Just add water
June 30, 2019 4:42 PM   Subscribe

"Just then, our secretary came into the office and said an inventor was here to see us. Normally, Myung was the one who worked with inventors. I handled sales. But Myung wasn’t there. My secretary said, 'Well, the guy’s here. Why don’t you meet him?' I turned around, and in the doorway was a small, thin, spectacle-wearing black man who looked like he was the saddest guy in the world." An oral history of the Super Soaker.

Lonnie Johnson, the inventor of the Super Soaker, previously on Mefi.
posted by How the runs scored (30 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
There's an episode of Endless Thread about this, too, it's also good: "The Greatest Squirt Gun Ever Built"
posted by Going To Maine at 4:53 PM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


I asked him if I could see his invention. He didn’t have it with him, but I gave him a legal pad and said, “Draw it.” He’s not an artist, but he drew this big gun with a big bottle on top. It was very intriguing. It didn’t look like a real gun, which I liked.

What was he thinking? The working prototype is so much more compelling than a drawing and verbal description. He got so lucky that he got a callback out of this botched demo.
posted by thelonius at 5:13 PM on June 30, 2019 [1 favorite]


Super Soaker 100 was the shit! Lots of fond memories.
posted by Fizz at 5:31 PM on June 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


I had to look up the Oozinator to make sure that part wasn't a joke. Someone actually did make a super soaker that looked like a penis designed by H.R. Giger, that one pumped vigorously to fire, and that shot white slime.
posted by ckridge at 5:37 PM on June 30, 2019 [14 favorites]


They were consolidating — I get it, that’s the nature of the business. I did have some reservations in that I felt Hasbro never totally understood what they had with Super Soaker.

I have seen this happen several times. There's a lot of embodied knowledge in an organization, especially one which has only one job. You might think that consolidation saves redundancy since, well, why should people have just one job? But then you lose a lot of knowledge particular to, say, marketing or selling something in its particular market.

Still, folding the Super Soaker in with the Nerf brands wasn't crazy. It makes a lot more sense than most consolidations.
posted by sjswitzer at 6:10 PM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


Timely - looks like the last of the Super Soaker original patents expired today
posted by scruss at 6:13 PM on June 30, 2019 [8 favorites]


I had a Super Soaker 100. One day I replaced the smaller spherical pressure tank with my friend's Super Soaker 50 tank in the belief that it would make it more powerful. It did not. What it did do was, after vigorous pumping, rupture the SS50 tank lengthwise with a BOOM. There's no end to this story, just learn from my mistakes and don't do that.
posted by wordless reply at 6:22 PM on June 30, 2019 [21 favorites]


I had to look up the Oozinator

Holy shit that video is insane.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:27 PM on June 30, 2019 [3 favorites]


Near the end of the article there's a link to a Fortnite-branded "Super Soaker".

"Easy to fill, easy to fire: immerse the front of the blaster in water and pull the handle back to fill the tank, then push in the handle to unleash a huge stream of water at your targets."

Which is to say, it's a giant syringe. You suck water in and then push it back out with a plunger. I can't imagine this having *anywhere* near the power of a well-pressurized Super Soaker.

The article doesn't go into much detail about what happened after Hasbro bought Larami and the company's original management left. Just a few hints, like the bit about how "2008 marked the first year that the Super Soaker line had no new products that made use of the pressurized air technology that made them so successful in the first place." Now it's just one of like a dozen sub-brands of Nerf. And nothing on the first page of the line works in the traditional manner; there's a lot of blasters that are "pump-to-fire" where there's a pump instead of a trigger, and I can't imagine that doing any favors to anyone's aim!

(Cynically I wonder if Nerf, ah, nerfed the Super Soakers because they don't have the recurring revenue stream of "aww man, I lost all my darts, gotta buy more".)
posted by egypturnash at 6:31 PM on June 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


Timely - looks like the last of the Super Soaker original patents expired today

I can't decide whether to drive my Chevy to the levee or not
posted by oulipian at 6:50 PM on June 30, 2019 [12 favorites]


Weird article. Lots of information and fun stories, but would Lonnie Johnson not talk to them? Did they not contact him? I saw him speak at a robotics competition a few years ago, and he's just as proud of his work inventing the Super Soaker as he is of his engineering work for NASA. He's a really inspiring person. Seems like a very incomplete oral history without his contribution.
posted by rikschell at 6:54 PM on June 30, 2019 [17 favorites]


I had to look up the Oozinator

Wow. To finally see the source of like a jillion YTMND gifs came from an actual real thing that existed. Weekend = complete.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 7:34 PM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


Surprising that nobody from one of the soaker forums has kickstarted a beefed-up CPS 2000 or 100 yet in preparation for the patents expiring.
posted by a halcyon day at 7:34 PM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


The Super Soaker was preceded by Entertech, which were waaaay better and more fun toys and which would never in a million-bazillion years get manufactured today because. In comparison, Super Soakers seemed silly and Nerf-y.
posted by cribcage at 7:39 PM on June 30, 2019 [4 favorites]


The decline of Super Soakers makes me a little sad. As a kid in the late 90s/early 00s I had a group of friends who organized Very Serious water fights, and there was nothing like those CPS series soakers. Our bread and butter was the CPS 1000/1200 - the more famous CPS 2000 was a little unwieldy and took some effort to pump, for a kid. I was the first one I knew to get the backpack-fed CPS 3000 - which was even more of a white elephant but certainly impressed everyone in concept, including the dads.

I never quite figured out why the Super Soaker line fell of so hard, while expensive Nerf machine guns were still going strong. Maybe if the patents are expiring somebody will bring some of these designs back?
posted by atoxyl at 7:44 PM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


Weird article. Lots of information and fun stories, but would Lonnie Johnson not talk to them? Did they not contact him? I saw him speak at a robotics competition a few years ago, and he's just as proud of his work inventing the Super Soaker as he is of his engineering work for NASA. He's a really inspiring person. Seems like a very incomplete oral history without his contribution.

He showed up in this reddit post about the Super Soaker last year. He seems to have a great sense of humour. One user says to him "You have single handedly filled many summer days with hours of entertainment" and he responds: "I had to use both hands."
posted by obscure simpsons reference at 7:56 PM on June 30, 2019 [31 favorites]


I agree, great 90s childhood fun. I suppose Nerf Guns are more drought friendly though. Maybe super soakers declined because we didn't want to get our fancy flip phones wet?
posted by mundo at 8:30 PM on June 30, 2019 [2 favorites]


My mom bought a Super Soaker 50. Not for me mind you, for herself. She used it to shoot down squirrels when they were messing with her bird feeders.

She would have been happier with a pellet gun I think, but you’re not allowed to fire those in the city.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 9:40 PM on June 30, 2019 [8 favorites]




I was obsessed with squirt guns for a couple of years (when I was 8-9(?)), but these were way after my time,

Lately I've been thinking about a sneaky way to make water cannon much more effective using less water and less fuel, but that doesn't exactly seem like a socially responsible thing to do in these times.
posted by jamjam at 12:17 AM on July 1, 2019


That brings back memories of water fights in my neighborhood growing up, and an epic running water battle at a sleep-away camp when I was about 11. I think there were a couple of the really monstrously huge Super Soakers in the collective arsenal for that one.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 5:16 AM on July 1, 2019 [1 favorite]


It didn’t look like a real gun, which I liked.

There were endless early 90s toys I wanted that I wasn't allowed to have, often on the grounds that they were violent, the definition of which was amorphous and ever shifting.* But a small Super Soaker was possibly the only popular toy I was allowed to have, so small child me is quite grateful it didn't look like a real gun.

*I have a suspicion my mom started with a philosophical opposition to violent toys that then morphed into a convenient reason we weren't allowed things, because we were definitely allowed all kinds of violent historical play.
posted by hoyland at 5:47 AM on July 1, 2019 [2 favorites]


Oh man, Super Soakers changed the face of summertime water fights. If you didn't have one, you had to opt for the concussive blast of water balloons, because a traditional peashooter squirt gun wasn't going to cut it.

*I have a suspicion my mom started with a philosophical opposition to violent toys that then morphed into a convenient reason we weren't allowed things, because we were definitely allowed all kinds of violent historical play.

My wife uses a similar "Mom Logic". I noticed one evening my son was playing with his wooden two-headed battle axe we got him at the ren faire. At one point he turned it around and was pretending it was a rifle. My wife scolded him, "that is NOT a gun!" I guess the two bladed weapon of head lopping was ok? *shrug*
posted by Fleebnork at 6:58 AM on July 1, 2019 [2 favorites]


I'm that Mom who didn't let her son have any guns* except non-real-looking squirt guns. Super-soakers are so much fun.

*If he made a gun from Lego or used a stick, I ignored it. My mother-in-law described it as abusive that I did not allow violent toys. Good times.
posted by theora55 at 7:29 AM on July 1, 2019 [4 favorites]


This reminds me; I used to have a super-soaker to help rinse my bathtub after cleaning it. May go get one again for that purpose.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:02 AM on July 1, 2019 [1 favorite]


(Cynically I wonder if Nerf, ah, nerfed the Super Soakers because they don't have the recurring revenue stream of "aww man, I lost all my darts, gotta buy more".)

My experience with the original was that the epoxy at the pressure tank attachment would fail after a summer or less. You'd hear the pressure leaking out through one or more pinholes, making the toy much more frustrating to use. You couldn't pump up and then sneak up on an unsuspecting victim, because by the time you got there you wouldn't have any pressure left in the tank. I think the third one I bought may have been the last, but they were definitely a recurring revenue stream for a while.
posted by fedward at 9:12 AM on July 1, 2019


I gave away my OG Super Soaker 100 about 20 years ago, figuring I was never going to get a chance to use it again. Now I have two nephews who use my sister's old Super Soaker. So, I looked up how much an original Super Soaker 100 would cost on eBay.

I am a stupid, stupid man.
posted by dirigibleman at 12:20 PM on July 1, 2019 [3 favorites]


I just saw a two pack of the current iteration of SuperSoaker at Walmart for less than $20 when I popped in to pick up a tarp and some cheap life jackets (don’t ask) yesterday. Had I read this article beforehand I would not have resisted the urge.
posted by padraigin at 5:06 PM on July 1, 2019


There was an episode of Without Fail with the executive at Hasbro that revived the fortunes of Nerf and SuperSoaker, with sales surpassing their previous level. Episode is here.
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 4:22 AM on July 3, 2019


Meant to add: it focuses mostly on her other ventures. The bit about SuperSoaker is towards the beginning.
posted by matildatakesovertheworld at 4:23 AM on July 3, 2019


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