Free advertising is just about the only advertising the Etch A Sketch gets these days, and the Ohio Art Company, which introduced the toy in 1960, couldn’t have paid for a better publicist than Eric Fehrnstrom. Even if it Rick Santorum hadn’t started waving an Etch A Sketch at campaign rallies, and even if Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and the Democratic National Committee hadn’t all cut ads featuring it, the toy might well have been swept up sooner or later in a wave of retro chic.
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Comments
Clearly the author of this column has very little imagination. When I was a kid I loved my Etch-A-Sketch. The challenge created by it's limitations are actually part of it's appeal. For a kid taking something like an Etch-A-Sketch and learning how to make it do more than is immediately apparent is both fun and a great learning experience. Perhaps the author could only make horizontal and vertical lines, but a lot of us Etch-A-Sketch fans learned to do a lot more than that.
I have very happy memories of my Etch-a-Sketch too.