Stuff You Should Know - How Play-Doh Works

Episode Date: August 5, 2014

Do you love Play-Doh? Chuck and Josh certainly love to talk about it, from its interesting history as a wall cleaner, to its more scientific chemical properties. It's everything you ever wanted to know about the pliable children's toy. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this is the first of two stuff you should know that were recording today. My voice already sounds weird to me. What do you mean? It doesn't sound a little weird, you know, like when we get toward the end of the second one or it gets a little like worn out or something? Yeah, like it's been extruded through a Play-Doh fun factory.

Was all that a setup or do you really feel that way? That was off the cuff, baby. Okay. No, it doesn't sound weird to me. Your voice never sounds weird unless you're sick. Jerry, Judge McCall? Yep. Jerry Brokawtai.

You decided with me? Well, Jerry wears headphones, but you and I fight the broadcasting business by being the only people that don't wear headphones. Or cans. I never get it. I'm like, you're two feet from me. Why do I need headphones? I know.

I don't want to hear myself anyway. I don't want to hear myself better. No. It's terrible. It sounds like torture. How about this for a new S-Y-S-K-T shirt? No more cans. Okay.

Just have a little X through some headphones. I think when you make a step you should know decree from now on, we should have like a very wand sound effect where he's like, here's this for a new T-shirt. I decree it to be made into existence. Yeah. We're going to, by the way, since I mentioned it, we're going to have some new shirts coming soon. Yeah.

Some good, like some fan designs even. Yep. Pretty exciting. Yeah. We do have some now that people can go buy if you want. I like those first designs we had. And well, let's just have this out on the air. It's not an argument, but let's have this discussion.

Are we going to retire the original six from the contest, or should we just let them keep going in perpetuity? Oh, unless there's a reason. I think perpetuity is the way to go. Okay. Because someone might like the dancing, I don't know what we call that, the skeleton woodcut. Yeah.

Parade of dancing skeletons. The macabre parade, that's what I would call it. Yeah. That's a good one. All six of them were excellent. The baby with the fly on its forehead. Still my all-time favorite. Yeah.

It's good stuff. If you want to go to stuffyoushouldknow.com, our venerable website, and in the top navigation, there's a store button, and it will take you to our store, and you can see with your own very eyes what the heck we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. That was off the cuff. Yeah, it was.

I wasn't like, ooh, we got to plug the t-shirts. No, no, no. You very rarely say things as fretfully as that. Okay. Chuck. Yes. You want to talk about Play-Doh? Yeah.

We promised to do this recently. And here we are. Yeah. In my defense, it was already on the list. Oh, wow. So it's not like, you know, I'm at the beck and call of anybody, it's like, do Play-Doh, do this, do that. Yeah.

No. It was already on the list. Dance, monkey. Great. Did you play with Play-Doh a lot when you were a kid? Oh, I played with it. I ate it. I don't recall eating it.

I do specifically recall eating the paste that was an off-brand that had a purple pirate on it. Oh. He was a pirate wearing a purple hat, and I think maybe he had an orange parrot. Yeah. Was the paste, did it have a, on the inside of the lid, did it have a applicator attached to it? Yeah.

I totally ate that paste. That was the best tasting paste on the planet. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think that paste might have been manufactured in part to eat. Like it's cruel served to kids, some bad kids. Yeah. Actually, I want to revise my statement. I licked and tasted Play-Doh.

I don't remember swallowing it, but I remember tasting it and maybe even put it in my mouth and spitting it back out, but I don't think I didn't swallow. I got you. Yeah. I don't think I ever ate Play-Doh in any form or fashion, but the scent of it, it's unmistakable. Unmistakable. It's so unmistakable, in fact, that apparently back in 2006, Play-Doh, or Hasbro, threw a year-long celebration for Play-Doh, which it owns, which it bought off of Kenner, which

Kenner bought from a dude named Joe McVickers. Actually, they bought it from Tonka. Tonka bought it from Kenner. Oh, yeah. How to forget Tonka. Exactly. For this 50th birthday party, they had a scent, a Play-Doh perfume released that smelled just like Play-Doh.

Can you buy that? I wonder. It looked, and I think you can get it, but I don't think as easy as you could back in 2006. Yeah. I wouldn't want to wear it. I was just curious. I think, yeah.

Nostalgia. I like them. I would like to smell it, but don't spray that stuff on me. I don't think you're supposed to wear it. Oh, is it just like, yeah, one of those things? It's a mood stabilizer. Okay. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Spray in front of your face, and you just go, oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, like rose water. Maybe I should put this lead pipe down and rethink things. Right. Remember when I was a kid and less violent? Right. Somebody give me some paste to eat.

You should do that. Well, back when you were a kid, did you know much about the origin of Play-Doh? Oh, no, not at all. I didn't either until today or yesterday when I started researching this. Play-Doh, everyone. And in this article by Tracy Wilson, who hosts Stuff You Missed in History class, she says that it's lower, but I've seen it all over the place. And from what I understand, it's the truth.

I think it's the truth. There's a dude named Joe McVickers who had a company, and his company produced, from what I understand, McVickers Invention, which was wallpaper cleaner. Yeah. His father and uncle started it, and they were called Couto Products. And it was a soap company, but their big seller was this wall cleaner, because when we heated our homes with coal, your house would get coal sit on the walls, which is really weird to think of now.

Yeah, but it's true. And your wallpaper can still get dirty, grease from cooking things, food fights, whatever. Your wallpaper can get dirty. Let's just face facts, everybody. And McVickers company had this putty, it was kind of a pliable, gooey putty, that you slapped up against the wallpaper and rolled up and down, and it just took that soot or that grease or that spaghetti sauce clean off, and it was wallpaper cleaner. And it was doing okay, I guess.

It did great. I don't think they were like hurting necessarily. But Joe was married to a woman, or was his sister-in-law was a teacher in Cincinnati. Yeah, they sold a lot of this stuff for a while, but then natural gas came around, and so they fell upon hard times. But Joe took over from Cleo, because Cleo was his father, and his sister-in-law, K. Zufal of New Jersey, read about kids that were making Christmas ornaments out of that stuff. And she said...

Out of the wallpaper cleaner. Yeah, and much like kids do today with Play-Doh. And she said, hey, we're hurting, why don't we try and turn this stuff into a toy? And they did so. And in 1950, he made a non-toxic version, added some almond scent, and you had your first little off-white Play-Doh. Yeah, kind of exactly what you would think of when you think of a gummy-colored dough. Off-white, khaki almost.

And McVicker was a pretty smart dude as far as business goes. He donated a bunch of cans to the Cincinnati City School system. And so got these little kids hooked on Play-Doh. It was a huge hit, but it might have just been a regional hit. If he hadn't have approached a dude named Captain Kangaroo, he went to... What is Captain Kangaroo's name, Bob? Bob Keishan, I think. Bob Keishan.

Nice memory, Chuck. I pulled that out from, I don't know how many years ago, the last time I heard that name. He... Well, did you watch Captain Kangaroo? Oh, yeah. Me, too. Huge fan. Love Captain Kangaroo.

I like Captain Kangaroo more than Mr. Rogers. I liked him both. But yeah, I think I might have been, yeah, Captain Kangaroo a little bit more. It was a haircut. And now it's an electric company over Sesame Street, amen. Yeah, I like both, but I like the electric company more. But I like Pinwheel most. I didn't watch that.

It was for real old kids. Anyway, Captain Kangaroo had a show, and Joe McVicker somehow got in contact with Captain Kangaroo and said, hey, I have a little deal for you. Yeah. We've got this awesome stuff. The kids in Cincinnati are crazy for it. We're calling it Play-Doh. Right now, it's an off-white, or it used to be, but now we have four colors, red, blue,

yellow, and white. Those are the four original colors of Play-Doh, by the way. And he gave some to Captain Kangaroo and said, I will give you 2% of gross sales if you mention this on your show two times a week. He played with it. And Bob Kation was a money grubber, that's what we all know. I think he believed in this product. Yeah, and he's a smart guy.

He is. But he believed in it so much that he upped the number of mentions without any additional compensation from two times a week to as many as three times a week. He would play with Play-Doh on TV, and it just took off like a rocket from there. That was his additional compensation. Did he got free Play-Doh? No, he had a percentage, so. Oh, yeah, you're right.

You know what I'm saying? You're right. But it suggests that he believed in it. That's right. He did believe in it. Man, do not shatter my image of Captain Kangaroo. I'm not saying he just wanted to make more money. Of course not.

Isn't that the show that Mr. Greenjeans was on? Yeah, big fan of that guy, too. They formed the Rainbow Crafts Company. They wanted to take it out from under the Coutole Products banner. And got famous wildlife artist John Ruthven to design that first package with, originally it was very briefly, it was an elf. And those I think are probably, if you have a can of that, it's probably in a museum or something.

Yeah. That wasn't around long. No. And then they went to Play-Doh Pete, the kid with the smock and the beret. Yeah. Because all little kids wore berets and smocks back then. Or you wore your dad's dress shirt like backwards. Oh, yeah.

That made a good smock, too. Yeah, the one he didn't want anymore. Yeah. Or that you thought he didn't want anymore, but he really got mad at you because you got paint on it. That's my good short sleeve dress shirt. And finally, it took all the way until 2002, did the herbal elves wear short sleeve dress shirts?

Oh man. Really? With slacks and ties. Yeah, my dad usually has a principal or a coat. But when you take off the jacket and you've got the short sleeve, that's something else. With a blue felt tip pin, a red felt tip pin, and a green felt tip pin in his pocket, front pocket. That was your dad?

Yeah. He's a mechanical engineer. So each one had a different use. Yeah. Interesting. Plus, I think he also just thought they were pretty. Yeah. Like they made a shirt pocket pop.

That's where you get it. Your shirt pocket thing. Right. All right. It took until 2002 for that beret to become a baseball cap. And then now he's just gone. Yeah, I was looking. He's not around anymore at all, is he?

Not at all. Yeah. Now it's a can with arms, and the lids kind of pull back in between the rim of the can and the top of the lid are a couple of eyes. It looks a bit like a garbage can, but it's obviously a Play-Doh can, but just kind of I don't like it. Yeah. I like Play-Doh Pete.

The kid with the beret. Yeah, me too. He was great. That's what we grew up with. It's nostalgia. Yeah, but he was around for a really long time, and then they just do away with him. Like he's nothing. That's another shirt.

Bring back Play-Doh Pete. Yeah. We'll get sued. Yes. I didn't get the impression that they were too terribly litigious. Well, plus we could tell him, we sold nine t-shirts. Here's your $73. Here's your 2%.

So Play-Doh, we all played with it. It was fun for modeling, but it was not like if you were like me, your hopes were dashed a bit when you modeled something and left it out overnight because you thought it would make it into a permanent exhibit, but it would really just kind of break apart. It's not like you can't cure it like you do modeling clay. No, I was on Play-Doh's site, and they readily admit that. As a matter of fact, they say if you want a permanent thing, go get you some modeling clay.

Yeah, get some Sculpey. I don't want to buzz market, but Sculpey's a lot of fun. Okay. We're talking about Play-Doh though. Yeah, Sculpey's fun. But they say modeling clay, they don't say Sculpey, but they say if you want to make a permanent thing, go get some modeling clay. It's not what Play-Doh's for.

No, it's for being in the moment, making fun things, and then smashing those and then putting it back in the can. Right. Doing it all over again every day. And driving your mom crazy because she can't stand colors to be mixed together. Yeah. She sits there and picks them apart or whatever. Or it's in the Orange Shag carpet.

Which again, Hasbro has some helpful suggestions for how to clean this stuff up. Number one, and you will understand eventually by the end of this podcast why, do not use warm water when you're cleaning up Play-Doh from the carpet. It will make everything a million times worse. What they say, if possible, if you have the patience of Job, just go ahead and let this thing dry, turn brittle, use a stiff brush, and just kind of brush it out of the carpet. Vacuum it up. Boom.

Yeah. Or do the reasonable thing and get hardwood floors. All right. We'll discuss that very soon after this message. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular.

And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find a skyline drive in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, so Play-Doh is fun enough on its own. Like when I was a kid, I had zero accoutrement to go along with my Play-Doh. I don't recall having anything but just the Play-Doh too. All I had was the Play-Doh in my imagination. And in 1960, I said, you know what, let's get a couple of engineers from General Electric to design what's going to be called the fun factory. That's like, that was it. That was it.

Then you could put Play-Doh into various forms and molds and press it and have it come out like sausage or spaghetti or just whatever they decided to design. Like, have you been to the site recently? There are hundreds of different things that you can buy now with your Play-Doh, of course. Yes, for sure. There are different types of Play-Doh, too, to make different looking things as well. But the original fun factory thing is basically just a hand-pushed lever that shoved the Play-Doh inside through a hole.

It was a sausage grinder. And then basically, and then in front of the hole, you had just kind of like different shapes that you could make this thing into. Yeah. What did you say, spaghetti? Yeah, like spaghetti or a star. I remember the star. Oh, yeah.

And the rope. All of these are basically what it is, an extruder. This is a Play-Doh extruder is what these guys came up with. And I guarantee they had colored felt-tip pens in the front of their pockets, too, when they designed this thing. But if you took all the Play-Doh, by the way, here's a Play-Doh fun fact. If you took all the Play-Doh ever created and ran it through the fun factory and extruded it into one long rope, it would wrap around the earth 3,000 times.

How many Big Macs is that? No, I'm sorry. It would wrap around the earth 300 times. Let's not go crazy. Oh, only 300? Yeah. And you could go to the moon and back 10 times with that rope. You could make a pretty good little bridge that would be kind of crumbly by the next

day. Yeah. But it'd be colorful. That's right. That's a lot of Play-Doh, man. Yeah. They've sold 950 million pounds of this stuff, more than 2 billion cans since 1956. Yeah, and they apparently make about 100 million cans every year.

What I find heartening is those are current statistics. They're not rated for inflation. No. But this article that Tracy wrote was apparently written in 2006. She said that they make 95 million cans. So they've upped their production by 5 million cans a year, which means Play-Doh's not going anywhere. That's right.

I'm pretty psyched about that. Yeah. And all the stuff they have now, they've got all sorts of licensing deals. They have the Play-Doh Disney Princess set, and you can make dresses for your Disney Princess out of Play-Doh. And they have a longstanding tradition, too, of making fake food. Oh, yeah. I was watching some... I wouldn't really call it a documentary.

It was almost just a compilation of Play-Doh ads over the years. And there's one from the 80s where you could make pizza hut pizzas out of Play-Doh. I think I remember that. Nowadays, they have kind of a sweet shop, I think, is the name of the line. And like I said, they have different types of Play-Doh. Some are squishier and thinner and more pliable, so you can use those to make the frosting. Yeah. You can use regular Play-Doh to make the actual cupcake.

That's because the cupcake craze, I bet. Yeah, probably. It's filtered down to kids. And with the gluten-free craze on their website, it says, contains gluten. Yeah. It has wheat. And they have to advertise that now because your child will want to eat the Play-Doh. And if you have your kid off gluten, they can't eat the Play-Doh.

No. Mommy has to explain that. Or daddy. But if your kid has a peanut allergy or a milk allergy, you're fine. That's right. Water, salt, and flour is the general... I mean, it's a very proprietary recipe, obviously. Right. It's the best patent number 6713624.

But if you look that up, you're not going to find the ingredients. No. Like you said, it's proprietary. They do give kind of like a general ingredient list somewhere, I guess, in the patent itself. Yeah. But yeah, they're not going to tell you how to make it. But we'll list those really quickly. And then we're going to talk about chemistry.

Yeah, we're going to get to the chemical molecular basis of Play-Doh itself. But in broad terms, it is water. You've got a starch-based binder. You have a retrogradation inhibitor because you have to inhibit that retrogradation. Sure. Salt. No, there's salt in there. In fact, at one point, it was too salty and they had to get a new chemist to remove

some of the salt. Is that right? Yeah. But do you remember how salty it tasted? No. I never tasted it. Oh, you didn't? I never tasted it.

No, I said I never did. I ate the paste. Oh, OK. I'd never tasted it, but the smell was the way. Was the paste salty? No. No. No.

It had a weird sweet taste to it. It wasn't overly sweet, but of all of the tastes, I would say it was sweet. Just sweet enough to get a kid to eat it. Right. Salt. You got your lubricant. And all this will make sense in a bit. A surfactant, a preservative, a hardener, a humectant, a fragrance, of course, and color.

I know we used almond for the first fragrance, but I wonder if it's still an offshoot of that. Does it smell like almond? From what I saw, they've admitted to vanilla. Oh, really? That's all I've seen. OK. And they're saying like that doesn't tell us anything.

That's all they admitted to? Yeah. Under questioning? Yeah. But the colors, we should also say chuckers, they originally had red, yellow, and blue, the primary colors, and they added white, and this is all in the 50s. And those were the only colors until the 80s. Wow.

And then they added a couple more, and they had eight colors total. And then now today, it's like a whole rainbow, a whole galaxy of different colors. I never got the white, because it just looked dirty so quickly. I never really understood the purpose of the white. I liked it. I thought it was a nice juxtaposition with the primary colors. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

You were an artist. No, I was just a connoisseur. All right. So now, the rest of the show, we're going to talk about chemistry. You're not happy about this, are you? Well... What did you think about this article? I thought it was good, you know, because that's what House of Works does, is they tell the

story behind things. Like, we can't just talk about surfing, we have to talk about the physics of a wave. All right. I get that. But yeah, chemistry was not my bag, baby. This one, kissing and roller coasters, you're kind of like, you had a little bit of protest going on. Like, come on, this is fun stuff.

Yeah, when you're talking about kissing, you want to talk about, you know. Remember the title of it was a rigid, sterile look at kissing. Yeah. Well, I don't know if the title for this will end up being what I wanted, but it was going to be taking the fun out of Play-Doh. No. Let's call it how Play-Doh works. All right.

But you heard it here. That was my... That was the working title. Yeah. All right. Well, I will kick the chemistry off, and maybe I will spark your interest. Are you ready? Yes.

Do you have your beret and your smock on? This isn't even the fun chemistry, you get to burn things. No, this is the chemistry of compounds, you're just adding them together. Yeah. You know, there's a little heat involved, as we'll see. So? Possibly, yeah. You could start that flame.

Okay. Okay. So, the whole basis of Play-Doh, it turns out, is an interaction between starch and water. That's right. And starches are, they're polysaccharides, which are sugar molecules, and there's basically two varieties or two types that combine. There's amylose, and there's amylopectin. That's right.

And amylose is like a string, amylopectin is branched, and when they get together, they form a starburst shape, they form a molecule in a starburst shape, and it's arranged around a central area, a hollow, called a hyalum, H-I-L-U-M, and it's all held together thanks to hydrogen bonds. And then you have all that, these polysaccharide chains all mixed together with hydrogen bonds forming a starburst, and my friend, you have a starch molecule. And when you have the starch molecule, you have one of the two bases of Play-Doh. Yeah.

And this one, this article does have some pretty handy illustrations. If hearing this doesn't make as much sense, you can follow along on your own computer. And look at the illustrations. If you add cold water to starch, the granules are going to absorb some, but when things really get interesting is when you add warm water or when you heat up that cold water to be warm water. Like you can mix it ahead of time and then warm it up, and basically what you're doing is making a gelatin.

Just like when you make jello, it's got to be warm water. Right. Like if you've ever had like cornstarch or flour or whatever, and you add cold water to it, they just kind of separate, right? Yeah, it's really untoward. It doesn't do much. It's almost like the starch protects itself against the cold. It's like, yeah, you stay over there cold water, but when you use warm water or a mechanical

action of mixing them together, it forms like you said, it gelatinizes. That's right. And now you're starting to get the basis of Play-Doh, but the problem is when you just add warm water and the starch, in this case, it's wheat starch that they use, right? Because they have to... Gluten. ...worn against gluten. When you add those two things, they mix together well, they form a nice gelatinous goo.

But as it dries, you've got the problem of retrogradation. That's right. And that's trouble. Yeah, because it really depends on the breakdown of amylose to amylopectin is the key. If you have a lot of amylose, it's going to take more swelling to gelatinize. Right, but you get a nice, robust gel when you have a lot of amylose. But the problem is that excess amylose separates some from the water, binds to itself, and then you have something that's not a full compound anymore.

It's basically like a couple of... It's like you've got that gel and then some extra amylose and it's dry and brittle and it's not good. Well, yeah. And in the case of making a product for kids to play with, it's too firm. Like they had to get this recipe just right to make it firm but still pliable and a lot of work went into this, I'm sure. Yeah, because anytime, like they started with a starch in a water, put it together, fantastic.

But then that created this problem and then when they went to solve this problem, it created this problem. So then they had to solve it with this problem and then after adding like seven things, they finally have this like precariously balanced compound. That's perfect. That's perfect. But it's pretty neat. It's really complicated and it's self-complicating, which I find very interesting.

It is. So what they ended up settling with as far as percentages go for that wheat starch was 25% amylose and 75% amylopectin. They found that to be the secret sauce as our buddy Chad likes to say. And the reason they have the amylopectin is because the amylopectin is a waxy starch and it keeps the amylose from binding to itself. So you've prevented that retrogradation problem where the amylose separates from the water and just binds to itself.

The problem is now that you have this extra amylopectin, the amylopectin, it keeps the whole thing together, but it does it too much. And now you have a sticky, tacky compound. Yeah. You don't want it sticky. No. And anybody who's ever played with Play-Doh and tried to make something, you can't make it sticky.

It'll stick to your hands or it'll stick to itself. It's not going to make a cheeseburger like that. No. No. So they added something else, a lubricant. That's right. In this case, I don't know if that's part of the secret or not, but it's probably some sort of a vegetable oil or mineral oil.

Well they think possibly it's a mineral oil which is derived from petroleum, which is why. It's non-toxic, but you shouldn't eat it. Right. Yeah. I did see that there was petroleum. I bet you they're going to come out with a gluten-free Play-Doh. I'm surprised they haven't already.

But that would almost be like admitting your child is eating this or can't eat it. Well, some of that new stuff, like the sweet shop stuff, I would be very surprised if they hadn't done some R&D of different flavored Play-Doh because they have the different colors and this is supposed to look like this frosting, this is supposed to look like this frosting. So I wonder if they were like, well, we can make this taste like vanilla or cotton candy or whatever, but yeah, and then they kind of shook their heads off and were like, oh, we can't have kids eating this stuff. Or I wonder if they've done R&D on how much of it you can eat before it makes you sick.

Surely. Like if they're making something that looks like a cupcake, some kid is probably going to eat that entire thing at some point. And like we said, they've pretty much always been like, you can make fake food with this. Pizza Hut gave us money to do this. But don't eat it. Right. It's a weird mixed message.

It is a totally mixed message. But you were saying they used the petroleum oil as a lubricant. Yeah. And that keeps it from being all sticky. So if you've ever played with it, you know, it like it's very pliable and moist, but it's not going to stick to your fingers, which is the key. Right. So you have added the mineral oil or some sort of lubricant to prevent the extra amylopectin

from making it sticky. And the whole reason you added amylopectin was because too much amylose can cause retrogradation. So you've got all these solutions and you've got the lubricant solution. The problem is you can't just put like, you can't just drop it into lubricant and expect it to stick. The lubricant won't bind within this compound. Yeah. So you have to add yet another thing, the surfactant.

Yeah. Surfactants you'll see in a lot of household cleansing products if you use that chemical junk to clean your house. But a surface active agent is another name for it. And it basically, they're artificially manufactured, they're molecules, but it's going to suspend something in water. Yeah. It's the whole key to being a surfactant.

Imagine a surfactant has two ends and one end is hydrophilic, which means it attracts water and is attracted to water. And the other is hydrophobic, which means it repels water and it's actually attracted to fats, lipids, right? Yeah. Or afraid of it even. The cool thing about a surfactant is that if you take it and you throw it into a solution of water and oil, fats and waters, one end will attract the fat molecules and another

end will attract the water molecules. And the end result of all of this is that you can basically suspend fats in water or water and fats so that you have, effectively, molecularly speaking, a compound that's all mixed together. Yeah. It's not going to separate like oil and water because the whole thing's being held together by surfactants. That's right.

That's pretty amazing. Yeah. It actually binds to the molecules of the lubricant. Right. It's a chemical reaction that's taking place. And keeps them all mixed together. It won't allow them to separate. So we've got the lubricant in there.

Yeah. The whole thing's being held in place by their surfactant. All lubed up, ready to go. We've got a little extra water, Chuck. What are we going to do? Well, I don't think we mentioned earlier. The reason it dries out to begin with, if you leave it out overnight, is just because of apparition.

Right, and Hasbro recommends that if this happens, you take your Play-Doh modeling clay, and you wrap it in like a damp paper towel, put it back in the camp, put the cover on it, leave it overnight. It should be good as new. Yeah. And I've seen you can also add a little water to it as well, but I've never tried that. So that, my friend, is it's a very fine-tuned mixture. Like you said, they had to, I'm sure it took a lot of work over the years to get it just

exactly right. And we're going to learn how you can make your own right after this break. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

The situation doesn't look good, there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we should have said there's a couple other things that they add, like you get excess water. Yeah.

Salt. Yeah, sure. And apparently for the excess salt, they brought in a new chemist, so it's just perfectly fine-tuned stuff. And you've got to color it, of course, and give it its scent. Yeah. And then possibly make it taste in the future. Who knows?

I'm betting on that. Yeah. And the salt also adds a little anti-microbial element to it, which is nice. So it acts as a preservative as well. And to make Play-Doh, you just put all this stuff in the right measurements and apply heat to it and mix it together and package it. And that's Play-Doh. Yeah.

And it's got to have that shelf life. Like this is, it's really hard to come up with a product like this that meets all those needs. And we'll still like, you know, I'm sure there were times early on, we're like, oh, this stuff's two weeks old on the shelf, it's like a brick. Back to the drawing board, put on your beret and your smock. Or in our How Twinkies Works episode, they dealt with that initially. Oh, the shelf life?

Yeah. Right. So they just made it infinity. Man, that was such a good episode. That was good. One of my all time favorites. Agreed. We still get emails from people that are like, I found the banana Twinkies.

Yeah. They have them in like limited release from once in a while. I have yet to try one. I remember trying one years ago, but it was in my bag. I don't like banana flavor things, but I like bananas. You're a very complex man, Chuck. Well, they don't quite get it right, I don't think ever. I've never tasted a banana flavor thing that got it right.

Gotcha. I'm hard to please. So, man, you just totally threw me off. What were we talking about? I think we were at two point where we're going to make our own, right? Right. So it's very tough to make until you come upon the recipe. But apparently a lot of people, even though it's a proprietary recipe, a lot of people

have come up with their own recipes for Play-Doh. Sure. And it's fun to do with your kid, you know? Like if they like playing with it, then you can teach them a little chemistry along the way. Right. Like in a learning moment. If you want to save some money or you don't want to feed the corporate beast.

That too. Or, yeah, you just want to do something with your kid and make it. You can do all this stuff. It just takes a little elbow grease and work and there's recipes all over the internet. There's some for like Glow in the Dark Play-Doh. Oh, really? There's some for Glittery Play-Doh. There's a couple of recipes in this article on how stuff works, but basically you're doing

the same thing. You're adding starch. Yeah. To water. You're adding some sort of lubricant to it. Something to hold the whole thing together. In this recipe, it's a cream of tartar. Yes.

Which stiffens eggs and gives Play-Doh, homemade Play-Doh, it's firmness. But there's a lot of recipes online that if you want to not only just play with Play-Doh with your kid, but make it, that's a great chemistry teaching experience, I think. Agreed. And you can explain what each ingredient is doing and then at the very end, you're going to have Play-Doh and your kid's going to say, this Play-Doh stinks. It's not nearly as good as the real thing. Unless it's the peanut butter variety, then I'll bet you're like, oh, this is tasty Play-Doh.

Do they have that? Yeah. There's a recipe for it in this article. So peanut butter is one of the ingredients? Yes. Interesting. Yeah. Or, you know what?

You could make it with your kid while you listen to us stumble through the explanation. Yeah. And to everybody who's doing that right now, hello, hello, everyone. And your kid's going to say, who are these jerks and why does my Play-Doh not work? Can we just go to the store and buy some Play-Doh, please? Yep. Yeah. Well, we're portable.

We go around on MP3 players so we can go to the store with you, too. Exactly. What else you got? I mean, you can listen to our episode on temper tantrums on the way to the store. That was a good one, too. It was. What else you got? I've got nothing else.

I got plenty more. Oh, well, please. Mr. Bill, remember him from Silent Life? Of course. He was made of Play-Doh. Yeah. They made the first Mr. Bill short for 20 bucks. That's pretty good stuff.

What else you got? Fun facts? Yeah. Play-Doh fun facts. Not just one, but two, at least, Play-Doh 3D printers on the market right now. Really? Yeah. It's pretty awesome.

So you put a hunk of it in there? Different hunks in there. Oh, no, no. And I was about to say a hunk in there, and then it whittles it down, but that's the opposite of 3D printers. No, no. It extrudes it. It builds up.

Yeah. That's crazy. There's one on ThinkGeek for like 50 bucks that plugs into your iPad, so that's where your schematics are, and it tells it what to do. It makes pretty cool little 3D Play-Doh stuff. That's kind of fun. It is. At the same time, it's kind of like, you know, I mean, you're really building a little geek

there, but the imagination and the hands-on thing's kind of taken out of it a little bit. Well, I think that's the new imagination, my friend. I guess so. To follow forms and schematics to a T. Maybe so. It would be cool as if you could design your own schematic and then- Which 3D printer.

Which I'm sure you can. Yeah. And then Play-Doh has one called the Dovinci. I saw that. And that's a 3D printer, too. And then one other thing I found, we were talking about Play-Doh ads earlier, there is a series of banned Play-Doh ads that were published in Singapore a couple years back. Oh, banned is in, I thought you meant like bands recorded music.

No, no, no. Band. Yeah. And then Play-Doh ads that are very adult-centric. Really? Yeah. Can you say what? What?

How about this? Yeah. I made a slideshow of them on our site. You can go check them out. They're pretty crazy. Okay. They're not like naked or not adult in that way, but kind of violent and a little dark that this ad agency made basically without the approval of Hasbro.

Yeah. Clearly. Hasbro came in and like denounced it and everything, but they're pretty great. So if you go to stuffyshow.com and search a band of Play-Doh ads, it will come up. And Hasbro had a news release that says, we don't endorse this use of Play-Doh brand moldable clay. Right. They just kept working the name in there.

Yeah. It's pretty crazy. I learned all about something called scam ads where advertising agencies basically create ad campaigns based around brand names without the brand name's permission. Really to submit them for awards consideration to expand their prestige. Interesting. Well, and if you want to be a TV commercial director, you have probably made some spec or fake ads yourself just to have on your reel.

Like you know, I'm going to make a Doritos, well Doritos is that contest every year. Right. So this is that same thing, but sometimes they really run a foul of like the spirit of the brand and there's scam ads. Yeah, they're like European commercials, which are always way better and risque and like funny. Yeah. Get with it, America.

So if you want to learn more about Play-Doh, including a few Play-Doh recipes, you can type Play-Doh into the searchbarthouse.forks.com and since it's in search bar, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this another MPAA called the Golden F-bomb. Hey guys, I discovered your show and he says a little Jerry and spilled her name right too. Yes. Which doesn't happen often.

No. The spelling that is. I discovered your podcast while looking for something interesting to listen to while I worked on my organic farm in Kauai. I heard the MPAA show and I just had to write in. Growing up, my friends and I were always looking for a way to sneak into movie theaters. He had an exit door, having an older friend or parent buys tickets, using a ticket single ticket stub, pass back through to get in on the same ticket, etc.

He had all sorts of ways of stealing. Our goal was to get into an R-rated movie underage, with NC-17 being the ultimate prize. PG-13 always felt like we had failed or were settling, so to make it fun, we would count how many expletives we heard and compare notes after the movie. He really took things to a different level. Yes. It must have been a time when movies weren't as good as they are today in the theaters. Movies have never been this bad.

I know, man. It is really out of control. It's terrible. One pattern we soon realized was that PG-13 movies are allotted one F-bomb. Listening for that one F-bomb became the looked for moment, making the PG-13 movie experience a tad more interesting. Something I look out for to this day still. There are some real classics, including Ron Burgundy's and Anchorman, most recently in

Skyfall when Judy Dench uses that naughty word. She did. I don't remember that. Judy. The first one in the Bond series. Judy. Judy. Judy.

Oh, I just saw Filomena, by the way, finally. What did you think? It was fantastic. Was that just an amazing change of pace for her? She always plays like a shark pulled together, like boss lady, and in this one she was just kind of just working class. God, that was a good movie. It was really good.

Love that movie. Highly recommended. And then I noticed the rating rule is not ironclad, however, because recent examples of Lincoln and Filomena, hey, how about that, had two of those naughty words, a piece. Lincoln had it in there, huh? Does that Spielberg gets away with anything? Well, he's the one that had the whole thing changed. Oh, yeah.

He was the one that created it. P.G. 13, yeah. And then he ran afoul of it. Jeez. Anyway, my absolute favorite P.G. 13 golden goal naughty word, not mentioned anywhere else that I've researched, was the one that got me out of my seat cheering like the President's Speech and Independence Day

is from Oblivion. Tom Cruise's character waits to the very end of the movie to deliver the perfectly timed line to his enemy. That movie's stunk. Did it? Yeah. I heard the other one was pretty good, though. Edge of Tomorrow?

Yeah, that was really good. Oblivion's stunk. And he closes by saying, Mahalo, Nui Loa, thank you very much for all you do to infotain us. And that is Evans on Kauai. Yeah, sorry, Evans. Oblivion was no good. He said he liked it a lot, but you know, to each their own, I'm not going to boo-boo his taste.

Good for you, Chuck. Thanks for your game and your thievery. If you want to talk to me and Chuck about movies, we are always down for that. We love talking about movies. We should just like do an episode where we just say, have you seen this movie? Oh, yeah, I love that one for like a half hour. There'll be a couple of people out there that are like, oh, this is a good episode. There are podcasts like exactly like that.

You know that. What was I just saying? Oh, yeah. If you want to get in touch with us for whatever reason, movies or otherwise, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me. And my whole view on astrology changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison.

During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all. And now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.