Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck 58: Roaring! Spinning! Winning! The Rise of the Big Wheel

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Before helmets, hoverboards, and helicopter parenting… there was the Big Wheel. Louis Marx and Company turned a low-slung plastic tricycle into one of the most iconic - and unexpectedly controversial - toys in American history. From glorious downhill drifts and neighborhood wipeouts to lawsuits, broken bones, and adult underground Big Wheel racing leagues, this is the wild story of the toy that taught generations of kids that danger and fun were sometimes the exact same thing. For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's Christmas morning, 1970, and you bound down the stair to the Christmas tree already looking for your presence before you're even fully awake. Underneath the tree, you spot a box, bigger than anything that would hold boring presents like clothing or books, and you wonder if this is it, the big one, the new toy you've pinned all your hopes and dreams on. Is this the magical day that you're getting your very own big wheel? For many kids who grew up in the 70s and 80s, even in the early 90s, the big wheel was an iconic tricycle seen and heard on thousands and thousands of streets across America. There were earlier tricycles, of course, metal contraptions with handlebars and streamers, the kind of thing. Kids would pedal around on in their driveways and quiet cul-de-sacs while their mothers made dinner. But the big wheel didn't act like a regular tricycle. Made from molded plastic, it put its rider inches from the pavement in a lot of the pavement and a lot of.

lightweight but durable vehicle, a.k.a. fucking rocket ship that was perfect for careening downhills. Or terrifying. Its plastic wheels had basically zero traction, meaning that a clever rider could easily launch into a drift around a tight turn

or try to execute that move and end up crashing spectacularly and eaten a lot of pavement. Oh, there were injuries. Lots of them. So many. The big wheel could reach speeds up to 15 miles an hour or more on a downhill incline. And while that may not sound like much, 15 miles per hour in a big wheel, as a former rider, felt like a hundred

miles per hour in a car. And this was in a time when very few almost zero kids wore helmets or padding and parental supervision often boiled down to be home in time for dinner and then leaving you entirely to your own devices and discretion until then. In hindsight, some have wondered, was the danger inherent to the big wheel just incidental? Or was that sense of danger exactly what its makers were trying to provide. Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream.

I'll plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. Let's get nostalgic with this silly-ass tale today, a little story that kind of reminds me of the action park time suck. Let's talk about toys. If you grew up with them, and God, I hope you had at least one, and ideally a whole bunch, there's probably one that sticks out in your memory

as being super duper fun, more fun than the rest. Maybe it was your favorite board game or an extra special doll or action figure. Maybe it was the Millennium Falcon, right? The little thing for your Star Wars toys, your little figurines. Maybe it was a gaming system like the Atari or Sega Mega Drive

or if you're younger, maybe an Xbox or a PlayStation or American doll. Maybe got swept up in the Tamagotchi craze or had a cute but also terrifying Furby. But did you ever have a toy that was dangerous? Or to put it a different way, really fucking exciting. A toy that allowed you to do something that felt, even for mere minutes or seconds, like you were getting away with something

that a five or ten or even twelve-year-old should not be allowed to do. I had a toy like that. When I was, I don't know, nine, ten, I got a daisy BB gun rifle. My grandpa ward let me have it over the strong objection. of my grandma Betty and mom, who both felt I was too young. My grandma and mom made me promise not to shoot any little creatures with it or other kids. But Papa Ward hated a local woodpecker that noisily pecked the shit out of his house all the time.

So I was given a top secret assignment to kill that motherfucker. Made me feel like a mercenary. Hired gun, right? A sniper. And I spent, I don't know, months out on this back deck of my grandparents trying to find and eliminate that son of a bitch. Did I ever kill it? No. No, I didn't actually.

However, some other local birds were sacrificed. They did meet a violent end. And as much as that might sadden you, and I get it, I felt so cool. It felt like a real man, primal. I love that BB gun. And I never even put my eye out, kid. Not even one time with it.

Part of my love for it was that it was dangerous, that I could put my eye out with it or somebody else's. One of the most famous examples of a dangerous and exciting toy was the old slip and slide. In the summer of 1960, Robert Carrier arrived home from work to his Lakewood, California home where he found his 10-year-old son and friends

sliding across a wet concrete driveway. They'd run from the garage and belly flopped down under the slick surface, sliding all the way to the curb. Sounds pretty brutal, just to slide on some concrete. We didn't have a slip and slide. I think I may have talked about this in the Action Park episode.

We did tape a bunch of big black garbage bags together for a real low-rent version of one. And yes, of course, every session ended with somebody crying. When a rock in the yard inevitably tore through the thick plastic or not so thick plastic and left somebody with a nasty gash.

Wanting to make something safer, Kerry used his resources as an upholsterer to build a long, thick vinyl-covered surface that could be attached to a hose which would then shoot water through evenly spaced holes in the vinyl. The result was a slippery backyard lane,

the kind that would only have been accessible in a water park beforehand, now devoted to at-home slipping and sliding. When carrier saw a neighborhood kids racing over and traffic on a street getting to starting to back up, he decided to patent his invention and the application referred to it as a portable aquatic play device for body planing. Hell yeah.

The slip and slide was born. With that, carrier and his business partner, Richard E.Riser. Old Dickie took the idea to the Whammo Corporation, a brand that had made wholesome toys like the hula hoop and the frisbee. Who doesn't love a frisbee? The company agreed to manufacture and market the slip and slide with one adjustment. The expensive Naga-hide material would be replaced with cheaper plastic. The 30-foot-long, 40-inch-wide slip-and-slide went on sale in 1961 was an immediate hit,

sold 300,000 units priced at 9.95 in a matter of months. And something else was happening as well. The same year the slip-and-slide was introduced, WAMO officials, what a great name, WAMO, observed that adults were trying it out, too. Hell yeah, they were. and I bet they were rarely sober. Initially, this was not seen as a big deal. Plenty of parents play with their kids, toys.

However, the slip and slide had been engineered for children of a limited weight and height, typically under 125 pounds. When adults, often exceeding 200 pounds, raised and threw themselves on the surface, they were not always dead ascent to cross. Sometimes their weight meant that they would abruptly stop, the forward momentum driving the weight of their body directly onto their necks. It could, of course, be devastating for the spinal cord, and in several cases, led to instances of quadriplegia, paraplegia, or even death as a result of impact. Man, imagine that fate.

Imagine being paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of your life, and having essentially, I slipped, but I didn't slide, as the summary of your explanation for what happened. between 1973 and 1991 is estimated that a total of seven adults and one 13-year-old suffered severe neck injuries or paralysis as a direct result of using the slip and slide. Though these instances were obviously clearly rare, WAMO was apparently concerned enough that they opted to take it off the market in the late 70s. But the slip and slide would then be reintroduced by WAMO's new parent company, Crancoe, in 1982. And that meant more injuries. In 1997, Michael Hubert of Wisconsin used his neighbor slip and slide, suffered a broken neck. The 34-year-old was left an incomplete paraplegic, meaning that he had a limited ability to walk and use his hands, sadly. He sued Crancoe over the injury.

American Empire Surplus Lines Insurance Company, which insured Crancoe, offered Hubert a $250,000 settlement, which he quickly rejected. The case would go to a jury trial in 1991, and Hubert would be awarded $12.3 million. just a bit more than 250,000. The jury declared the slip and slide defective and unreasonably dangerous. It slipped too much, didn't slide enough. After an appeal, Cranesco ultimately settled with Hubert for 7.5 million. And then there were other instances of injuries. At least six adults suffered broken necks in the 1980s and 1990, as well as one eight-year-old girl who suffered brain damage.

Indeed, in 1989, a consumer advocacy group known as the Consumer Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic action reported that approximately 5,000 people had gone to the hospital for slide-related injuries in 1988 alone. And how many of those injuries were essentially some kind of version of a brutal road rash centered on tits and or dicks? I can't be the only one who went there mentally. How many of those 5,000 injuries revolved around losing or nearly losing a nipple or peeling some of the skin off of a dick? Anyway, finally in 1993. Don't think too much about that. Finally, in 1993, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the CPSC, issued a recall notice in conjunction with Cranco to alert consumers to the dangers of the slide, and it looked like injuries tended to go down after that. But this story is not actually an odd one when it comes to toys in recent decades.

Between 2002 and 2011, roughly a million people, most of them kids under the age of 16, wound up in the emergency room as a result of bouncing on the seemingly innocent trampoline. Oh, fuck yeah, they did. I was jumping on a trampoline. A neighborhood won back in fourth or fifth grade spiking a buddy to bounce him higher and higher when he broke his leg. My sister, a couple years later, got her arm broken on a trampoline next door,

getting spiked by some other neighborhood kids. She was around eight. I got spiked, clean off of that trampoline, or launched other kids completely off of it a whole bunch of times. Can't believe none of us went to the ER. I almost killed a buddy of mine in college when I spiked him off of somebody's trampoline. when we were drunk, and he nearly got impaled on a piece of rebar.

And then after all that, knowing the danger, I, of course, bought a trampoline for Kyler Monroe once I got them one. We played on it for years. No one went to the hospital, but, man, there was some close calls, especially when Kyler Monroe and I would play Crack the Egg, which we still play sometimes. It's an insane game, and also so much fun. A third of those million injured, I just referenced, suffered long bone fractures, breaks in their femurs, tibias, fibulas, humoruses, or forearms.

And this presents an interesting conundrum. Aren't toys for kids supposed to be safe? Isn't keeping the munchkins in our care healthy, the number one priority of any parent? And if the kid wants to do something dangerous, aren't you supposed to tell them no? I asked this as a parent who went hard on Nerf gun battles with the kids growing up,

and definitely shot Kyler and Monroe in their faces on multiple occasions. Did they cry sometimes? Yeah, it hurts. Of course they did. after consoling them Did I sometimes wander off And then laugh really hard? Yes, of course I did

I can't begin to tell you how satisfying it is To shoot your small child in the face with a dark gun Just make sure they're wearing goggles So you don't actually put one of their eyes out But for real, where is the line Between dangerous and exciting? Whose job is it to figure that out? We haven't always had this problem as a species

Indeed, for a long time, toys were not considered anywhere close to the realm of dangerous objects they were representations of things humans would use in everyday life. Dolls representing infants, animals, and soldiers, as well as representations of tools used by adults. These things have been found at archaeological sites from the Indus Valley civilization to bronze age society that existed from around the year 3,000 to 1,500 BCE.

You know what? I bet some of their shit was dangerous, though. I bet those kids played with knives and threw rocks at each other as well. And I bet dads were behind those games about 99% more often than moms. actual toys for prehistoric tots though included small carts whistles shaped like birds toy monkeys that could slide down strings many toys today are designed with some kind of physical activity in mind whether that's running around exploring or building something and for early societies that was no different excuse me a set of three stone balls were found in the tomb of a four-year-old girl at the uh shian bunpo neolithic site in china it's actually so sad and sweet still when it comes to ancient societies it's kind of kind of hard to draw the line between what was a toy and what wasn't. Often archaeologists tend to think that miniature figurines were most used for ceremonial purposes, not for play. In ancient Greece and Rome, the toy market expanded. Now children played with dolls made a wax or terracotta, sticks, yo-yoes, bows and arrows.

Oh, man, the yo-yo. Oh, man, I forgot how long that toy's been around. My grandpa played with one when he was a little kid. And after picking one up for the first time and probably 50 years when I was a little kid, Oh man, he could still walk the dog And he was so proud of that Whole face lit up I do love how a good toy

Can turn an adult into a kid again Right plane is in our nature Sometimes we forget that Such a beautiful thing I never could figure out many yo-yo tricks I fucking sucked at yo-yo's I actually don't think I ever mastered A single yo-yo trick

Thinking about this actually makes me want to go get another yo-yo Give it a go There was also an expectation Even back in aging Greece That kids eventually grew out of their toys on the eaves of their weddings, young girls around 14 would give their dolls to the temple as a symbol of their passage into adulthood,

which I understand, but that's also kind of sad. As long as you're getting your adult shit done and contribute into society, why can't you also play with some toys? You can't actually. As you can probably see, for the most part, toys were not given much special consideration when it came to society as a whole.

Indeed, kids were mostly seen as small adults, expected to work, contribute, learn essential skills, just like their parents, and if toys helped them learn some of those responsibilities they were going to face, perhaps even dangerous responsibilities like shooting a bow and arrow, then they were considered appropriate. But someone probably wouldn't have gone out of their way to make a super fun toy and definitely not a thrilling or dangerous toy that had no application to adulthood.

That take on toys would change a little, starting with the Enlightenment, as ideas proliferated about kids' growth and how their minds were fundamentally different from adults' minds. New toys sprung up to suit the end. interests of kids. For example, blowing bubbles from leftover soap became a popular playtime activity, as well as spinning hoops, pulling toy wackens, flying kites, playing make-believe with puppets. In the 19th century, Western values prioritized toys with an educational purpose, like puzzles, books, cards, and board games. Meanwhile, with a growing prosperity of the middle class, kids were not expected to contribute as much to the family survival, and toy manufacturers

quickly sprung up to take advantage of this economic opportunity. As the industrial, era made leaps and bounds in manufacturing. Toys got cheaper and working class families were able to afford them more often. Things like model railroads and lead cast toy soldiers, but none of these had an essence to them that other companies could not reproduce. You could get your toy soldier from one company or another, and they probably looked pretty much exactly the same. Nobody would say in the playground that you had a knockoff for an established top-of-the-line toy. In other words, toys were not brands yet. That would change in 1903. A year after public, the tale of Peter Rabbit, English author, Beatrix Potter,

created the first Peter Rabbit soft toy and registered that toy at the patent office in London, making Peter the oldest licensed character. Other spinoff merchandise followed, including painting books and board games, setting the stage for licensed characters like Mickey Mouse and Harry Potter to take over the fucking world. But, of course, there were still toys that were not necessarily brands.

They were just really cool, good ideas, something fun to play with. Some of these have been discovered by accident during World War II. Scientist Earl L. Warwick was trying to create a replacement for synthetic rubber and ended up coming up with Nutty Puddy, eventually known as Silly Puddy. The Band-Tone material sold inside a hollow red egg-like container that can lift ink off in newspapers. And I remember playing with Silly Puddy when I was a little kid, and my grandparents cracking up about how that was still around from when they were a kid. The kids still cared about it. Similarly, in 1943, Richard James, aka Dick Jimmy, probably never went by that, actually, was experimenting with Springs as a part of his military research. When one came loose and flopped down to the floor, he spent two years then fine-tuning a design before he came up with the Slinky, one of the most iconic toys of all time.

But can we agree that Slinkies actually fucking suck? I had one of those two. It was really hyped up, right? I liked it for about all of one minute. And then I was like, that's it. It just kind of slowly, clumsily, goes down a few steps. Fuck that. I got better shit to do like play Pac-Man or throw bouncy balls in my sister's head.

Still, discoveries like these opened to floodgates for a new way of thinking about toys, not just dolls or toy soldiers, but something exciting that you could interact with, something you could make move. And so while many toy companies like Mattel, producer of Barbie and Hasbro, producer of GI Joe's, while they still focus on the old, reliable, you know, dolls and soldiers, some people began to think more seriously about what kids want. Did they want to sit quietly at home with a doll or play kitchen? Did they want to spend hours laboriously building a model train set,

only to watch it slowly crawl across the room in endless circles? Or did they want to go really fucking fast? This is what one man, Louis Marks, would come to believe, although it took him quite a few decades to get there. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1896, to Austrian Jewish parents, Marks graduated from high school to age of 15, despite the fact that he did not learn English until he graduated grade school.

Wow. Rather than sticking to the classroom, he spent most of his time as a kid roaming the streets in New York and occasionally shoplifting from department stores. But he did well enough in school to graduate early and from there. He's a very smart kid.

He became a very smart man. It was off to a career with Ferdinand Strauss, a manufacturer of wind-up toys whose best-selling product was Zippo the Climbing Monkey. a mechanical chimp that zipped up a tin string. Okay, I'm curious. Probably would only like it for slightly longer than the slinky, but I'm curious.

By 1916, Marks was managing Strauss's plant in East Rutherford, New Jersey, but then was eventually voted out by Strauss's board of directors over a disagreement about retail sales practices. He had suggested that as employers closed some of their retail shops and focused more on increasingly, on increasing, excuse me, overall manufacturing. They didn't like that. And then with World War I looming, Marx entered the U.S. Army, where he would attain the rank of sergeant

before returning to civilian life in 1918, and then it was all toys all the time. His days spent in the army had left quite the impression on him, and it would be a huge inspiration for him. He would go on to make tons of toys that represented various pieces of military equipment. For now, though, Marx went to work selling for Newton and Thompson,

a Vermont-based manufacturer of wooden toys, where he redesigned their product line and increase the company's sales tenfold real quick. Following that incredible and quick success, it only took him less than a year to do that. In 1919, Marx and his brother David decided to strike out on their own, and they founded Lewis, Marks, and company. They would specialize in buying existing toy lines

and then improving them. Like most toy makers, Marks did not mind emulating competing playthings outright, though he would usually make them either better performing or cheaper to produce, and they knew exactly just where to start to do this. his old boss Strauss was not running his business very well. And Mark smelled blood in the water, and he swooped in to buy Strauss's old molds

at a steep discount, enabling him to now make Strauss's toys and sell them as his own. And that would make him a lot of money very quickly. In 1922 at the age of only 26, just three years after founding his company, Mark was already a millionaire. Back when being a millionaire meant you were a multi, multi-millionaire.

Essentially, $1,1922 is equal to the company. into roughly $20 million today. He was doing real fucking good for himself. Then he followed up his popular line of mechanical toys with something far simpler, the yo-yo. This concept has been around for millennia, but in 1929, Mark's introduced a yo-yo with a longer looped string

threaded around the plaything center axle, increasing hang time, and making new, complicated tricks possible for people other than myself. This guy was a genius. In an article dated November 9, 1929, the New Yorker noted that Marx was selling yo-yo's at a rate of about $150,000 a day. Holy shit.

$150,000 a day. And at an average price of 20 cents each, which translates to more than $200, or that translates to more than $200 million annually in today's dollars. Yo-yo's were so popular that they even banned them in many public schools around this time. So what made Marx so good at what he did? I'll tell you in a moment, but you have to have fucking patience.

I'm going to tell you right after today's first to two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads, please sign out to be a space-listen on Patreon, get the catalog ad-free, episodes early, and more. Thanks for listening to those ads, and now what made Lewis Marks so good at what he did? Well, he didn't just improve on toys

by making them spin faster or work better. He also made them more true to life. His company soon offered kid-friendly automobiles that were scaled duplicates of popular full-size vehicles of the day, packaged with full tool sets that taught kids basic mechanical skills. These kids, or maybe sometimes their parents probably, would also need those tools to put the cars together,

since they did not come preassembled. This was actually a cost-saving measure on Marx's part, but it also worked out for a lot of these kids who got to pretend to be adults, learn how to use tools, and have a sick fucking little car at the end of it. In 1937, a London newspaper declared him the toy king of the world, and truly was. By that time, Marks employed nearly 5,000 workers, many of them working on factory lines, making mass produce, cheap toys that families could easily afford.

But life still came in him hard, like it does for everybody. Damn it, life, why can't you be nicer? Stop treating us like fucking spiders and get stepped on at any moment, or flies and get swatted. Don't you know how special we are? Marks had married his first wife, Irene Salisman, nickname Renee, December 31st, 1927. Less than 17 years later, April of 1944, she died of breast cancer at the young age of just 37. During this time, he struggled with depression,

thought about quitting the business and focusing on his four children, but in the end, he would not do that. He would be a great dad, but he would also keep making toys. World War II would present a complication for the toy industry as America entered a new world where food, gasoline, other resources were officially rationed. Supplies are rubber, metal, and rayon, all of which could be used to make,

were now considered critical to the war effort. In January of 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pretty sure I've heard of that guy before, established the War Production Board to oversee the use of critical materials within each American industry and the conversion of civilian factories into war production facilities.

More bullets, fewer toys. On March 30, 1942, the WPB issued General Limitation Order L81 prohibiting the production of toys that contain critical materials, like iron, steel, zinc, and rayon that made up more than 7% of their weight. Existing toys with content over that amount could be sold until June 30th, 1942.

The WP order, or WPB order, excuse me, and related material shortages, inspired toy manufacturers to come up with creative ways to continue production. And now paper dolls, puzzles, and games increased in popularity, thanks to their widespread availability. Once the war-ended manufacturers resumed their pre-war production, and the toy industry experienced a surge in sales from the post-war baby boom, and Marx was ready for that boom. Marx hadn't just adapted to different circumstances. He had used this wartime period to make new friends in very high places. He'd earned Dwight D. Eisenhower's friendship by personally repairing

a special model train set that the five-star Army General and future President had purchased for his grandchildren. He'd also become close friends with famed generals Omar Bradley and George C. Marshall, both of whom will be part of the family as his kid's godparents. Thanks to these connections, Marx was even rumored to have contributed to the Manhattan Project, possibly building components for the first atomic bombs, although we do not know that for sure. We do know that he was recruited by Eisenhower and Marshall

to help rebuild infrastructure that had been destroyed during the war, though. Dude had a real special mind. But to those who did not know about his connections, Marx was something much simpler, the guy who made their kids have fun, who was frequently described as an exceptionally smart businessman who also in many ways had the mind and spirit of a child. Dude was like a real life Peter Pan with an MBA.

Thanks to the baby boom, there were about to be a lot more kids in the market for new and exciting toys as they grew older now. Indeed, the 50s were a very good decade for Lewis Marks. And he'd already had several very good decades. He'd even be featured on the cover of Time magazine, December 12, 1955. On the cover, his face is seen blocking soon.

Santa Claus's profile. In other words, he was now widely considered as the rightful face of the Christmas season. By this time, Marx held about a 10% share of all U.S. toy sales. He'd used some of his money to buy a mansion in Scarsdale, New York, just north of Manhattan, complete with White House-like Corinthian columns. For his kids, life at the Scarsdale mansion was nothing short of idyllic. Mark's youngest daughter, by Renee, Patricia, would go on to marry Daniel Elsberg, the think tank analyst who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and she would say we lived an amazingly luxurious life. Every Christmas, there were, of course, a ton of toys under the Christmas tree, not only Marx's toys, but also toys from his competitors. He wanted to see for himself

how his kids liked these toys. This luxurious life included a new stepmom, Ida Blackadder, a burlesque dancer, Hale Lucifina, who performed under the stage name of Barbara Moffat. Ida and Marx would go on to have five more kids together, bringing the family to a total of nine kids. The family also had six dogs that Marks would take running every morning along with the fucking monkey from a trip abroad. That would often sit on Marks' head as the inventor smoked a Cuban cigar. This guy was one of one. It reminds me like Willie Wonka.

But Marks never let leisure distract from his work, particularly his partnership with Ray Lohr. And this is all building toward the big wheel, by the way. Ray had joined the company way back in 1930, worked his way up to becoming the manufacturer's chief designer. Over the years, he'd come up with tons of toys, everything from miniature pianos and rocking horses to rock'em-sock-em robots. Oh, man. Anyone else remember rock'em-sock and robots?

They didn't quite live up to the hype that I'd built for them in my head, but super fun. Way better than this linky. Ray's real passion was wheeled toys. Back in the 20s, he had created a mini car made out of stamped sheet metal that had a safety feature built in so the car would go into a reverse whenever it hit an object. With the rise of plastic in the 1960s, Ray now started to wonder what the new substance could do when it came to wheeled toys. And he wound up creating Marvel the Mustang, who introduced in 1967, a plastic horse that kids could bounce on to activate springs that would move the horse's legs. That's awesome.

But he wanted something more exciting than that. He'd heard about a new concept called blow molding, where metal form lined up full of plastic was puffed up with air. the resulting form would be both light and sturdy, capable of sitting a child or being dragged around by one. But how would he use this new process? He tried over and over to come up with something, but his ideas never felt like they measured up to his high standards. Not until 1968.

That year, Laura's mother passed away and the engineer was driving with his entire family from Erie, Pennsylvania, where Marks had one of three U.S. toy factories located, to Cincinnati, Ohio for the funeral. driving along interstate 71 Ray started to tell his kids about how he used to take apart his tricycles and reassemble them upside down

how he'd sit on the frame and because the center of gravity was much lower now he could go down hills incredibly fast without tipping over and that gave him an idea when Laura returned from Cincinnati he began to work on his inverted tricycle where the seat wouldn't sit far above the pedals

but instead level with them or even below them close to the ground the first step was to create wooden models Mark Company was known for its meticulous prototyping, and the company employed a team of skilled carvers who created Big Wheel Alpha, a wooden upside-down tricycle. Next came injection-molded versions, but these iterations were solid plastic,

which made them too bulky and hard to manage. The true Big Wheel really began to take shape when Laura built a blow-molded sample. The hollow frame gave him everything he was looking for, a lightweight object that could easily be maneuvered but still had a lot of durability. But the really exciting part, part was the wheels themselves. By making them from molded plastic, there was practically zero

traction, which meant that kids could build up speed, then skid, drift, and lurching to turns. Now, Big Wheel was ready for the prime time. It debuted for the holiday season of 1969 and was an instant hit, even bigger hit than Lewis Marx had hoped for or expected. With the big wheel, he wrote, we are in trouble all over now and we have been swamped. I would say roughly we will be 50 to 75 thousand pieces oversold and maybe more. I get nothing but telephone calls all day on this item, and it is a must for a lot of people. Oh man, how exciting to have a hit product like that. Despite limited supplies, Marks launched a television campaign that zeroed in on the big wheel's trademark roar, the sound that echoed in the hollow plastic, and made you know instantly if a bunch of

kids were big wheeling around your block. Though TV advertising was fairly common for toys in the late 60s and early 70s, the fact that the big wheel had such a recognizable sound made the product especially well suited for the medium. The 30-second spots shouted stuff like the big wheel sound of power, roaring, spinning, and winning. Listen for yourself to one of the first commercials. I love these retro commercials. Big wheels are rolling. Listen to them turn. The big wheel sound of power with speed enough to burn. Winning. Sing. Breaking. Breaking. the big wheel by marks with adjustable seat

handy saddlebag and a quick stop racing break breaking winning spinning it's the big wheel with saddle bag and racing break big wheel by marks

if we make it it can take it if we make it it can take it man that's like a golden era of commercials for me the promo is also benefited from the newly popular color TV where the big wheel's red yellow and blue visuals played perfectly. The tires were black, which was purposeful because it implied that the big wheel

was just like any grown-up vehicle. With a little imagination, it could be a bike, a car, a motorcycle, whatever you want. Still, Marks made sure to advertise that the big wheel was actually safer than any other toy vehicle on the market. In 1973, Big Wheel advertisements capitalized on a study sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Product Safety, the predecessor to today's Consumer Product Safety Commission. The report showed that low-slung trikes, like the Big Wheel, were much more successful. stable than traditional higher profile rigs. Marks purchased full-page advertisements in national magazines, touting the survey's conclusions, quote, safety study shows Mark's big wheel, most stable tricycle design tested in USA,

read an ad that ran in the November 1973 edition of Family Circle. Oh, man, all those different tricycles. My grandpa actually saved an old metal tricycle that my mom and her sister, my aunt, wrote his kids, and I actually do have memories of trying to ride that old tricycle down his dirt driveway, and it fucking sucked. Then I got a big wheel. Way better. Both did really suck to wreck on, but still, big wheel so much better. This pissed off tricycle manufacturers, this whole safety announcement, who wrote in to Family Circle with their grievances. So many of them wrote in that the paper's chief author later qualified his findings, asserting that the study,

quote, nowhere said that the tricycle is unsafe. What we said was only that it is less stable than some other designs that have the youngster seated closer to the ground. But to the average consumer, the message had already gone out that the big wheel gave you the feeling of danger going fast without any of the bloody results. But was that true? Well, no, of course not. All of this shit can be dangerous, right? If you just fucking let it rip down a hill, for example. Also, these things allowed kids to do the one thing that they really wanted to do that was probably not very safe,

and that's get away from their parents and oversight. You know, and this was going on for kids as, you know, you. youngest three or four. In an era of parenting that was far less helicoptery than it is today, kids could ride around for hours, skinning their elbows, knees, faces, without helmets or pads to protect them. And they did, and they did it a lot. According to a medical journal report from 1990, during the summer months at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, 44 kids, with an average age of just under four years, experienced injuries from riding on tricycles, with 33 of 44 being on big wheels specifically.

Most injuries not serious, though, but two had head fractures, and one had a concussion. I was surprised it wasn't worse than that. The report noted that the big wheels were particularly dangerous because they were so low to the ground, meaning that drivers couldn't see them.

And that was, of course, very dangerous. Let's back up and look at an event that happened on April 17th, 1977. Right after today's second of two, mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. Now let's back up. Look at that one event that happened on April 17, 1977.

On that day, Florida resident Cynthia Vincent was doing her normal Sunday routine. She brought her five-year-old daughter, Stacey, her son, Leo, over to her parents' house. Stacey went across the street to play with her friend Jill and Cynthia spent the afternoon hanging out with her mom, dad, and Leo. When it came time to head home, Cynthia called for Stacey. Stacey came running out, but stopped before she got to the car yelling, I forgot my big wheel, mommy. I got to get my big wheel. A little girl vanished down the block.

Cynthia waited in the front seat, passively watching as a Cadillac, a Cadillac, excuse me, turned on to the street. Moments later, she heard the crash, had a horrifying thought, oh my God, that's my kid. Cynthia ran into her mother's house, grabbed a phone, called an ambulance.

The ambulance arrived, then the police. They pulled Stacy's body out from under the Cadillac's front tire, her legs still straddling the wheels of her tricycle. She'd been dragged for approximately 50 feet. The driver claimed he had not seen her. Cynthia sat in the back of the police cruiser that followed the ambulance to Cardinal Cushing Hospital

Unable to get the image of her daughter's bloody body Out of her head, of course. The little girl was now in a coma. Doctors would soon discover that she had a ruptured spleen as well And so much other shit was going on. Stacey would need months of skin grafts, extensive surgery to repair her fractured skull, ruptured spleen, broken jaw.

In addition, her left side was paralyzed, her knee shredded to ligaments and cartilage. She was incredibly lucky to have survived at all. Four months after her admission to children's hospital, Stacy was transferred to Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Brighton for a lengthy recovery process. Six years later, at the age of 12, her left arm was still paralyzed, and she suffered from epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and significant brain damage. My God. Her fifth birthday present to Big Wheel had turned out to be a nightmare, and neither of her parents had seen that coming at all. The Vincent's had no idea, or claimed they

had no idea, that motorists couldn't see easily the big wheel unless it was from far away. Even that wouldn't have helped if a child rode off the sidewalk don't into the street when a car sped down the road. And I got to say, this shit makes me so mad. What happened to little Stacy beyond tragic? But was it big wheel's fault? Fuck no. It was her parents' fault. It was her mom's fault in this situation, clearly in my mind for not properly supervising where and when she was riding this thing. You know, don't write it out into the fucking store. street, obviously. Make sure your kid doesn't. Watch them. To me, her parents suing the big wheels manufacturer is equally stupid as suing Nike because you were dumb enough to step in front

of a fucking bus wearing their shoes. I had no idea that my Nike shoes would allow me to walk fast enough to step in front of bus. Why did no one tell me? Stupid people suing for doing stupid shit will always be one of the most annoying parts of modern life to me. Stacey's parents would now file a lawsuit against the Lewis Mark Company, as with several other parents who experienced their own horrifying incidents with big wheels. On May 6th, 1980, an 8-year-old California boy was killed when he rode his plastical tricycle out into the street and was struck by a car, right? Fucking tragic, terrible. Boy died a week later from skull and brain injuries. But again, how was that the actual tricycles fault? Was it supposed to come with a giant fucking sticker

that announced something like, reminder, you dumb fuck, this tricycle will not fare well. If you drive it in front of a car, so do not do that. Also, do not ride it off of roof. Do not ride into snake pit. Do not ride off cliff. Do not ride into active minefield. Another thing, if you ride tricycle into hot lava, you will be burned. Same thing if you ride into open flame. If there is gas leak, tricycle will not keep you alive. If you ingest poison, riding tricycle, tricycle will not provide antidote. Tricycle is not magical and does not protect you from literally anything. Please do not do stupid shit involving tricycle and then blame tricycle. In 1982, an 11-year-old Massachusetts boy suffered multiple fractures and a

brain injury when he rammed into a parked car on his plastic tricycle as he tried to avoid a moving vehicle. His parents would sue. Clearly the tricycle's fault. These cases would reveal some interesting information, like the fact that some company executives had been suspicious of the new toy from the start. Calvin Cook, a former company manager for research and development testified in one case that no one at the Marx company had created any kind of test to figure out if the big wheel was visible to cars, but why

would they? And of course it is somewhat visible. The cars is not painted with imaginary and visible paint. It wasn't designed to blend into the background like a chameleon. Fuck me. It's like when you see your kid in it, you know how fucking tall it is. You know how tall a car is. If you don't know those two things,

you shouldn't have a kid. Cook also knew the use of plastic rather than rubber for the toy's wheels, pose some added danger since plastic meant less traction than rubber, right, couldn't stop as fast. Could they have put something else on it to make it safer? Well, they had thought about it. A member of the company's Child Testing Division had concluded that safety flag should be permanently designed into the tricycle to promote visibility. Her recommendation, based on safety considerations, was all but ignored until the competitor came out with a drag flag on its plastic tricycle model.

Suddenly, the Marks company designed a flag of its own. The device was marketed as a safety flag, but sold. separately as an accessory, not as a mandatory feature as it should have been. I mean, you could also spray paint your big wheel, Hunter Orange. If you wanted to be super visible, you could tape fucking glow sticks to it, a reflective tape. You could tape a siren to it. It just plays nonstop. You can do all sorts of shit.

It's called personal responsibility. In the case of Stacey Vincent, the jury found that the toy company was not liable for injuries. The family appealed and lost their appeal as they should have. for some people the danger that big wheels offered was the only reason they wrote it in early 1986 a 16 year old gearhead and bayown new jersey native by the name of johnny spasovsky hell yeah decided to take another look at his childhood big wheel i like how this is starting he also wanted to modify it to fit his adult size frame and take things a step further or maybe like a hundred steps further by adding a miniaturized hemmy engine to the back effectively making the toy into a plastic

motorcycle. This progression is going along nicely. Johnny also decided that it would be fun to race his new invention, so he created an opportunity to do so. The big wheel, open class, invitational race. I like Johnny a lot. The first race would be held in the back of a gravel-filled Kmart parking lot. This is so good. On that day, Johnny, his little brother, Phil, and a friend who went only by Stitch, of course, raced around the parking lot for 22 and a half laps before Phil crashed into a dumpster and fractured his skull. according to one report Phil was in a coma for about seven months But did that minor setback

Stop Johnny and Stitch? Fuck no, it didn't The boys did it again the following year Dressing hockey gear now This time about a dozen other local teens It also built their own modified big wheels Within a few years Dozens more were showing up

To see if they could beat the competition Like the legendary operator Of the Barclay marathons And former short suck subject Lazarus Lake Johnny felt he wanted to make things harder So in the 15th season he mandated that participants had to wear tube socks filled with a minimum of three bars of soap

so they could take out those bars of soap and throw them at other competitors while they raced. Why isn't Johnny our president right now? As one write-up would describe, quote, this bizarre ruling added a twisted new dimension to the event, as well as an increase to visit to the emergency room. The amazing thing is that as the race got inherently more treacherous, the more people came out to compete.

It became a cult phenomenon, much to the ire of the local North Jersey community. On April 1st, 2013, the 27th race, 300 people from across the globe showed up to compete for the Camacho Cup. Camacho Cigar is being the race's unofficial sponsor. Not sure if it's still running. I don't think so. But another race definitely is, it's similar.

San Francisco's Bring Your Own Big Wheel. As the organization's legend has it, in 2000, a man named John Brummet happened to cross a big wheel. He thought it would be funny to write it down. Lombard Street, one of the world's most crooked streets in places and quite steep. He invited his friends to watch him head down on Easter Sunday. 13 people showed up. And then John would continue this tradition for the next six years, accumulating other

riders and more watchers. A 2007 YouTube video of the event would go viral, leading to more and more people attending and participating in subsequent races, the location moved to Vermont Street, still steep, still crooked, and it's been happening there ever since. Well, listen to some audio. play from the 2023 event I'll narrate a bit

this is so much joy to be heard so many crashes people dressed up in crazy costumes eating shit into hay bales

oh love it people wiping out I love the no no no no no no no no no no no no please please

a lot of those people in that video clip I just showed too clearly in their mid to late 60s you know, a few people in their 20s. I just love everyone just being big kids. Also, very quickly before moving on,

listen to this dad's joyous laughter. See, watch as his toddler, his little son, face plant into the yard on his big wheel after heading down the driveway and then catching it on the curb. And you can just tell that he knew this was going to happen. Hey, daddy.

Little kids looking back at dad, like, I'm doing good, right? And then, boom. That fucking cackle from the dad killed. me. As you might guess from these stories, the big wheel, pun intended, has kept on spinning. Backing up by the mid-70s, Marks, still with Lewis Marks running the toy show

in his 70s now, had expanded the big wheel lineup. In addition to flagship 16-inch model, the company introduced the 6-inch mini-wheel, the 9-inch little wheel, and the 12-inch sport wheel. The second-generation trike, which was $5 more expensive than the original at $15 bucks featured a saddlebag, adjustable plastic seat, most importantly, handbrake alongside

the right rear wheel. The commercial I played earlier was this model. Mark's zone advertising at the time touted the brake as helping a rider slow down without dragging his feet, but it would actually have the opposite effect. Just like an automobile's emergency handbrake, if you jam the big wheels unilateral friction lever into the locked position, you could go into even more massive spins and drifts, which people did. And that made a lot of money, too, not that Lewis Marks needed it, this product. By now, he's in his 70s again, looking for a successor, but none of his kids want to enter the business. And to his credit, he doesn't push them into it. Patricia Marks would remember how her dad told her that toy making was not the kind of thing

you succeeded at if you didn't truly have a passion for it. Instead of having a family member take his spot, Mark struck a deal that he thought would continue his work. At the time, the recreation and leisure industry was being overwhelmed with a kind of merger mania, often known as the conglomerate boom, because companies, companies could use their own stock to buy other companies, and accounting rules made earnings look better after acquisitions, buying other companies, no matter their relationship to the original company, created a feedback loop. Buy a company, report higher earnings, stock prices rise, then use those higher price stocks to buy another company and so on and so on. On this environment, buying companies was the fastest way to boost revenue and smooth out bad years in one industry with profits from another. And so the 70s saw a lot of weird corporate shit taking place,

like CBS Broadcasting, purchasing ideal, the maker of the evil-knevel action figures. Meanwhile, American Machine and Foundry, a manufacturer of cigarette machines and nuclear power plant parts randomly, merged with a bicycle company and a bowling pinmaker. All right? Now, I wanted to be left out.

A pair of cereal companies joined the fray with General Mills of Cheerios fame, buying Kenner, producer, of Play-Doh and the Easy Bake Oven. On some level, it probably made sense for these companies to buy toy manufacturers. You know, CBS, for example, could promote their action figures on TV.

Serial companies could bundle toys with their product and use a design of boxes to advertise to kids. This sometimes worked, but often the idea of synergy sounded a lot better in theory than it worked in practice. As it turns out, pretty hard to run a company with an entirely different process

than the one you're used to. But a lot of companies didn't know that yet. In 1972, Quaker Oates would get in all this buying the Marx Company for about $52 million. The acquisition was troubled from the beginning. Ray Lour, who stayed on, would recall later that the company manual grew from being about an inch thick to over a foot tall. None of these new rules seemed to help them with making better toys, though.

Quaker also eliminated the company's hugely popular lines of military-themed toys, citing the growing anti-war movement at the time. They would probably have a lot more to do with the pacifist Quaker ethos. As a result, Marx's profits went down by a third very quickly, and Lewis did not like that. He was kept on as a consultant, but according to him, no one ever asked for his opinion. After six months, he left. And by the mid-70s, the toy company that had turned to profit every year of its existence, including through the Great Depression, was operating at a loss, which speaks volumes to how important his mind was specifically to his business. And then Quaker Oates made another

mistake. They were so busy trying to find the synergy that they didn't protect their intellectual property. The result was a flood of big wheel lookalikes, including the easy riders, mighty wheel, the Colco power cycle, the Headsstrom's Supercycle. That last one sold well thanks to an advertising tie-in featuring Fonzie, the motorcycle ride and stud from the sitcom Happy Days. But the supercycles, true claim to fame came on the big screen when Danny Lloyd, the six-year-old who played Danny Torrance and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, the adaptation of Stephen King's novel, was depicted riding over the iconic red, orange, and tan carpet in the halls of the fictional Overlook Hotel on his very own super cycle. Meanwhile, Quaker was trying to maintain sales with a program of steep discounts and tie-ins.

Among them was a 1974 promotion that connected the trike with the company's leading kid's cereal brand, Captain Crunch. If a family purchased a big wheel and consumed four boxes of cereal, they could receive, by mail a check for $3. That didn't work out very well. There were just too many big wheel knockoffs on the market, which in some ways had been Lewis Marx's own strategy early on, taking popular toy ideas, adding fun features, making them cheaper to produce.

By the end of the decade, the company was foundering, and Quaker sold it to a British manufacturer, which would then also go bankrupt in 1980. Sadly, not even the super cool big wheel cobra cycle launched in 1979, was able to save it. It's sleek. It's black. Fuck, yeah.

It's beautiful. It's new big wheel cobra cycle from Marx. You can make cobra really move. And cobra comes with a license plate and letter so you can put your name on it. Cobra, the beautiful book big wheel you can put your name on. So sinister. Big wheel cobra with license plate. from Mark's assembly.

Even had a custom license plate. How did that not save the company? I'm not going to lie. I kind of wish I had an adult-sized Big Wheel Cobra right now. Some kind of license plate said something like Rocket Man. A company called Carolina Enterprises,

which later changed its name to Empire Industries, ended up buying the patent for the big wheel, though they already had a factory that made their own version of a blow-molded tricycle called the Hot Cycle. It seemed like they...

Hot Cycle. Sounds like a menopause kind of phrase or something. It seems like they bought the patent just to be able to use the big wheel name and it worked. Sales skyrocketed. Nobody seemed to care if they had a version that was true to Marx's original or a variant. 1980, the company patented a big wheel variant called the Green Machine, a chopped trike that used a pair of levers for rear wheel steering. Green Machine was an exciting product, but it could not save Marx. The company's head offices at 205th Avenue, the historic Toy Center building in New York City,

which it had occupied for over 50 years, finally closed, and then Lewis Marks died. in 1982 at the age of 85. And then the Big Wheels home at Empire Industries did not last. The company, like all others before it, was diversifying, and soon it would own the Klondike and popsicle lines of frozen confections. By the 1990s, as electronics became the country's new toy market focus, plastic toy production had moved overseas, and in 2000, after three consecutive years of losses, Empire declared bankruptcy.

The Big Wheel, along with a few other brands, were sold for a bargain price of about $6 million. The new owner would be Jody Keener, a toy entrepreneur and former Carnival Barker based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Jody would end up moving big wheel production to a series of facilities under the name Alpha International. During the peak of Alpha's ownership, manufacture of big wheels reached up to 10,000 trikes per day, using over 200 molds. But that wouldn't work for long. And 2007 is part of a highly contested divorce proceeding between Jody and his wife that included both company assets and individual property, including a nearly 14,000 square foot. mansion, complete with an indoor swimming pool, movie theater, and Sistine Chapel-esque overhead fresco, a judge wrote, quote, when two people cannot get along. Sometimes it is better for both of them just to pick up their toys and leave. The Big Wheel was essentially the child in this custody battle, and the court would award Connie Jody's ex-wife, claimed to the patent. She was, however, ordered to pay her ex-husband some $7 million to equalize the division of property, and then a later court proceeding returned the right to the Big Wheel to Jody.

was a big mess. In the middle of all that, the big wheel simply faded away. Lost in a divorce battle. What a strange fate for an iconic toy. In February 2020, Jody Keener then approaching his 70s, told industry trade journal the Toy Book that Alpha was, quote, in the process of selling or licensing its brands. A potential savior emerged in June of 2024 at the strong National Museum of Play, which began as one of the world's largest collections of dollhouses in 1960s, but has since morphed into a 375,000 square foot tourist attraction in Rochester, New York. Notably, it houses the National Toy Hall of Fame, which included the Big Wheel, or inducted, rather, the Big Wheel in 2009. Chief curator Chris Bench says the Big Wheel is as close as a toy can get to perfect. Quote, the sound it makes, the feeling, the durability.

It pretty much is the essence of play. Has there ever been a toy like that? And this acquisition could actually be something good for the Big Wheel brand. Indeed, shilling specializes in revitalizing vintage toy brands. It's known for reestablishing the lava lamp, along with care bears and sea monkeys, all iconic toys that had gone somewhat out of fashion by the turn of the 21st century. Man, I remember growing up visiting a friend's house and his mom had a lava lamp. I thought she was the coolest lady I'd ever met in real life.

And then I ended up having a lava lamp later. Oh, so good. Today's shilling big wheels are available on Amazon for between $100 and $110 bucks, less than what they retailed for during the Keener era, and are sold nationwide at the tractor supply hardware chain. I love those stores, actually. They're unfortunately not made from the original molds, though, which have been lost,

and would not be suitable for today's manufacturing machinery if they were around, but you can still enjoy the Big Wheel experience, or your kids can, or all of you, in a time where toys are increasingly digital, increasingly expensive, and lead kids to spend more time inside, where it's safer and easier for parents to keep an eye on them. The Big Wheel stands out as basically the opposite of that.

and, you know, maybe that's worth preserving. After all, the Big Wheel had nowhere near the number of incidents that the slip and slide racked up and that many people seemed to put these two inventions on the same level when it comes to dangerousness. And for the record, it's not like every toy is guaranteed to be safe, even if they originally appeared that way. Check this out.

The CSI fingerprint examination kit, for example. A toy based on the hit CBS show, CSI, crime scene investigation, allowed children to look for fingerprints, with special powder and brushes, The powder in question turned out to contain up to 5% asbestos. The alarm was sounded in November of 2007, but the Toysmakers, CBS Consumer Products, decided to leave it on shelves in the run-up to Christmas. Rather than wait for the CPSC to negotiate a recall,

the asbestos Disease Awareness Organization filed a civil action to stop sales of the kit. And that was not the only poisonous toy on the market. After arsenic, lead is the second most deadly household toxin in existence. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that no toy contained more than 40 parts per million lead, which is why it was so alarming when lab tests revealed that 2007's the Hannah Montana Pop Star card game contained lead at 75 times that level,

a whopping 3,000 parts per million. But that wasn't all. One study found that 35% of all toys on the shelves contain high levels of lead, and nearly 5% contain arsenic or toxic cadmium. What the fuck? By year's end, there have been 42 recalls involving 6 million toys for excessive lead contamination, excessive lead levels. But Hannah Montana stayed on the shelves because lead was found in its vinyl, not in paint, and thus was not covered by regulations.

That's great. One final example, one of 2007's most popular toys, a lot of deadly toys that year, were aquedots. I don't remember those. I don't think. Aquadots, small, colorful beads that could be arranged into different designs, then permanently set. with a sprinkle of water. The water activated a glue in the coating of the beads, which fuse them altogether, seems innocent enough,

and yet reports surfaced almost immediately of children playing with these things starting to vomit, and some passing out and even going into comas. Why? Well, because scientists discovered that the glue contained chemicals that metabolized into gamma hydroxybuterate, gamma hydroxybuterate,

otherwise known as GHB, the date rape drug. My God. The toy makers, or the toys makers, Canadian-based spin master and Australian-based moose enterprises blamed Chinese subcontractors before eventually agreeing to recall

all 4.2 million aqua dots kits. Look into that, the big wheel, or even the slip-inslide. Doesn't seem so bad by comparison. After all, you can choose how safe you want to be with these things. You don't have to ride out in traffic, right? You can wear protective padding.

You can follow the, the instructions, right? Stay away from dangerous areas. Fucking avoid snake pits. If you get a skinned elbow, well, at least end up with a good story. But if you got as best as poisoning on a rainy day inside, not so much. And that's it for this edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed this story, check out the rest of the Bad Magic Productions catalog. Be for your episodes of Time Suck, Monday's noon Pacific time, new episodes of scared to death, the paranormal podcast, Tuesdays and midnight, and two episodes of nightmare fuel, fictional horror thrown into the mix every month. Thank you to Sophie Evans for the initial research, man, she killed it.

I thought this was a really fun one. Nice escapism. And thanks to Logan Keith polishing up the sound of today's episode. Please go to bad magic productions.com for all your bad magic needs and have yourself a great weekend.