Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Easy Bake Ovens Work

Episode Date: February 4, 2023

Easy Bake Ovens are as iconic as a toy can get, as American as apple pie or baseball. Learn all about these light bulb cooking, working ovens that endanger children to this day, in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What's up y'all this is Questlove and you know at QLS I get to hang out with my friends Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Umpink, Bill and we you know at Questlove Supreme like to nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Questlove Supreme.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands.

Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hi everybody, it's Chuck here on a Saturday. I'm not going to be weird this week, I promise you. I'm going to take you back in time though to November 1st, 2018 because this is one of our episodes on Famous Toys. We love doing these eps. They're nostalgia bombs for everyone that listens and this is all about the Easy Bake

Oven. That's why it's called How Easy Bake Ovens Work. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Ramsey over there, The Euse, which means it's time for Stuff You Should Know, Nostalgia Edition, Colin T.S. Hodgman. Yeah, we've done a few toys, Play-Doh, Slinkies, right?

What else? Well, does a boomerang count as a toy? That's the way I live, mate. We've done tons. We did Silly Putty. Silly Putty, sure. We did, you know, a bunch. The Balls?

Yeah, the Balls episode. How Balls work. They round and they bounce. We said Balls like a million times in that episode. Yeah, this one's kind of cool though. The Easy Bake Oven, which I never had one. Did you ever have one in your home? I don't think so, no.

I don't think my sister had one either. Well, I was a pretty tubby kid, so it's possible that my mom was like, make sure your brother doesn't know you have one of those. Do not feed your brother anything from there. But it's interesting that this is one where sort of a very simple idea and you never can tell what's going to hit toy-wise. Nothing super complex about this other than you could literally bake food and sort of pretend to be an adult in the kitchen.

That was the basis of it. Being an adult, that was kind of Kenner's thing, and Kenner, the people who made Star Wars toys were the ones behind this, and they were very much into toys that let kids pretend they were grown-ups. Yeah. That was their bag. Yeah. I have a new neighbor actually.

Shout-out to Rick, Kathy, hey guys. Well, they really got under your skin, huh? What? Rick and Kathy got a shout-out on the podcast and their new neighbors. Geez. Yeah, because he worked for, I was talking to him and I was like, he seems like a good guy. I was like, what do you do?

You know, what did you do? And he's like, I was a toy and action figure designer for Kenner, and I was like, whoa. What years? He came on after his first, the first thing he worked on was the Tim Burton Batman movies. Nice. And he stayed on for a long time, like his whole career, like after they were sold and everything. Wow.

Pretty neat. That is very cool. Yeah. Good for him. Yeah. He still does wonderful sculpture, so. Oh, I'll bet. Let's go after Rick Watkins art online and then check it out.

I'm going to check it out. But I mean, Kenner is such a big deal to like, to people our age and of many ages, but I didn't realize that they, I didn't realize their origin as a company. Remember in the, we talked, we did a whole action figures episode. Remember? Oh yeah. And we talked a lot about Kenner. Was that a two-part episode or was it just like an hour and a half long?

I feel like it was just long. It was very long. But Kenner almost didn't do the Star Wars ones, if I remember, but for us at least, that put Kenner on the map. What I didn't realize is that Kenner was already on the map as far as toys go. Yeah. And one of the ways that they got there was from the Easy Bake Oven, which debuted in November of 1963, right around the time that John Kennedy was shot.

Yeah. But Kenner had been around since the 1940s. Albert Phillip and Joseph Steiner formed the company after, as legend goes, one of them saw a bubble, you know, maker bubble wand or whatever you call them. Yeah. And it was like, hey, if I could do a gun that shoots bubbles, we might be on to something. And that was their very first product is the bubblematic gun. And then whatever, less than 20 years later, the Easy Bake Oven, even though as we learned

today and yesterday, there had been toy ovens since like the Victorian days. Yes. Like really, really dangerous ones. I know. Like real, real little ovens. Like wood burning pellet, solid fuel stoves made of cast iron that were sized down for little kids to use. Yeah.

Basically like, here's the oven that can kill your parents. We'll just make a smaller one that can kill you. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, the children's play oven, functioning play oven history very kind of closely tracks the real oven history, right? Yeah.

Like when there were cast iron, wood burning ovens, there were kids versions of them. As real ovens moved into electric ovens, there were kids versions of them. Apparently Lionel, the train, the model train makers, they made some in the 30s. Also we want to give a shout out to Lisa Hicks and the people at Collectors Weekly for a great article we also used for this episode too. But in the 30s, there were electric ovens. By the 40s or 50s, I think there were fiberglass insulated ovens, electric ovens. It was just like a small oven for kids, but they were ovens.

They were extremely dangerous. And Kenner had this really great idea and the reason that this idea came about at Kenner to begin with. So, apparently Kenner was really big on having ideas could come from anywhere. Anybody in the company floated an idea and people would listen. They had regular meetings where there were bull sessions, maybe they ordered some chow mane or something like that. Everyone rolled up their sleeves and relaxed and spat out ideas.

And one of the salesmen from Kenner came back in from the field and said, you know what? I saw something. I saw some pretzel vendors keeping their pretzels warm on the street using a light bulb. What if we used a light bulb to heat up an oven for the little kiddies and somebody, I think, Charles Howes, Ralph Howes? Well, Norman Shapiro was that gentleman and then Ronald Howes was the big time inventor for Kenner who had a couple of like really big products under his belt. And he was like, that's an ace's idea.

That's exactly how he talked. Yeah, probably so. Everyone hated him for it, but he was really good at inventing toys so they had to put up with it. Yeah, but Kenner's deal, like you were saying, was find things that mimic adult things. And that's like kind of, I bet like kids are going to dig that stuff. And they did from like, and kids still do, little toy lawnmowers and toy bulldozers. And, I mean, Ruby's got a little cleaning set with like a duster and a dustpan and a

mop. Is she OCD? No, but I mean, all the time, she will say, you know, come on, daddy, let's clean and she'll hand me a mop. That's a little OCD. Well, no, that's good then. Yeah. I like where she's headed.

Did you have one of those plastic safety razors so you could shave next to your dad? No. I did. But I was, I think a lot of boys are pretty obsessed with shaving before they have whiskers. Yeah. And I think I heard that they would actually stimulate hair growth on your face. I was about to say, I remember being worried about that. Yeah, because I didn't have, I had a pretty, I mean, looking at me now, you would never

know, but I didn't have a lot of facial hair going on until well into college. Was it like lacking or did it come in patchy? Just a little bit, sort of like my brother is now, he just stayed in that phase where... Your brother's got a perfect chiseled face. Well, I know. That's because he doesn't have a beard. Oh, okay. And Scott can grow a pretty decent goatee now, but I don't think he could grow the

full beard. But his was, we were both spotty, like a little bit above the lip, little bit on the chin. One part just kind of traced a line up to your eye from around, from under your nose. Yeah. But I mean, it was sort of a family thing. We're not hairy dudes. We don't have very hairy legs or stuff like that. It is odd that you have such a full beard.

Like I don't have hairy arms or anything like that. You're a beast. I don't know if beast is the right word, but yes, I'm a little hairy. You're a hairy guy. My chest hair definitely plucks out from under my shirt. You ever done any like a laser or anything like that? No. No?

Good for you. No, I'm just, I'm hairy. No, I mean, you're normal. It's not like you're Robin Williams. No. He was hairy. Yes, he was. God rest his soul.

Yes, indeed. So back to the ovens. So the idea has been put out there now by Norman Shapiro. Yes. Okay, so, and it was taken up by Ronald House, and this was huge in groundbreaking because again, there were unsafe ovens for kids that have been around since the 19th century. What these guys had just happened upon was the way to make another unsafe oven seem safe to parents.

That was it. That was the genius of this idea. That is what made Easy Bake Ovens take off. What they had figured out was that if they used a light bulb as the heating element, and believe me, a light bulb can heat up an oven. Sure. 350. Yeah.

Up to 350, which is a common baking dump. Yes, from a light bulb. And actually at first, we'll see a pair of light bulbs, but the fact is they're light bulbs and parents are familiar with light bulbs. They don't seem weird or scary. Yeah, it's not a wood pellet. And the fact that it's not like a heating element like in an actual oven, it's just a light bulb.

That is what they used to convince parents that this was a safe product that they could buy for their kids. It was a genius idea. It really was. And like you teased a second ago, the very first model in 1963, and if you look at that very first one, it doesn't really even look like an oven. Well, certainly the new one doesn't either. No.

I did go online. I was like, maybe I should get one of those, but they're ugly now. I'm sorry to the person who designed them. Yes. I'm glad you said it. They're ugly little ovens. Yeah. They should kind of go back to looking more classic, I think.

Yeah. That'd be my advice. But they used two 100-watt incandescent bulbs at first, one over the top and another under the bottom. Obviously, they were trying to get an even heat because you're baking things. Right. And they very wisely designed this thing so that the actual oven part was basically inaccessible to the kit.

Right. And on the other side, so just imagine a box, okay, oh man, here's the way. I love it. Okay. It's my favorite thing when you try to describe something. Let me see if I close my eyes, it works. Imagine a box. Okay.

And then coming out from either side of the box are a couple of little arms, but the arms are half arms, and they're rectangular and hollow, and they're actually openings. One opening, you slide in the uncooked thing that you want to bake into the heating area, the oven. Mm-hmm. Let it bake, and you push it through the other side, the cooling chamber, and then it comes out the other arm. Everyone, Josh just had his eyes closed that entire time.

And it worked. I really painted a great picture. In your mind's eye. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. So that's what's going on. You had the two bulbs, and in fact, let's go ahead and take a break there.

Oh, okay. I'm still cliffhanger. When we come back, I'll re-describe the Easy Bake Oven again. Sounds good. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism.

Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love-bombed by the Tinder Swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did, and that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify

the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, and also slightly dangerous.

And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace, because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow.

Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. All right. We were at one bulb, right? Oh, yes. I'm sorry. No, we were at two bulbs. Right.

So long ago. I couldn't remember. I know. It was a full ad ago. But then what they did was they figured if they just engineered this thing to distribute heat and hold heat a little better, almost like a convection oven, exactly like a convection oven, that they could go down to one bulb. Yeah.

There was a dude named Charles, hold on. I really want to, yeah, Charles Cummings. Charles One Bulb Cummings? Yeah. That's what he was known as. Charles Cummings was a designer at Kenner. And I think in the late 70s, he designed the interior of the oven so that one bulb created a convection current.

So it cooked just as well as two bulbs, but you just needed one. And he owns the patent to that. Oh, really? Oh, that's smart. Which is the way it should be. Yeah. He was the designer. He came up with it.

That's pretty rare too, I think. Kenner, of course, I'm sure had an exclusive license to it, but I'm sure he got a decent amount of money from that license agreement. That is the way it should be. He also created the patent, or he held the patent for the add-on popcorn maker that you could put under the Easy Bake Oven too. Good for him. Good for you, Charles Cummings.

Charles One Bulb Cummings, he probably lives on top of a mountain somewhere. He does. On a mountain of money. So all right, you're down to One Bulb, thanks to Charlie Cummings. They initially wanted to call this in 1963 when it was two bulbs. When they debuted. Yeah, right out of the gate, they wanted to call it in November of 63, the Safety Bake Oven, because they really wanted to drive this home, was that it was super safe.

Right. And the regulatory bodies were like, you can't, you haven't even sold one yet. We're not sure if this is going to kill kids. You burned a dozen monkeys during the product testing trials. Oh, that's so awful. But you can't call it that yet, because we don't know yet whether it's truly safe. Go ahead and sell them, but just don't call it safe. The Safety Bake Oven.

So they were like, well, what about Easy, and they were like, are we still talking about this? We're done with you. Go away. So they were like, okay, fine, we'll call it the Easy Bake Oven then. Right. And they sold it as the Easy Bake Oven, and it sold out immediately. They sold it.

So November 1963 is right before the Christmas season. Actually it's in the Christmas season, even back then. And they made a little more than half a million units and sold them all before Christmas. Yeah, for $15.95, which is expensive, that would be about $130 today. No. Yeah, that's an expensive toy. Wow. Another thing, I saw a picture of one that's for sale on eBay, for really cheap, I think

it was like $30 bucks or something. Really? It was unused in the box. What? Still needed to be assembled. But if you look at it, you're like, that thing looks like a death trap. It looks like the Ford Pinto of children's toys from the 60s. You know, like the sharp metal edges, and like, that's what it looks like, like the

baby strollers we were pushed around in. Yeah, remember that Dan Aykroyd SNL skit from years ago, the Dangerous Christmas Toys? There was one called the Bag of Glass. That's so great. And that's all it was. It was just a bag of shards of glass. So yeah, they sold a half a million, and then they're like, we got to make a lot more of these for next year.

Yeah, because this is back at a time when toys didn't do that very often. You know, it seems like every Christmas now, people are like, well, what's the toy we should go fight other parents for in the aisles? Tell us. Yeah, because I'm training in the ring. This is when it happened organically, when you put out a toy, and if it became like the fight worthy toy, that was a few and far between things. The Easy Bake Oven was the fight worthy toy right out of the gate.

Yeah, so in year two, I think they made about 1.5 million, sold all those. And here's the little bit of genius from Kenner, is anytime you can sell a supplementary product to the big thing, then you're really cooking with gas. That's like the Gillette razor model. I think it was King Gillette who came up with that. Yeah, so what they did was they sold mixes, you know, these little instant mixes that you would pour and it would make a little cruddy cake. And they had 25 of these at first, and we're selling those like crazy, because if you're

a kid, if you're a kid, you want all those, you're like, well, I haven't tried the strawberry cake yet. Plus also, it's not like you're putting this in like a book, like some baseball cars and you're like, well, I've got this one, I don't need it anymore. You eat that thing and you need another thing to replace it. And you poop it out. Yeah. And you're not going to eat the poop again.

You're going to go buy another one. And that was the genius of the other genius idea of this whole thing. There was a third genius idea too. Kenner did this so right. The licensing. I'm in awe. Not just, no. The advertising.

Oh, sure. So remember, this is kids emulating grownups. That was their thing. They advertise not just to kids through like Archie's comics, but they advertise directly to their parents too. There were ads for the Easy Bake Oven on I Love Lucy and on Hogan's Heroes, according to this collector's weekly article. And in these ads, if you look at a lot of old ads and even some of the newer ads too

for Easy Bake Oven, it's a mom and a daughter. And the parent is like, oh, this is something we can do together. I love baking. It's basically my whole life. I live in 1963 and I'm a woman. So I would love to share that with my daughter. Maybe she's old enough to have an Easy Bake Oven herself. And that definitely helped propel sales for sure because it's not just kids going, I want

an Easy Bake Oven. It's the parents going, that'd be a great thing to do with my kid. Yeah. And of course, as people evolved and people became more woke over time, even though that word wasn't used, enlightened maybe, it became a bit of a problem with gender roles and like, this is for moms and daughters, they're pink. And that's what you're supposed to do is be in the kitchen baking for the men. Yeah.

I mean, very famously, the Easy Bake Ovens always ended with the disclaimer like, this toy is not for boys. Yeah. It didn't really. But essentially, like that was this, that was what was coming through. And the weird thing is, as far as like legendary and iconic a toy as the Easy Bake Oven was, as gender roles and yeah, as gender roles evolved, I mean, this was, we're talking like the early seventies when this really started to become like a thing.

Yeah. The Easy Bake Oven did not evolve with it. Right. As we will see, it wasn't until the like early 2000s that they started to like respond to that kind of thing, and I saw an ad for 2014, not a boy in sight, all girls and just dancing around like the girliest Easy Bake Oven you could possibly imagine, they actually got more girly as time went on, more girl focused as gender roles went on, which is really weird to me to be that, not just non responsive, but almost like, no, we're going the opposite

way. I mean, early 2000s, Hasbro, who, you know, they bought out Kenner eventually. Makers are the classic Snoopy snow cone machine. I never had one of those. Did you have one of those? No, neighbor did. Okay. But you got to eat some of that sweet, sweet sugar ice.

There was no thing like the taste of, I think the cherry one, I can't remember, but it was just the greatest snow cone you could possibly have. And that's until you had a shaved ice later and you're like, oh wait, this is a lot better. Still the number one reigning champ. Really? Number two is blue raspberry slush puppy. Yeah. See what I would always do is slurp that sweet liquid and that'd be left with just some faintly

colored kind of just ice. Oh yeah. No, I know. That was the problem with it for sure. But if you did it right and you just kind of let it settle, you got, you know, through the nasty stuff first, when you got to the bottom, then you got to the true like hyper dense snow cone experience. Yeah.

I could never do that. I still have problems regulating my like hot fudge to ice cream ratio when eating a Sunday. Oh yeah. I just won't even do it anymore. So you do all the hot fudge first and then you're left with some cruddy ice cream? Yep. That's pretty, I mean, that's standard. Cruddy delicious ice cream.

Right. This ice cream that some people around the world would kill for is cruddy. It doesn't have any more fudge. Dude, I've been on a 15 year campaign to convince Emily that vanilla ice cream is like a legit flavor. Sure. But she still thinks that vanilla ice cream is just like... Unflavored ice milk.

Yeah. It's like, it's the one without the flavor added, right? I'm like, no, vanilla. Yeah. This is really delicious. It is. It is. It's subtle.

Vanilla bean ice cream. Like a true... The flex. So good. I'm with you. So in early 2000, they finally, like you said, tried a very ham fisted way to get boys involved with the QU, easy bake? Queasy bake.

Is that what it is? Give me a second too, because QU is a separate word. Okay. Now it makes sense. It's not even hyphenated. So the queasy bake oven and the mixerator for you boys, you can make mud and crud cakes and larvalicious cocoon cookies and not like, hey, just bake something good because anyone can bake.

Yeah. Anyone can bake. And they didn't... The girls don't use that one. It was only boys that showed up in these ads. They're like, we really need to get boys involved. How can we do that? Oh, we'll make one specifically for boys that's like they're making cruddy cakes.

I mean, I know they're just trying to sell stuff, but when in these meetings, in these marketing meetings that you just can't help but think they're... It's like a bunch of like 85-year-old men, it's our Senate that's in there. Right. They're like screaming and pounding and yelling at each other about the idea of like selling this to boys. Oh man. Well, after that, I feel like we should probably take a break.

Yeah, we'll go to our Senate chambers and regroup right after this. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads?

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love-bombed by the Tinder Swindler.

The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money you took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships.

Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business.

My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. This is what happened in the MySpace era, would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. All right, so in 1967, the Easy Bake Oven is selling like hotcakes, literally.

General Mills buys Kenner, and they did a couple of genius things. They partnered because they were General Mills. They had no problem because they owned Betty Crocker as well, I assume, launching Betty Crocker branded mixes. And then later on, they got into licensing deals with McDonald's and Pizza Hut because here's the thing, you can bake anything in an Easy Bake Oven because it's just a little oven. Yeah, I saw that.

You can make pizza, and you don't have to buy these mixes. You can just bake cookies that you made from scratch. Yeah, and there's like a lot of recipes online, Easy Bake Oven recipes. Yeah, they actually don't taste like garbage. Right. So, yeah, they did have a huge line of mixes though, and they sold more than 100 million of them over the years. Man, that's how they get you.

But I mean, there were recipes for mixes for candy bars, pecan brittle, popcorn, bubble gum. You can bake your own bubble gum. Interesting. It is interesting. I would have tried that for sure. I want to see bubble gum come out in like a brownie pan. Yeah.

I'd be like, I want some of that bubble gum. That looks amazing. We had a cotton candy machine, now that I remember. What? It would just spin sugar and you would... Oh, I know what they do. Yeah. I wanted one.

Yep. That thing was probably dangerous. It was probably like a nuclear centrifuge. What was interesting about those, or fascinating to me, was like the cotton candy, oh, it's not called... It's like not the web, but... Sponge sugar or something like that. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to say web, but that's not it either. It's not really visible in the machine, but when you stick in the little cone, it just builds up on it. Like, it's just coming out of another dimension into this one. Like coming out of a spider's butt. It's awesome to see a pink and blue spider's butt. Man, I had to go out yesterday to... I still have my pickup truck because I just kept it because it was paid for, and I still

move and haul stuff occasionally. Yeah. I had to move something. You had to justify it to me. I had to move something yesterday, and I went out and there was the most beautiful, huge spider web from a tree down attached to the rear tailgate of my truck. I mean, you're like, Chuck, smash. With this big spider right in the middle, and I was like, oh, man, I just felt so bad.

I didn't know what to do. So you just put it in reverse and pretended nothing. You didn't see anything? No, I actually plucked it off little by little because I wanted to ensure his safety, and the web just goes crumbling down into a long skinny string, and he climbs right up to the tree, and I was just like, I'm really sorry. He's like, oh, I'm sure you are. It's great.

I know. He tried to spit venom into my eyeball. He's like, what do you need your truck for, and you're like, I've got to go get peanut butter? He's like, oh, good. Thank you for ruining 30 hours of my work. A giant vat of peanut butter that would only fit in my truck. All right, so let's flash forward here to the modern times in 2007, the Energy Independence

and Security Act, when the government said by 2012, light bulbs have to increase their efficiency by 25%. So bye-bye 100 watt incandescent bulb. Yeah, so let me just say something. Let me set that up too. Over the years, the Easy Bake Oven had just remained a steady seller for Kenner and then Hasbro, and the design had been basically the same. It went from two bulbs to one bulb, but it was this closed box where the heating element

was where there was a slot on the side, remember, I went through the whole thing, pushed it in and it came out the cooling chamber on the other side, but really the design was the same. The outward look changed. It went from the weird, its own thing to the late 70s and early 80s, it started to resemble a microwave, and then in response to this change in light bulb requirements, Easy Bake did a redesign in 2006. And for the first time ever, the Easy Bake Oven actually looked like an oven, like a stove.

It had little fake burners on the top. It looked like a stove, and it was actually a front loader to where there was a slot in the front of the Easy Bake Oven, and that's where you put the thing in, and that's where you actually pulled it out from too, and it went right into the heating element. And they replaced the light bulb because again, so long 100 watt light bulb because of the energy act with an actual heating element, a ceramic heating element, like an oven. Yeah, it was an oven. So they made an oven, but then when they made the oven, they redesigned this thing so that

you could put your fingers right into the oven while it was baking at its hottest temperature, and of course kids immediately started doing that. How did they, how did that one slip past? No idea. I mean, that just doesn't make any sense at all. So in the end, I think close to 250 kids ended up with like second and third degree burns. One partial amputation of a finger. Yeah, because kids would get their fingers stuck in it, right?

And it's just serious. And then some kids got their fingers stuck in it while it was hot. And yes, they were getting huge burns. So Hasbro was like, well, we'll do a recall and they recalled like 985,000, I think ultimately a million of these things they recalled. First they tried to say, here's a little fix. Yeah, here's a retrofitted piece. It's really easy to snap it on and it'll solve everything.

And apparently it did solve everything. They're like, why didn't you make it that way to begin with? Right, but most parents were not like, they didn't have their ears out that there was a recall of their easy bake oven. And so the kids kept getting burned and finally Hasbro was like, just bring them back. So there's a recall of a million easy bake ovens from that 2006 redesign. There's a huge toy for them. If that would have ruined the easy bake oven, that would have been a big, big deal.

So what they did was they temporarily went back to an old design featuring a light bulb too, while they redesigned it to the new version. So then they came out in 2011 with that really ugly designed, what's called the easy bake ultimate oven. Oh, I'm looking at it now. That thing's, yeah, it does. It looks terrible. It's horrible.

It's super, it looks like it's on the go or something like that. I don't like it. It looks like a weird toaster oven. Yeah, but it's sort of, it looks like it's trying to look futuristic and modern, which never ends up looking like that. No, it doesn't. But they also made it pink and purple. Yep.

It's really early. The ads were super girl targeted yet. There's flowers on it. And again, they were like, nope, this is for girls, boys don't play with this. So in 2000, I think 2013, there was a girl named McKenna Pope, yes, who was just a hero of heroes. She's amazing. I saw an interview with her on CNN.

She's pretty great. She's just so like self-possessed and intelligent and like well-spoken, but also like a kid and aware she's a kid. She's just amazing. One of those clearly reincarnated. And she went on, she started a petition to get Hasbro to make a gender neutral version of its Easy Bake Oven, because her little brother liked to bake, but realized that the Easy Bake Oven was for girls.

She wanted him to be able to bake. So she said, Hasbro, why don't you make one that's gender neutral and got something like 50,000 signatures for her petition. And Hasbro came out with a new version of the Easy Bake Ultimate Oven, which was just a black version of it, black and I think silver. I'm surprised it wasn't like our brush stainless model. Sure, right. Like to emulate, you know, kitchens.

Right. Yeah. She's probably almost 20 years old now. Yeah. I wonder what she's doing. McKenna Pope, are you out there? She's some sort of like consumer protection lawyer, I'll bet. Probably so.

I hope so. In 2006, they go into the National Toy Hall of Fame. The same year as that disastrous redesign. Yeah. They got in just under the wire. They did. Yeah. Can't take it back.

I'm trying to look here from their very own website, some of the landmark years, and it is kind of funny that it emulated the styles at the time, unless they were just doing pink. Like in 69, they premiered the Avocado Green. Yeah. The very next year was Harvest Gold. Yeah. Metallic P. We say that a lot in our house.

Oh, they had a potato chip maker? Do we mention that? No. 1973, the Easy Bake Potato Chip Maker. That's awesome. And then in 78, they finally started putting a fake digital clock on it that always read 1230. Okay.

Not 420. Right. You see that a lot as a joke. Sure. And like the... That's a joke. Yeah, but like you'll see an alarm clock add and like Sky Mall or something, and it'll say 420.

Right. Because the publishers aren't paying attention. They get it. They don't know. Or they don't care. Sure. I remember years ago, when we used to have a lot of illustrations on House of the Forks and had two in-house illustrators that I won't name, and remember one of them drew like

a park scene for me and the tree clearly had a marijuana leaf like embedded in it. And I was like, hey man, you can't do that. And he was like, oh, it was completely an accident. Right. I was like, man, I wasn't born yesterday. Yeah. I'd seen a pot leaf before. I mean, I thought it was funny, but like, you know, couldn't do that.

You got anything else? I don't think so. Easy bake ovens. Mac and cheese you can bake. Oh, in 2003, they introduced the real meal oven, and that's when you could do like french fries and pizza and mac and cheese and stuff. I think that was the predecessor to the ceramic heating element that they eventually redid the Easy Bake in in 2006.

Good stuff. Good stuff. If you want a nice blast from the past, just type in like Easy Bake oven commercials. There's one from 1980 that was just perfect. Yeah. Was it rad? No, it was pretty rad. Oh, okay.

It was like Carpenter's era. Gotcha. Which is not rad, but still lovely. Yes. Love the Carpenter's. Me too. Well, if you want to know more about Easy Bake ovens or the Carpenter's or the Snoopy Snow Co.

Machine, just go on to the internet. It's a vast repository of stuff like that, and since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Hey, guys. I'm a freelance writer who works remotely, so I've been writing and traveling the world for the past year and a half. It's been wild. Since I've been traveling alone, it can get lonely, but from Mexico City to Bali to Tokyo,

you guys have been with me, keeping me company, making me laugh, teaching me all kinds of cool facts. As a content writer, I also feel a connection to y'all. We both have to research seemingly mundane topics sometimes and discover the cool, interesting things about them, present them in a palatable way. People sometimes laugh when I'm telling them that I'm writing something like the History of the Egg McMuffin or the best month to buy a mattress, but I just point to your podcast as a sterling example of how gyms and surprises lie within even the most unassuming topics.

Thank you. Yeah, I agree. I've never considered doing a show on digital nomadding. Never. I know it's becoming increasingly popular as more companies race remote working. I'm in a cafe in Medellin, Medellin, Columbia right now, and there are five digital nomads tapping away on their laptops as we speak. They would beat me up if they knew I just referred to them as digital nomads.

The future is location independent, I say. Thanks again for being so awesome. It's a short-term dream of mine to digital nomad over to a country where you're doing a live show by you guys to drink. Awesome. If you do read this on the air, please give a shout out to Mark Alexander who insisted that I keep listening to you guys even after I was initially slightly turned off by all of your sides in off-tracking.

Happens to a lot of people. And that's funny because we had a lot of those today. You know that reminds me of totally unrelated story. She says now I very much learned to appreciate those. He would burst into tears and I would too. So thank you Mark Alexander for turning on your friend, Maria Cristina La Londe. Thanks a lot. Beautiful name.

Yeah. I'm sorry. La Londe. La Londe. Maria Cristina La Londe. Beautiful. And I hope that your buddy did just burst out into tears. That'd be amazing.

It's pretty neat. Thanks for that email. If you want to get in touch with us, you can find us on the web at stuffyoushouldknow.com. Check out our social links there. And if you like, send an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

What's up y'all? This is Questlove. You know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn. We laugh.

We fall down rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler.

Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Welcome to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil.

On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Join to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.