Stuff You Should Know - Nerf!

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Another classic toys edition is at your collective feet. Today, we dive into the soft, padded world of NERF!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is Stuff You Should Know. Another toy edition, we haven't done one in a while. Classic toy edition. Yep, I love these. Nerf. That's right. I was just got back from spring break. So I wanted to do a couple of things and this is nerf relevant,

but got to see a bunch of LA pals and I wanted to give a special shout out, which I'm sure you will agree with even then you didn't see them, to the Randazzo clan. Our old buddy Joe Randazzo who we met many years ago is still a faithful listener as are his kids. Yeah, they listen to the show, they've called me and left messages yelling at me about the show before, but we finally got to hang out and Ruby got to hang out with their three kids, Cormac, Gus and Hazel and they even spent the night at our rental house a couple of nights. By themselves?

No, with Joe and the whole family did and we just had so much fun and those kids are so much fun and so big hellos to all of them. Very nice. But the reason I mentioned nerf was I was, we went down to Venice Beach and did a lot of touristy stuff and I wanted to show Ruby the skate park there because she's used to seeing the kids at the local skate parks who are like, like literally can't even Ollie basically. Yeah. And it was like Ruby, it's like your mind's going to be blown when you go to this skate park at

Venice Beach because these, like this is where it was born and they really know what they're doing and it did not disappoint. There were some, these three dudes that were just crushing it, these two kind of young teenagers and this one guy that looked like he was probably in his late 20s and they were trying to outdo one another and goofing around with one another and it was just a big fun show. Like I could watch that for hours and one of the guys, the older guy kept making fun of the kids saying, you're doing these nerf tricks, you're doing these nerf tricks. Oh yeah.

And I couldn't figure it out if that just meant like it's like a kiddie version of a real trick is kind of what I figured he meant. Like a nerf ball is like a kiddie version of a real ball. Very nice segue, Chuck. I think that's probably what he meant, but it was just so funny. Look at you with those nerf tricks. Dude, could you tell what he was criticizing specifically? Like what they were doing that was making him say that?

It looked like just sort of little more basic stuff. Like they were coming out of the bowl and doing different things and then like landing on the flat surface and anytime they just did sort of a basic thing, he'd say, get out of here with your nerf tricks. Were they landing on their feet or on their skateboard? On their skateboard. Oh, okay. But they would like kick a leg out and then land on the skateboard or something like that.

I wouldn't call it a nerf trick. I mean, trust me, dude, I couldn't even run around this thing much less do it on a skateboard. But this guy was so good, man, and everyone was so good. And it's just amazing to see them do that stuff. Nice. Very highly recommended if you go to Venice. Yeah, I can imagine. I've never gone to see that, but I'm going to now.

It's amazing. So let's go back to your segue, nerf. Nerf. There's a lot of questions about nerf, Chuck, in particular, what nerf means. And not just in skating terms, in the original form even. Okay. So for example, some people say it was French for nerve, obviously. It makes total sense.

That's not true at all. There's other people who say it stands for non-expanding recreational foam. That's not true at all. But you will see that all over the internet as fact. Not correct. Instead, it's got one of the cooler origin stories, or most interesting origin stories for a word that no one really knows where it came from. Yeah. And if you're in some part of the world that's right now saying, what is nerf?

We should just quickly say that it's a toy brand made of soft, foamy products. And we'll kind of go through the history, but they started with balls and then now they make all kinds of stuff. But it's spongy, soft, foamy things that you can throw and not hurt somebody with. Wow. That was some professional podcasting just now. But the origin, and this is something I remember when I was a kid, because we had nerf bars on our Jeep, it started out as a racing thing.

Like if you bumped up against another car in a race, they might call that a nerf. And they eventually started putting this metalwork on the outside of the cars to prevent damage if you hit a car like that. And those were called nerf bars. And today they're still called, like if you have a, like I have a pickup truck that has nerf bars. And instead of having a little tiny step, sometimes big trucks and Jeeps and things, you'll have a step to step into the car.

Sure. Instead of just being a little step, it's a big round bar that extends sort of the length of at least the door, two doors, if you have a two door or a four door, I guess. And they still call those nerf bars. Does it say yee-haw every time you step on it to get in the truck? It really does. I'm familiar with nerf bars is like those, like anti-roll bars, like you were talking about on your dad's Jeep or something like that.

Those can, especially if you have like a soft top or a no top, like Jeep and you have a roll bar over your head to keep you from dying or the Jeep from crushing you if it rolls over. It can still hurt pretty bad because that's a metal bar, even if it is hollow. And if you go over some bumps and you hit your head on it, that's a problem. So people started figuring out very quickly in the advent of off-roading that you could put foam padding on those bars. And that's where nerf bars came from.

This idea that foam padding could prevent some sort of injury became like kind of wedded to that idea of nerf, which was originally just a little bump. And that's apparently where the actual, the name comes from. That's the origin story. It was a marketing person who was familiar with that term and just brilliantly thought to apply it to these little foam balls that can't hurt anybody because they're too light. Yeah, they are generally, there's all kinds of nerf products, but generally we're talking about polyurethane foam.

It's got a little thin plastic coating that kind of keeps the foam from breaking down as much and gives like a nerf arrow, like better flight characteristics. But that's basically all it is. It's a very low-tech thing. The Grabster helped us with this and I think very astutely kind of argues that that's part of the appeal of nerf is that it's a very low-tech product and sort of like a frisbee. Sometimes it doesn't have to be something fancy to really endure in the toy market. Yeah, I think that that's one reason why nerf has just hung in there for so long because they're just,

they're very prolific, but the stuff they make is, it's just, I don't know, it becomes like iconic here in the United States. Like it definitely did from the beginning of the 70s till the mid 90s. I think it's kind of gotten less like a huge cultural thing over time, but it's become more niche and I think just as widespread, but just not quite as like pop-culturally. Yeah, I would agree with that. So one other thing about the word nerf, it's kind of experienced a rebirth among gaming communities. Apparently back in, I found the actual origin for this, Chuck, you ready?

Sure. In the late 90s, early 2000s, there was a massive multiplayer online role-playing game called Ultima Online and when they launched it, for some reason the swords that you used were way more devastating than any other weapons and so the developers were like, this is a problem, everybody's just using swords and it's not really fair, so they went in, they fixed it, they put a patch in there and swords suddenly became less devastating and players complained that it was like hitting one another with nerf swords now and so nerf became a word for anything, especially in games, where the developers go in and like downgrade its effectiveness essentially.

So like they should have nerfed Bo Jackson and Tecmo Bowl because he was unstoppable. Was he? Oh man, yeah, it's sort of a legendary thing is that in the original Tecmo Bowl, I don't know if it's the original, but Bo Jackson was, you couldn't stop him and like if he played the Raiders, you know, you would have to instill rules like Bo Jackson can only carry the ball like once every five plays or something. Oh really? Yeah, because he was just built faster and better and you could like score almost every time he

touched the ball. I mean, that's an appropriate person to make like that for sure. Oh, for sure, but it was so gamed, it was just like, you know, it wasn't even fair. But yes, to circle back to your original point, that is an excellent use of the term nerf. The nerf that we know and love was invented by a guy named Rin Geyer, R-E-Y-N Geyer. It's short for Reynolds. Yeah, that makes sense. And he invented Twister, so he's got a couple of big time pop culture games under his belt.

Yeah. And he was forming a company and he wanted to design a game where kids could throw rocks at each other. And so they made them obviously at a foam and they had this packing foam and this technique that they use cutting that foam with heated wire that worked out pretty well. And he wanted to sort of gamify it, like I said, and not just, you know, make it a light ball that you could just throw at each other. But that was kind of the hit from the, from the get, which was you could throw something at your little brother and not get in trouble because it wouldn't hurt.

It wouldn't break a window and they took it to basically everybody, I think Milton Bradley passed on it, Parker Brothers bit, but they said, let's just do the ball. Like we don't need some dumb game around it. And that was the very first thing. It was a ball in a box and it was a Nerf ball and off to the races. Yeah. The first ad copy said, throw it indoors. You can't damage lamps or break windows. You can't hurt babies or old people. Yeah. Okay. That's very weird. And then on the package itself, they call it the world's first indoor ball and it took off

like a rocket. Yeah. Like a Nerf rocket. This was 1969. Big success. Hard to get good numbers. Like with a lot of products, it's really hard to get like great numbers sometimes. But I've seen anywhere from like three to four million of those sold in that first year. That's astounding. Yeah. I mean, it's just a round polyurethane foam ball. That's it. That's all. They just put it in a box and made it pretty colors out of it and ragged on old people and babies. And it was a hit. So that was 1969, I think, when the first Nerf ball came out.

So they didn't actually start innovating themselves, I should say. They knew a good idea where they saw it. And they saw it from a pair of guys, Fred Cox, who was a place kicker for the Vikings, and a businessman named John Maddox. And they had a very good idea that took Nerf into the next dimension. Yeah. This is pretty funny story, actually, because John Maddox wanted to build a game like a field goal kicking game where they had these little portable goal posts. And you could go in the yard and kick field goals just like the pros do. And he went to Fred Cox, who, like you said, was a professional kicker for the Vikings. And he was like, here's what I want to do. But here's the deal is like this ball can't go too

far because yards aren't huge. And so we should make it like a medicine ball or something, but shaped like a football. So they can't kick it very far. And Fred Cox was like, that is not a good idea. Kicking a big, heavy ball is really stupid. And you could get injured very easily. He said, why don't you do something super, super light and very low density and soft. So it doesn't matter if you can kick it far. It's not going to hurt anything. Well, plus it won't go very far because it's foam. Yeah. I mean, it would, I mean, you can kick in our football pretty well. Okay. All right. Calm down. I love it when you say calm down when no one's not calm. It's a good, it's a good bit.

So I don't even know where it was. Oh yeah. So he's like, let's do that. And so they, they had a, uh, created a mold and injection mold in the shape of a football filled it with foam. And they took it around and Parker brothers again said, oh, we don't need this dumb game. No one wants to kick field calls. It's like no one wants to be a kicker. That's really boring. Let's just sell the ball. And right, they licensed it from them because they were trying to work on a football, but that heated wire cutting thing couldn't make a good football. They had never thought of injection molding. So they said, great, well, we'll use your idea. And then in 72, the Nerf football and Nerf basketball, I had both of these very early in

my life. I probably had the maybe fourth generation of these or maybe first generation, but I got one and by the time I was probably four years old. And that was it for about two decades. Yeah, you could say that there was also some pretty iconic stuff. It just wasn't as big as the Nerf football or Nerf ball like Nerf tabletop pool. Remember that? Yeah. And I had like a ping pong, I think. Yeah. There was also the Nerf boomerang, the three. Oh, yeah. That was Nerf. Those things came out in the meantime, but Ed puts it like that. And I think some people would probably agree like, yeah, they didn't have any massive mega hits. And even if they did, the point is that in the 90s, Nerf got essentially completely reimagined as a

totally different toy company. And I think Chuck, if you ask me, if I can tube my own horn a little bit here, that was a quality cliffhanger I just set us up for. Beep, beep. Okay. So let's take a break and we'll be right back. America loves its founding fathers, but that's a tough act to follow as a founding son. If you do not rise to the head, not only of your profession, but of your country, you will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy. So we're tracing John Quincy Adams' journey from the White House to the halls of Congress. I'm Bob Crawford, bassist for the Ava Brothers. Join me, Patrick Warburton, and Nick Offerman as we bring the

sixth president to life. Was there ever witnessed such a barefaced corruption in any country before? Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. He held the union together across two pivotal errors and two visions for America. Adams stretches his hand forward to Lincoln, and in so many ways makes Lincoln possible. Listen to Founding Son, a curiosity podcast every Thursday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Beauty Translated is back y'all. I'm your host, Carmen Laurent. In season one of Beauty Translated, you joined me as I reconnected with my local trans community here in Atlanta. With an all-new season, we're going to get into the discourse and challenge your perceptions of trans people.

Join me for all new conversations that go beyond Atlanta, beyond the South, and beyond just skin deep. Stop cancelling words, but elders let people self-identify. I've definitely had people say, well, you would understand you're a binary trans woman. We started advocating for community defense. And now every Monday, I will also be translating the headlines with a mini-sode, so you can stay up to date with the latest news within the trans community. Beauty Translated is proud to be part of the outspoken network from I Heart Podcasts. Listen to season two on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, America. Danielle Moody here. You may have caught me on cable news, heard me on satellite radio, or have already

been listening to my podcast, Woke AF Daily. If you don't already know me, allow me to reintroduce myself. I am an unapologetic black queer woman, child of immigrants who isn't afraid to use my voice loudly and proudly to stand up for what's right and give voice to the critical issues impacting our daily lives. Every Monday through Friday, I bring you pivotal conversations with the nation's leading experts on headline making issues as well as the hottest takes from Yours Truly. For the last five years, it has been my mission to ring a daily alarm and make America woke. Now, Woke AF Daily is proud to be a part of the outspoken network from I Heart Podcasts. Listen to the new season of Woke AF Daily on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. All right. So you set the stage that Nerf was about to rebrand and they rebranded indeed in a big way from a company that makes fun balls to a weapons manufacturer. It's basically true. It sounded true. But there's a story behind this. In 1987, and Nerf is bounced around, they're sort of the stuff you should know of toys. I thought the same thing. They have been owned by virtually everyone, I think except for Parker Brothers, or no, no, no, wait, they weren't owned by Parker Brothers. Yeah, they weren't owned by Milton Bradley. Milton Bradley, right. So in 87, they were part of Kenner, part of General Mills, same as Parker Brothers. And I think then Kenner was purchased

by Tonka. In 91, Hasbro bought Tonka. So Nerf kind of endured through all those changes as we... As Nerf, right? Yeah, it stayed Nerf, just like we stayed stuff you should know. And at any point, someone could have come along, one of our company owners, and said, let's change the name. Yeah. I know, it was very dangerous. It's a dangerous time for sure. But there's another toy company that plays in called Laramie, and a gentleman that my daughter met recently. What? I wanted to do a full episode on Lonnie Johnson, but they did their first little, you know, how you do a little oral report. They did their first ones in second grade during Black History Month. And one of the kids profiled Lonnie Johnson, and he is still alive

and is local. And they took a field trip and met with Lonnie Johnson. That's awesome. So yeah, this guy is a bona fide inventories in the Inventors Hall of Fame for a number of reasons. But his whole thing that he's been trying to do all these decades is to come up with green energy solutions, long before anybody ever used the word green to describe things like energy solutions. And in 1982, he was actually coming up with a cooling device. I'm sure Ruby knows all about this. Probably. And the cooling device he was going to use would replace the Freon cooling device for a refrigerator. So get rid of Freon. And there's something happened. There was a malfunction somehow, and a really pressurized blast of water shot out of one of the tubes he was using.

And rather than kick over his equipment and start shouting into the air, which is what most people do, he saw a new opportunity. He was like, hey, I just figured out a way to pressurize water really easily and simply. And I'll bet you could make a really cool squirt gun out of that. Yeah. Do you know what's funny is no one before Lonnie Johnson that ever saw a pressurized stream of water shoot anywhere thought kids would love this. Right. Like it had happened before. He's, he didn't see the first stream of water being shot, but he was like, hey man, that's like the coolest squirt gun ever. Yeah. So I mean, I think that's why, you know, someone like Lonnie Johnson is a sort of a genius and has like such an inventor's brain. Right. They see the world differently.

Exactly. And he, he was like, I want to test my idea. I'm going to build a prototype for my daughter and give it to her, set her loose on the neighborhood. Yeah. And I think she was, she just probably very quickly became the boss of the neighborhood. Right. With her new, eventually we come to be called a super soaker, but was originally a power drencher. Yeah. So Laramie, this toy company I mentioned, they weren't very big. They licensed his idea as the power drencher, like you said, was rebranded in 91 as the super soaker. And in the meantime, we'll jump back to Nerf here between 87 and when the super soaker comes along, they had started making weapons, things like, you know, a bow and arrow, like a Nerf bow and

arrow. The very first thing they ever used, and you can still buy these on eBay, was called the Nerf Blastball in 1989. It's like a pop gun. Yeah. It's just a tube with a handle and you could just pump a ball out, a little Nerf ball. And so they were getting into sort of the Nerf gun business. But it was really when super soaker was purchased by Laramie rather, who owned the super soaker was purchased by Hasbro. When those two worlds kind of all of a sudden were under the same roof, they said, wait a minute, this whole idea of using pressure to increase force and range and accuracy with water, we can use with Nerf as well. And then all of a sudden the Nerf gun, they don't call them guns as a company, they call them blasters. The Nerf blaster became

the new thing in a big way. Yeah. That's what Nerf went all in on. The first thing they came out with was the Nerf Sharpshooter. And that was actually powered by a spring, but it's still considered the first Nerf blaster. They also came up with a bunch of other ways of shooting a foam missile or projectile out of a Nerf gun, including Lonnie Johnson's way of compressing air and then releasing air forcefully. And that's it. Like the whole company just completely changed and became that because they got so popular so quickly. Yeah. And it kind of, you know, it makes a good point. It kind of aligned with a bunch of things. It aligned with the 90s, which was, you know, remember everything was just extreme back then. That was the big buzzword in toys and in sports and everything

else. And it also, very sadly, also met with the rise in gun violence in this country. Well, not just that. There was a big problem with people who were playing with toy guns getting killed by the cops. There were actually three kids aged 13, 16 and 19 who were killed in a six-month period between 1987 and 1988 because police had mistaken their toy guns as real guns and killed them. And so Nerf was like, okay, these are not guns. And the ones we're designing aren't going to look anything like guns. They're going to look like a cartoon toy conception of what a gun would look like in the hands of Roger Rabbit. Right. In space. Because a lot of these look more like sort of laser space guns than, you know, gun guns, or at least they did for a while.

And this, you know, Nerf gun culture sort of rose in lockstep with gun violence in this country post 9-11. All of a sudden, and I hadn't heard this expression before, but I'd use it, tack to cool military cosplay gear and that whole aesthetic of like, hey, let me sort of dress up like I'm in the army or I'm in the special forces or something. They started putting sniper scopes and ammo clips and all this pseudo military gear alongside these nerf or as part of the Nerf line. Right. Like if you look up some of these guns, the Centurion blaster, it looks like a sniper rifle or an assault rifle with a, you know, a bipod stand. And but it's got these big, bright colors. You start to be able to mod these guns yourself. So Nerf started saying, well,

hey, wait a minute, what if we started our own modding, which they did starting in 2003 when they had these like tactical rails built in where you could attach other things to it to make it look more like a weapon, or you could attach guns to other guns to make like this super gun or a super blaster and stuff like that. So all of this stuff was sort of, I don't want to say, taking over the brand because they were, they were also pushing it at the same time, but that became the big thing in Nerf. Yeah. And I have the impression that the Nerf modding community, they're modding guns because that's what Nerf makes. But they're also modding guns because they play like in Nerf battles and Nerf wars and you use guns for that. So they're making it their

own. So I'm sure there's a hardcore overzealous like gun culture, subculture to it. But the impression I have more is it's more tinkerers, engineers, almost like reformed steampunk people. Yeah. Yeah, it's not to say like there's this like dangerous ominous subculture that's just waiting to rise up. Those are the people who modify real guns. These people are playing with Nerf guns, essentially. Right. Exactly. Just wanted to point that out. There's a distinction. There is. You go look up the Nerf Titan, which I did. It's essentially like a Gatlin gun. It is super cool and fun. And it, you know, Adam Savage has a fun video where he modded one in his little shop to, I think he modded the, I'm not sure if it was the Titan or not.

It was, which was the one that has like a hundred rounds that could hold of these little Nerf. That's the rival nemesis. Okay. So he modded, I guess, a rival nemesis to have like a 1000 pellet clip and then shot at a guy in a dinosaur costume in his shop. And it's kind of a fun video on YouTube if you want to go check that out. The great Adam Savage. Yeah. The, yeah, that one is amazing looking. It looks kind of like the, remember the Gatlin gun and Predator? Oh, Predator? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's like that, basically. It's the Nerf version of the Predator Gatlin gun. Yeah. Which is what they do. They look at whatever cool space gun or real gun they're using in the movies. Nerf will come along and make one, basically. And they've

also extended that to stuff like licensing deals with gaming companies where they, like you can get like a real Nerf Fortnite gun or something like that. Yeah. Which are pretty cool looking. And also that whole Nerf mod community, they of course have lots of like explainers and step by step and how to videos to mod your own. There are people who made the livelihood out of that. There's a guy named out of darts. His name's Luke Goodman. He's kind of a guru in that whole sense. There's a company called Spitfire Products that's on Etsy. And they make entirely from scratch Nerf sniper rifles that are 3D printed. And it looks exactly like something Nerf would produce. But they came up with the design themselves. There's like a, like the people who are into it,

like I was saying, when Nerf releases a new product, it's not like all of America knows about it. Right. But the people who are into Nerf like are really, really into Nerf now more than people were before. It's like they took all of that widespread, but relatively shallow enthusiasm and concentrated it much more deeply, but in a more narrow band. That's right. Yeah. So you want to take a break? Yeah. Let's take another break and we'll talk about some of these Nerf games right after this. America loves its founding fathers, but that's a tough act to follow as a founding son. If you do not rise to the head, not only of your profession, but of your country, you will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.

So we're tracing John Quincy Adams' journey from the White House to the halls of Congress. I'm Bob Crawford, bassist for the Ava Brothers. Join me, Patrick Warburton, and Nick Offerman, as we bring the sixth president to life. Was there ever witnessed such a bare-faced corruption in any country before? Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. He held the union together across two pivotal errors and two visions for America. Adams stretches his hand forward to Lincoln, and in so many ways makes Lincoln possible. Listen to Founding Son, a curiosity podcast every Thursday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Beauty Translated is back, y'all. I'm your host, Carmen Laurent. In season one of Beauty Translated,

you joined me as I reconnected with my local trans community here in Atlanta. With an all-new season, we're going to get into the discourse and challenge your perceptions of trans people. Join me for all new conversations that go beyond Atlanta, beyond the South, and beyond just skin deep. Stop cancelling words that elders let people self-identify. I've definitely had people say, well, you would understand, you're a binary trans woman. We started advocating for community defense. And now every Monday, I will also be translating the headlines with a mini-sode, so you can stay up to date with the latest news within the trans community. Beauty Translated is proud to be part of the outspoken network from iHeart podcasts. Listen

to season two on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, America. Danielle Moody here. You may have caught me on cable news, heard me on satellite radio, or have already been listening to my podcast, Woke AF Daily. If you don't already know me, allow me to reintroduce myself. I am an unapologetic black queer woman, child of immigrants who isn't afraid to use my voice loudly and proudly to stand up for what's right and give voice to the critical issues impacting our daily lives. Every Monday through Friday, I bring you pivotal conversations with the nation's leading experts on headline-making issues as well as the hottest takes from yours truly.

For the last five years, it has been my mission to ring a daily alarm and make America woke. Now, Woke AF Daily is proud to be a part of the outspoken network from iHeart podcasts. Listen to the new season of Woke AF Daily on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I appreciate you talking doubly fast on behalf of me trying to make up for my half-time speak. What? Do you talk slow? Yeah, I do. I feel like I've been talking slower than normal lately. How about you? I feel like you're talking at a normal speed.

Okay, great. I feel like you're talking faster too. I don't feel like I'm talking faster. I could just be losing it. I do want to say, Chuck, before we get into it, I feel like it'd be silly if we didn't mention that Hasbro is the company that made our stuff you should know, Trivial Pursuit Game. Oh, yeah. Even, oh wait, we'll disguise it as like a humble brag, just full disclosure. We don't want it to seem like, we don't want anybody, we don't want to come out and seem like we're playing secret favorites. Yeah, we're part of the Nerf family, I guess too, huh? Totally. I love that.

So there's a lot of games that people play with Nerf specifically, but also in general. And one of the things that people love to play with Nerf guns are these huge battles that can last hours, sometimes days, sometimes longer, and can involve many hundreds of people in some cases. Yeah, it seems like one of the more fun, because this worked its way into the cosplay community, of course, as they mod these and steampunk these things up, that's going to happen. And if you're looking for a cool cosplay outfit, a Nerf that's like paramilitary or something, Nerf is a pretty obvious place to start,

because you're already halfway there, just get out some cool mods and some paint. But what if you're into zombie and post-apocalyptic stuff? What do you do then? Well, friend, then you play human V-zombies. It sounds like a lot of fun. Sometimes it can incorporate other elements like capture the flag and some things like that into it. But HVZ is when you have one zombie initially, a bunch of humans, they are wearing two different colored bandanas to distinguish one from the other. And I want to play this. Humans, it'd be like it would be in real life. You can shoot a zombie from a distance with the Nerf gun, but a zombie has to actually touch you, mocking the bite

that you would have to get in person up close from a zombie in order to turn you into a zombie. Whereas, of course, it's eventually going to flip. The more zombies there are, the fewer humans. Imagine it starts growing exponentially, just like in zombie movies. But if you're a zombie and you get hit with a Nerf bullet or arrow or whatever, then you just have to sit out for 15 minutes and you're back in the game. These games can be huge. It can be hundreds of people and they can last like a weekend. Yeah, and you're tracked online by moderators. College campuses, if you haven't guessed by now are frequent sites of human versus zombies, Nerf battles, right? I think just Nerf battles

in general. But because there's so many people and everybody's all up on everybody else, in addition to the Nerf guns, they'll often have Nerf melee weapons. Yeah, why not? Like battle axes and swords and maces and Nerf made a lot of these. And now, you know, anytime it starts to get discontinued, they become like more expensive collector's items. But I was looking, Chuck, if you look up like new Nerf stuff that you could buy like Target, a huge consumer of the stuff you should know book that we put out. They're pretty affordable, actually. I mean, they're not nearly as much as I thought they'd be. Yeah, I would have thought like a Nerf machine gun would have been easily $100, $120. No,

they're like $40, $50 for like a big full-size one. Yeah. I think they get you with the ammo, maybe. Yeah, sure. The ammo is a little expensive, but you can also buy off-brand stuff online for much cheaper too, I hear. Yeah, whammo. What about them? Well, it's just joking, like the off-brand ammo would be called whammo. But I forgot whammo is a real toy. It's like, why'd you bring whammo into this? They're a totally different toy. What if Rizby's have to do with it? Do you remember that movie Gotcha with Anthony Edwards? Oh, do I? That's kind of what this reminds me of, but back then, kids pull up a chair and listen to a yarn spun by some old guys. Rather than Nerf guns, there used to be low-powered paintball guns

that were all the thing in the mid-80s. Yeah, and laser tag, remember that? Yeah, laser tag. Man, I got cornered by somebody once in laser tag and he just kept killing me over and over again. I shouted at him, stop. Did he stop? I don't think he did, or maybe, but he still shot me a few more times before he did, just to show me he wasn't listening to me. And that person went on to be the BTK killer. There was also that movie Tag, the assassination game. You remember that? No, I don't remember that. Gotcha was more popular, I think. Yeah, but it was the same premise, right? Like Anthony Edwards thinks he's playing like a paintball game, but he's actually caught up in international intrigue. I think so.

It was no Cloak and Dagger, I'll tell you that. The great Dabney Coleman. He was an amazing actor. I'm sorry to get off track here. I know we don't do this very often, but I saw Cloak and Dagger recently, saw 9-5 not too long ago. He's so good. Yeah. A couple other movies I can't even remember, because he just pops up in the most random places. Modern problems? I don't remember that one. Out of Time, I think was one where he's a cop who finds out he's dying erroneously, and he tries to get himself killed so that his wife can get his police pension for dying in the line of duty. I don't know. He just can't do it. It was a good one. It's cute. Cute considering he was a cop who was trying to get someone to kill him, but he was just an

amazing actor, just so underrated by me as a kid. Now that I'm an adult, I'm like, this guy was good. Yeah. Love Dabney Coleman. All right. So the future of Nerf, their main slogan since the 90s, has been it's a Nerf or nothing, and they still, like you said, are coming out with new stuff here and there. They are now coming up with their ammunition. It's a little firmer than before. They're starting to come out with things that aren't quite foams, a little more like rubber. I imagine that hurts a little bit more. I think even one of these guns is banned in some of these games, because it's not quite as bad as a paintball, but it can get a real sting with the range of some of these. I think they advertise a range of like 90 feet for some of these, whereas in our

day, well, in our day, it was just, it was just footballs and basketballs. Sure. Or when they started coming out with the little, the little, you know, sucker darts, you know, those things, they shot in an arc, you know, not much velocity. They went wide, real wide. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely increased tremendously. And then that whole modding community, one of the things they're into is increasing accuracy, power, distance, all that stuff. And one of the things I think that Nerf has really been smart about is that they know what their customers are doing with their stuff, and so they respond in kind. Like they found out people were modding their guns, so they put up tactical rails to make it easier to mod. They found out people were playing

humans versus zombies. So they came out with a whole line of like post-apocalyptic zombie guns and chainsaws and baseball bats and stuff like that all branded like Nerf zombie. And I feel like I didn't realize that that was going on. But now that I see it, I just think that's really smart. And you don't see that very often among a company in a way that's not like exploitive or going for a quick buck or something like that. They seem like they're really genuinely responding because they put like real thought into all their products. But I did not find a single person online complaining about Nerf and its products, not a single one. And I think that that's so rare that I mean, I like Nerf now. Yeah, I mean, they're a smart company. They've got partnerships with the NFL

with games like there have been Nerf first person shooter games. They now have these, I don't think there are many of them yet, the Nerf action experience centers, which is like a big, you know, the big indoor playgrounds are such a huge thing now for kids. Like trampoline zones and stuff like that. But Nerf has their own. I think there's one in, oh, where was it? I saw somewhere in Asia, but there's now one I think being built in the UK, one in New Jersey, like this is sort of the next wave for them. Hong Kong, London, New Jersey. It wasn't Hong Kong, but yeah, you got the right point. But yeah, these action experience centers seem like kind of the next big thing for them is, you know, not only do you have their products in there, but you're

charging a kid whatever 19 bucks to come in and play for a few hours. Sure, kind of like a Legoland or something. Yeah. Although that has rides and things, doesn't it? Yes, it does. It does sticky rides for little kids. Yeah, everything's very sticky. Well, you got anything else about Nerf? No, let's wrap this one up. Okay, well, we just wrapped it up because Chuck said so, which means, of course, it's time for listener mail. You know what we're going to forego listener mail. I believe this is coming out right before our tour. So this is a last ditch effort in real time to get people to buy tickets. We may 4th, we're going to be at the Warner Theater in DC the very next night, May 5th at the Chevalier and Medford mass right outside of Boston.

And then May 6th at gorgeous legendary Massey Holland, Toronto. I believe we've moved a lot of tickets in Boston, but DC and Toronto are kind of lagging. So plenty of great seats. We'd love to see everybody on this spring tour. We're going to be coming out again in the fall. But this is, if you're in the Northeast, this is your chance. Yes, and you can get tickets by going to linktree slash S-Y-S-K L-I-N-K-T-R dot E-E slash S-Y-S-K. It'll take you to all the ticket sites you need to go to to come see us. So come see us, everybody. All right, sounds good to me. Can't wait to get out there and we look forward to seeing everyone in DC, Boston and Toronto. Agreed. And if you want to get in touch with us in the meantime to tell us how much you can't wait

to see us in the Northeast, we'd love to hear that. You can send it as an email to StuffPodcast at IHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people like actress and director Cheryl Hines. They were looking for an unknown actress to play Larry David's wife. I said, well, how old is that guy? Isn't he old? Listen to the new season of Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1973,

Viva, an erotic magazine for women, launched its first issue. Staffed by feminist writers, Viva was groundbreaking, but it had one bulging obstacle. It's porn king publisher, Bob Guccione. Here he is, a guy wearing open shirts and chains. Stift is a podcast about the rise and fall of Viva and why it matters today. Listen to Stift on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm Ed Helms, the host of Snafu, a podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. Recently, I spoke to Rachel Maddow about her riveting podcast, Ultra. It's about a 1940s Nazi plot to overthrow our government. Like Snafu, Ultra left me with an eerie feeling about how much important history gets forgotten, and as a result, repeats itself. History is told by

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