kartooner

In the same era as Speak and Spell, The Lit­tle Pro­fes­sor, Shrinky Dinks and Trans­form­ers, there was Lite Brite — the qui­nessen­tial toy for any child wish­ing to shed their creativity.

Lite Brite was a sim­ple con­cept. It was essen­tially a peg board with a back­light in addi­tion to hun­dreds of multi-colored pegs — which resem­ble a cross between a Christ­mas light and those plas­tic pieces that remain affixed to model kit sheets.

When I first plugged a Lite Brite in I wasn’t sure what to do next. It wasn’t until I fig­ured out that included in the box were a hand­ful of pat­terns to inspire you. These included sail boats, clowns and the occas­sional island scene (one island smack dab in the mid­dle of the ocean with a sin­gle palm tree pro­truded to one side).

Over time a child would lose sev­eral of the pegs and more often than not you would be left with more than one color over another. For me, I had close to 50 or so pur­ple, 10 red and what seemed like a 300 pieces of green.

Today, the Lite Brite has evolved into the Lite Brite Cube — a vari­ant on the orig­i­nal design. Instead of one flat panel, you now have four pan­els com­bined to cre­ate a cube — which to me sig­nals the intel­li­gence or techno-savvy of today’s youth.

Chil­dren of yes­ter­year were enter­tained and con­tent with unpre­ten­cious tech­nol­ogy; things like Slip and Slides, Speak and Spell and remote-controlled robots. Those were the days.