Lite-Brite

Lite Brite, Lite-Brite / shine so bright / beautiful pictures come to life!

Lite-Brite was first introduced by Hasbro in 1967. On a black, back-lit breadboard (powered by a 25-watt bulb which was not included) one plugged in various translucent plastic plugs that came in eight different colors. To a human the plugs resembled colorful fuses. To cats they looked edible. What joy Lite-Brite gave was diminished by enduring a Sunday afternoon listening to your cat making horrifying cat puking noises.

On a pallet with a physical screen resolution of 50 x 25 pixels, one was encouraged to make luminescent clowns and trains. Those were hard to do. Usually you made a smiley face, a rectangle out of randomly selected colored pegs, or you spelled out "I luv u (insert name of your dog or Shaun Cassidy)". If you were really put off by your lack of talent in the world of graphical arts, Lite-Brite came with a number of templates that told you where you could stick the pegs. However, that was pretty time consuming. Those who wanted cool psychedelic looking art but lacked both creativity and patience, well, those people were shuffled off to Spirograph.

Although Lite-Brite came with 350 pegs, after a while you'd have a hard time finding adequate pegs because your brother had swiped a lot of them, claiming they looked just like A-Bombs and he lost several after he was raining them down on his little plastic army men cowering in the folds of the living room couch.

Lite-Brite has been voted a number of times by Parenting magazine one of is top all time top toys. However, Lite-Brite possibly " jumped the shark" as a toy in the '80s when it released a Mr. T themed set. Yes, now kids could render psychedelic images of mohawked bouncers.

In 2002, Lite-Brite went 3D with the Lite-Brite Cube.