Whatever happened to the...

Pogo ball?

Somewhere in between pogo sticks and moon shoes, there was a brief period in time where pogo balls were the personal elevation-related toy of choice.

If my memory serves me correctly, the Pogo ball was a short lived fad. It had its heyday between approximately 1987 and 1989. I remember those glory days distinctly, as I was an enthusiastic participant in the Pogo ball revolution. In first grade recess, literally hundreds of kids (myself extremely included) would be bouncing on their pogo balls, doing nothing of note. There were no games that went a long with pogo balls. It wasn't like you were playing basketball while pogo balling, playing truth or dare while pogo balling or trying to navigate unruly terrain while pogo balling..

Aside from maybe completing a challenging hopscotch diagram, you just bounced for an extended period of time. And then the bell rung indicating the end of recess and you probably high fived a buddy, saying something like "sick p.g.b'ing session.. you got really high. (8 inches).. I can't wait for snack time" or "Great bouncing.. I like your style. If you continue to focus on your skills, I firmly believe you can go somewhere with it".

Only the really daring (future base jumpers, astronauts and people who substitute office chairs with fitness balls at work) tried to pogo ball stairs. This is because they would soon find out that the pogo ball platform had a greater diameter than the standard stair depth, and thusly, you would fall. Typically hard. (The girl pictured to blog bottom knows what I'm talking about).

Anyway, I write this not in hopes of bringing back the pogo ball (as we are all mightily aware that it was a dumb toy to begin with) but rather in wonderment and jealously as to how great it was to be a kid and to be able to occupy/engross yourself for hours on end with something as simple as bouncing on a Saturn-like apparatus. The possibilities were endless.

If I could do anything, I would do it all again. (Most especially the pogo ball era. Not so much the moon shoes era)