Remco Earthquake Tower

My parents sent me some old pictures.  I forgot about the Remco Earthquake Tower Andrew and I used to play with.  It had these knobs you could turn at each of the white levels to make the sections shake and turn so the poor folks would fall off the tower to their deaths.  And they complain about video games.  Probably not so PC anymore post 9/11.  It made the Cracked.com list of 10 old toys that made sense in their era and nowhere else: "it's important to remind children that you can't save everyone, and people die all the time, because life is arbitrary and ultimately meaningless."

And there was a record that came with it so you could pretend in style (that's a link to a YouTube recording of the noise! Imagine being the lucky parent who gets to listen to that over and over).  These things are upwards of $150-$200 now and very hard to find (surprise, cardboard deteriorates - you'd be better off finding the plastic and reprinting your own).  But below you'll see what they used to cost, courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal in 1976, which is probably about when we got ours.

I loved the earthquake tower.  Basically a five foot tall dollhouse for boys where I could pretend to either help or hinder Ernest Borgnine.



Milwaukee Journal, advertising it for all of $12.97.