Friday

On the Bubble

I was walking down the toy aisle the other day looking for an inflatable beach ball for my son, and I saw something else I knew he would certainly enjoy: bubbles.  Bubbles are endless fun and they’re super easy to make.  As long as you have an arm, a hand, and at lease one opposable digit to grab the bubble stick and wave it in the air, you can make bubbles!  I picked one up and suggested it for the kids.  I was rejected immediately being told the only thing bubbles are good for is spilling.  Come to think of it, I don’t know that I’ve ever made it to the bottom of one of those bottles.

Want to ruin a bubble party quickly?  Kick over the bottle of bubbles.  It begs the question.  Why aren’t they spill-proof?  Well some of them are, but they are hardly as hap-happy to use.  Part of the beauty of blowing bubbles is their simple nature.  Dunk, wave.  Dunk, blow.  Dunk, anything.  Basically, dip the ringed stick in the soapy water and somehow get air to pass through the hole.  The spill-proof containers get in the way of this uncomplicated process and consumers buy the good old “even-though-it’s-going-to-spill-it’s-easier” bottle anyway.

Another solution to the bubble bottle toppling travesty is bubble-making toys.  It seems like a great idea because you can pour the liquid into a toy and screw on the top and the toys do all the work.  No spilling!  The novelty of bubble-blowing is lost, though.  When you reminisce someday about your youthful pastimes, you probably won’t think about how fun it was to shoot bubbles out of an AK-47-looking bubble gun or how you used your air-powered 10,000 bubbles-per-minute mega blower!  No, you remember the good, old-fashioned using-your-lungs and stick that always seemed to fall into the bottle.

(It’s kind of funny how the stick has a ring on both ends so that you can fish it out of the bottle when you drop it in.  The people who made these had to have realized this because they put the ring on both ends.  Why didn’t they just make the stick longer and strap it to the side of the bottle or something instead of putting it inside from the start?).

(And are they ever going to change the colors of the bottles?  I wasn’t alive, but I think they’ve been the same since the seventies!)

Good thing regular bubbles are cheap, because until they make a spill-proof (but not fun-intrusive), longer-sticked (but not lose-able), memory-friendly version, we’re stuck with the ever accident-prone bubble bottles of old. 

By: S. Cole Garrett

3/18/10