A child would then swing from the doll’s feet and the doll would stretch from the weight of the child.
I’m 83 now - I’m a dinosaur! A picture from Horowitz’s 1974 idea bookĪnyway, my original idea was that Tension Man was a circus trapeze artist, and that you’d attach the doll to a door jam. I can’t remember who came up with that name, as it was fortysomething years ago. When I got hired, I began coming up with ideas, and for idea number 80, from October 17, 1974, I wrote down, “Idea for stretchy doll - Tension Man.” Later on, we called him “Stretch Man,” and before it hit the market, it became “Stretch Armstrong” (I guess because Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon a few years earlier). Inventors do keep idea books, though, and I started my Kenner idea book in March of 1974. People always ask where inventors get their ideas from, but it’s an impossible question to answer because you never really know.
He hired me, an engineer who I can’t quite remember the name of and a model maker named Richard Dobek. Loomis didn’t want to lose Jeep, so he made him an offer to start a research-and-development team in New York City, which is when I came into the picture. In those days, Kenner’s headquarters were in Cincinnati, and Jeep had been there, but he went to his boss - a guy named Bernie Loomis - and said he had to move to New York so his wife could pursue acting. His name was James Kuhn, but everyone called him “Jeep.” He was a vice president at Kenner. Immediately, I said to myself, “This is the guy I want to work for.” But when I walked in, there was this tall guy with his feet up on the desk wearing a pair of boots and a long-sleeve turtleneck sweater. I had a background at General Motors, where you’d show up to work in a shirt and tie every day, so when I showed up for my interview, I wore a tie and jacket like I had at GM. I saw an ad in the New York Times for an industrial designer, and called for an interview. Horowitz, inventor of Stretch Armstrong: Back in 1974, after finishing basic training in the National Guard, I was living on Long Island with my parents. What is it about Stretch Armstrong that invites such mistreatment? I reached out to his inventor, his number one fan and a few others involved in his legacy to ponder the question of his eternal suffering. Like the sadistic, Stretch Armstrong-tearing kids of the late 1970s, Gen Z has found all new ways to torture the toy. In recent years, dozens upon dozens of videos have surfaced featuring people performing experiments on the toy, subjecting him to everything from liquid metal injections to death by meat grinder. In 2017, a Netflix cartoon of Stretch promised to end this streak of bad luck, but the show only lasted a year.īut while Hollywood failed Stretch, YouTube has come to his rescue.
#Stretch armstrong movie
A movie about Stretch was greenlit after his 1990s revival, but over the next few decades, it became doomed, with several different screenplays and actors attached to it until plans ultimately fell apart.
Joe, Stretch never found success outside of being a toy. However, unlike other popular toy lines that have transcended generations like Transformers and G.I. In fact, in 2011, Stretch Armstrong was named as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Greatest Toys of All Time, ranking at number 67, just behind the Rubik’s Cube. By the early 1980s, Stretch’s popularity had faded, but that wouldn’t be the last of him - he made a comeback in the 1990s, and then another in the 2010s. The muscular, underwear-clad gent was simply a man-shaped sack of rubber filled with gelled corn syrup, but the gimmick of stretching him to his limits was enough to catapult him to the top of every kid’s Christmas list (and to spawn numerous spin-off characters and knockoffs as well). But then they had to get another Stretch Armstrong doll to have a third go around, because they noticed that each doll has a consistent weak point that serves as an early warning that he's going to burst.Debuting in 1976 from Kenner Products, Stretch Armstrong quickly became one of the most popular toys of the era. How about if Dan held their other Stretch Armstrong doll while they repeated the experiment? That gives us a chance to gauge how large it gets before bursting. They even predicted the exact body part that would burst open!īut then they have another idea. Then they go back over the high-speed film to get the details of what happened. That only take three and a half minutes of this video. Watch this doll inflated to ridiculous proportions until it finally bursts.
#Stretch armstrong full
In their latest experiment, they decide to test exactly how stretchy a Stretch Armstrong doll really is, by pumping it full of water! This is different from seeing how far those arms and legs can stretch out, because it puts pressure from the inside on the whole body.
#Stretch armstrong free
Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy are the Slow-Mo Guys.
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