Old timers - need help finding a toy

Amy's was better at grammar.

 

I called my brother who is much older than me and asked him whether he remembered any toy that crawled on walls.

With no further prompting from me he said "oh yeah, it had a wheel with four suction cups; you pulled a string that wound up a spring that made the wheel go around so it could walk on walls." He can remember the technical details of how it worked, but not what it was called or even what it looked like. Happy to have a challenge, though, he's busy googling for a picture.

 

I give you.... the Mr. Joggi! TA DA!

 

I opened this thread because I wondered what toy was being referenced.

I wondered if it might've been a Rubik's cube, which I saw in the store recently and bought, just because I was so excited, and nostalgic, when I saw it. Has there ever been a toy that took the country so by storm when it was popular?

So now I've got this Rubik's cube, just sitting in a drawer at home, still unused...because I'm afraid I won't be able to solve it and get it back to the way it's supposed to be!

Just curious, are there any Rubik's experts/whiz-kid solvers here?

I don't mean to threadjack, but I'm thinking SpeedTchr has found what Rhody31 was looking for, anyway, and, well, at least it's another toy.

 

There have been other toys that took the country by storm, but I'm a little nostalgic about the Rubik's Cube because of the timing of it. I was 10 when it came out.
Of course, I was never really into the Rubik's Cube. I don't even think I owned one, but I certainly remember how ubiquitous the thing was during my childhood.

 

WriteThinking, YouTube will show you how to solve Rubik's cube.

 

Whe I was a kid, we didn't have YouTube. We just kept trying and trying until a smarter kid showed us the trick.

 

My 14 year old son averages something like 13 seconds to solve a cube. He's nationally ranked in a few of the different cube variations. He's just outside the top 100 in the standard 3X3 Rubik's Cube, but he's a lot faster now than he was when he set the time for the ranking.

He's pissed because the National Championships are this weekend in Vegas, but he starts high school on Friday.

And WateryTart is right - he actually learned to do it on YouTube.

 

Assuming I'll be broke by then, I just figured out what I'm going to do with my 9 hour wait on Saturday between the end of my conference and my flight.

 

That is amazing, PCLL!

I must say, though, that doing it that quickly would seem to take all the fun out of it -- although once you get that good at it, I guess the fun, the challenge, and the measure of how good you are is in the speed.

And, I know I can probably find out/look up how to solve the cube, but I don't want to cheat. Call me old-fashioned, but this is one problem I'd like to see if I can ever solve on my own, and then just get better and faster at it.

A harmless but engaging challenge, and all that, you know? So, I just laugh at myself, and my cube laughs at me, too, every time I see it, just sitting there, waiting to be broken in...

 

It's at the Riviera, IJAG. Have fun. When you see the crowd of teenage dorks and Cal Tech weenies, you're there.