A lot of people may tell you that a smell can cause them to picture something in their memory. But how about the other way around. You see a picture, and right away you can smell it.
It happened to me last night. While cruising around the internet, I came across a picture of a Thingmaker. I immediately could smell that warm plastic smell. And maybe a bit of scorched flesh at the same time. And, to be honest, root beer.
The Thingmaker was a toy brought out by Mattel in 1964. After a few years they did change the name to Creepy Crawlers, but it was a little hot plate with metal molds. You filled the metal molds with the Plasti-Goop, cooked it until it was done, and you had your own toy you had just made.
You could get different molds separately, and also different colours of Plasti-Goop. They even had a couple edible types of Plasti-Goop, which is why the smell of root beer popped into my head. I had a couple different flavours, but root beer was my favourite. Nothing like getting home from school and frying up a couple of root beer worms for a snack. Or maybe a spider.
They toy was discontinued in 1978. Surprisingly, Someone seemed to think the idea of giving children an open face hot plate that heated to nearly four hundred degrees and little metal plates to put on it could be hazardous. Although I like to think of it more as a teaching tool. You really only had to touch it once to figure out not to do it again.
It did make a comeback in 1992. A different company bought the rights and came up with a new unit that was more like a Easy Bake Oven, to keep children and hot parts from coming in contact. But it’s the original I remember.
That smell of the cooking plastic. Especially the root beer flavour, which was only sort of like root beer. It was close, but just something different about it.
As soon as I saw the picture I wanted to eat a root beer worm.