Today my son got a Slinky.

Not an app. Not a game. Not even a Nintendo accessory. Just… a Slinky. A tightly coiled, proudly analog piece of wire that’s been falling down stairs since 1945.

And of course, the second he pulled it out of the box and gave it that first wobble I immediately heard the song in my head. You know the one. You have to know the one.

“What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, and makes a slinkety sound…”

Yes. That jingle. The original Slinky song. Born in 1962, it was created in Columbia, South Carolina by Johnny McCullough and Homer Fesperman writing the music and Charles Weagly penning the lyrics. It was so popular that it remained the main commercial theme of the product until fairly recently, making it the longest running commercial jingle in history.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QUe8CS-Ov7w

It’s one of those jingles that’s more durable than the product. Because let’s be honest: the Slinky itself is pure novelty. Fun for about 7 minutes, or however long it takes to completely tangle it in some kind of unsolvable metal Möbius knot. Then it’s a sculpture. A sad one.

Well, that’s me, anyway. When I was a kid I never had much luck with it. We didn’t have a second floor on our house so there were no stairs for me to send it walking down. I think I tried to make some stacks with books and blocks, but didn’t have enough success to remain excited about the toy.

My son though? He loves it. He sends it down the stairs, he tries to juggle with it, walking it from hand to hand and quickly moving his hand to catch it, so it moves continuously, and other tricks.

Back to that jingle. As if summoned by its sonic cousin, another song burst uninvited into my head — the glorious Ren & Stimpy parody:

“It’s Log! It’s Log!
It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood!
It’s Log! It’s Log!
It’s better than bad — it’s good!”

What a time capsule.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8-9scNP5KWk

I tried to explain all this to my son. That Log was a parody of Slinky. That Slinky was a toy we all knew. That Ren & Stimpy wasn’t just chaos — it was postmodern chaos. That everything in that era was a little warped and brilliant and ran on jingle logic. He just looked at me, then went back to playing with his slinky.

That’s fair. Those strange 90s cartoons, born of MTV and trying to bottle Gen X irony and edginess, haven’t really aged well. I mean, we still love them, but they don’t much appeal to modern kids. Kids today are more innocent than we were, or at least their humor isn’t as satirical.

But I realized something: part of being a parent is this weird form of time travel. Our kids play with something for the first time, and we get thrown decades backward. Back into our own childhoods. Back into TV rooms with static-filled CRTs and commercials for things we wanted but didn’t know why.

I later learned where my son picked up some of his slinky tricks, by the way. It seems like there is a personality on Youtube who makes his living by doing “Slinky Shows”, kind of like magic performance shows, just with slinky tricks. Interesting guy.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-vbZRaSudw4

Did you ever have a slinky? What were your thoughts about it?

❦

David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon.

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Slinky and Log: Childhood by Jingle

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