not so on this recording. But you can certainly get a feel for how the game went when the batteries were at full power.

It seemed to me there were more football games for sale in those days than other sports. I've seen some of the tabletop ice hockey games, though. Those looked like lots of fun.

Maybe the proliferation of football games was because my dad enjoyed that sport most of all? Or because we live in the South, where football is king. I would have loved one of the baseball games, but, you can't have it all!

Whatever the case, all of these games brought lots of enjoyment and helped us to pass many hours when life moved at a slower pace.

JG