in the 70s, Toys of the Seventies

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Commentor Name:	Estie Dee
Comments left:	Like many of you, I wanted this BADLY around Xmas probably in '77 or '78, probably at least half due to the super-catchy jingle. Like many of you, I was profoundly, viscerally disppointed in the 'clicker'. It was really a worthless little come-on, I'd wanted something R/C (which was pretty expensive back then) and this was just sad. It was a teaching moment about advertising in the longer run, though my parents kind of inflicted it on me by not realizing it was NOT what I was actually asking for in the bigger picture, even as I clamored for that exact toy. I recall the jingle going "You and the Max Machine, You and the Max Machine... Make it turn left, make it go straight, make it turn right, you can see what I mean..." I'm sure it's on YouTube somewhere. However I recall that one click started it forward, the next click caused it to reverse and swerve ~90 degrees to the right, and take off forward again (i.e. crudely turning left, I guess?): you had to catch it and turn it off to stop it, once started. If you needed it to turn right you had to try to click it fast within a short amount of travel (such as in front of a doorway you were trying to get it to go through) and that usually failed. The forward/rear-right-forward wasn't an uncommon setup in low-rent "R/C" cars of the day, I recall some Tandy/Radio Shack cars doing the same thing: those even had a little top-down diagram of its possibile directions in the catalog, picture a capital 'L' with an arrow pointing up off the top and then another down at the lower end pointing to the right (where actual R/C cars' diagrams, also sold by T/RS in the same catalog) had left/right forward arrows to ahead and behind, say). Why even MAKE such a completely useless 'toy'? I do wonder how many of these were returned or chucked, perhaps enough to make them even rarer today. :) Reading folks' posts above, I'm wondering if mine was defective or if over the production run they changed what clicking did, or something. The audio sensor on the top was pretty sensitive too, so it was unable to run over textured kitchen linoleum without getting false input. So... in the end I "played" with it for about a day and in the weeks following I learned a bit about motors and wires and such, as I took it apart and eventually tossed it. Thanks for sharing, everyone. :)
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