Creepy Crawlers

I'm going to echo what others have said about the old Easy Bake Ovens: they were sexist. Against boys! (I know right? But hear me out.) Sure, nothing beats a light bulb when it comes to baking the best brownies, but did those ovens always have to be so rounded, soft, and pink? How come only girls get to do the cooking?? I know many of us would've loved those things (in public no less!) if we didn't feel like we were breaking the law even  just for enjoying their edibles. Make a BOY version of that shit, I thought! ...Which, I can only imagine would've been decked out in sharks, wheels, a revving engine, frosting gun attachments, fart noises from the buttons, blasts of heavy metal to let you know the cookies were done, and it would run on an NES controller. Radical! Ex-cel-lent! Allllll-righty then!

But alas... no such thing existed.

So we got what we got when it came to diahrrea-inducing kids baking equipment, and we still played with it. In fact, many young men are coming forth, like myself, and declaring proudly that, yes, because of the actual Easy Bake machine, baking is cool, even in pink! And it's not that I had anything against the color pink. Heck, in the 90s, pink was unavoidable. It was one of the primary colors of the decade. And I may be an uber dork, but I am also still a dude. I didn't fear pink, it's just I feared the "implication." And the possible allergic reaction. And something about the word "Easy" just wasn't right... perhaps "XTREME!" would've been more tolerable.

But all hope was not lost! The marketers weren't really ignoring those of us with a Y chromosome completely, for another 60's toy was making a comeback in the 90s. And this one they chose to cast in that other hallowed primary color of the 90s: lime green, making it automatically a "boy toy" (the marketing gods have decided!). Easily the boy equivalent to the Easy Bake, it was known as the Creepy Crawler "bug maker (and don't dare call it an oven!)." This thing was one of the coolest gadgets ever because it appealed to two of the things boys love: bugs and goop. You'd pour your goop into the molds, slide them into the "bug maker", wait a while and slide them out, extract them one by one and have yourself... inedible rubber bugs... spiders and centipedes...etc., which you could then stick places to allegedly gross out the girls and annoy stuffy, prim and proper elderly people, which would cause them to get angry for some reason. False advertising! They never looked real enough to actually creep anyone out, and yet the girls still kicked our butts for dropping them in their hair. I'm calling the Better Business Bureau.
 

That prank only worked until even they got into it, because really, who says only boys can be into grody, slimy bugs anyways? And what do boys do whenever girls start invading our turf just like that and start making their own bugs? We say "awesome!" because her spider was huge AND had eight GNARLY legs AND a hundred eyes AND big sharp fangs! You go girl! By then I was already stealing and scarfing down their bulb-leavened cupcakes anyways while they sat waiting to cool, so things evened out in the culinary arena I guess. And I know I can't be the only one to put a few of these in my mouth. Even though they were inedible and they were bugs, they still at least looked like the most delectably chewy candy ever. Of course, whatever was in that "Plasti-Goop" probably couldn't have been healthy, but whatever. It wasn't the worst goop I've tried.

In any case, all it goes to show is that boys like to cook too, and for that there were slimy bugs, but we also like to eat what we cook, and for that, there were pink ovens. In the end, few were grossed out enough to go hungry... until after the cupcakes set in our systems for 30 minutes. THAT was what was scary.