How About That Thing?

This is a Magna Doodle. It isn’t MY Magna Doodle, which either got thrown out when I as in fifth grade, or got lost in the move from rural Kansas to Kansas City, but all the same, it is a Magna Doodle. Perhaps you’ve heard of this, perhaps not.

In the days before tablets, before paint programs were as advanced as they are now… Hell, back when Paintbrush for Windows3.1 was the standard, there were these unique little things I personally referred to as “doodle toys.” Largely because the first one I ever owned was a Magna Doodle, and all toys you drew on hence forth were doodle toys. The power of name brand recognition, folks.

My Magna Doodle was one of my favorite toys. It went just about everywhere I did. I took it to my grandparents’ houses, I took it to friends’ houses, I took it on long roadtrips… Hell, my mom even managed to sneak it into church several times, and I drew on it while the reverend blabbed on and on about how we’re all going to hell unless we gave him money. I learned how to draw primarily through fucking around on it. I wrote silly messages that were poorly spelled on it. I even used refrigerator magnets on it, just to see if it’d work, and to my surprise, it did! It was with me through good times, and it was with me during bad times.

How does it work? Well, you had a magnetic pen, and a couple of little magnet pieces you could use to make pictures on the white part. There was some sort of magnetic substance inside the toy, and using the pen and the magnets drew it to the surface in order to make pictures. When you were done with the picture, you showed it to friends and family, and then you erased it via the eraser slide on the top. That’s it. No save function, no way to post it on-line… Hell, the internet barely existed when I was doodling. In a way, it’s kind of like zen gardening, except not nearly as lame.

I had my Magna Doodle for years and years. At the end of the run, I lost both magnets, and the white part got cracked somewhere around the top left part. The latter meant that I wasn’t able to draw anything near the top left corner. However, because we weren’t exactly the wealthiest family in Kansas, and because I spent all my money on game rentals, and eventually, Spiderman comics, I never bothered replacing it. I just made it a point to make sure none of my doodles ever went to the top left.

It was such a simple toy, and it had such a simple premise. And I got more mileage out of it than I did out of any action figures, any RC vehicles, any board games… Hell, if it weren’t for my Sega Genesis, or my big-honkin’ bucket of Legos, Magna Doodle would’ve probably been my favorite toy ever!

Noticing my love for doodle toys, my parents tried getting me other toys with similar gimmicks.

For one Christmas, I ended up getting the legendary two-sided Magna Doodle. It worked just like a regular Magna Doodle, but there was a second pad on the back that acted as the negative version of what you drew. So if you drew a black outline of a cat on the white side, and flipped it over, you could see the same outline on the black side in white. It was pretty cool… For about five minutes.

Sad to say, the novelty wore off pretty quick. Especially if you decided to be an asshole, and tried drawing on the black side while someone was already drawing on the white side. Suffice to say, getting your work erased before you were even done with it was kind of a deal-breaker.

And when it wasn’t some exciting new variant on the devil I knew, they got me toys from the devil I didn’t know. Such as…

This is a Lumasketch. It was one of two glow-in-the-dark doodle toys Ohio Arts was peddling one year. The other one, Sparklelight… Actually, I have no idea how that one worked. But Lumasketch, I can tell you all about.

Inside the little compartment on the bottom were four markers designed specifically to work on the Lumasketch’s screen. There was pink, orange, purple, and… I think it was teal? Either way, you drew on the screen, and then you turned on the back light in order to make your drawing glow. Then, you wiped the screen off with a rag, and you started all over again.

I do remember a friend of mine in third grade and I getting some mileage out of this toy. We’d sit in my bedroom closet, make doodles, and marvel at how cool they looked all lit up. Usually, we drew monsters. Either ones we came up with on our own, or monsters from our favorite TV shows. I distinctly remember drawing Crang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one time, and something vaguely resembling The Terror Toad from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers another.

Unfortunately, Lumasketch just didn’t compare. It had a neat gimmick, and I ended up getting more mileage out of it than I thought, but in the end, Magna Doodle still came out on top.

Also, I think the back light in the screen stopped working. Or maybe the batteries ran out? By the time it stopped working properly, I had kind of stopped caring.

It wasn’t the only time my parents tried to dethrone the glorious Magna Doodle, though.

This is the Super Color Writer by Nickelodeon. Yeah, let’s just set aside all the baggage about Nickelodeon being a soulless husk of its former self run by pedos and doing everything it can to milk the Spongebob cow dry. That’s not what this article is about.

I remember getting one of these for christmas back in the fifth grade. As memory serves, I’d lost my Magna Doodle in the move to Kansas City, and my parents guessed this would be an adequate substitute. While I give them an A for effort, I also give them an F for “no fucking way does this even compare.”

Color Writer was in interesting doodle toy. For all of five or six minutes. You drew with a battery-powered pen that heated up in the back, and got super cold on the tip. You ran the cold part across the pad, and a multicolored line would appear. If you ran the hot part of the pen on the multicolored line, it erased.

FUN FACT: if you left the toy in the back seat of your dad’s car during winter, the entire pad would instantly turn into a rainbow-colored mess, and the only way to get it back to normal was to put it into the heat for quite a while.

Where as Lumasketch had some legs to stand on, Color Writer didn’t even last a week. And unfortunately, about two or three months after I got my Color Writer, I got the infamous eye infection that left me with one functioning eye. As much as I loved drawing, I ended up giving up on it around the time I was adjusting to the cyclops life.

So in the end, Magna Doodle still ended up being my favorite of the doodle toys. There were plenty of others out there, but these are the ones I owned.

It has come to my attention in more recent years that Magna Doodle not only still exists, but there are actually several knockoffs made by other companies. I don’t remember the names of any of the knockoffs off hand, but the premise is basically the same. I was especially surprised to hear all this, because the thought had occurred to me: do kids even still have doodle toys now?

There are a lot of toys that the tablet has rendered obsolete, or at least old school. Knowing how many paint programs are on Google Play alone, I figured some random doodle app would ultimately take the place of Magna Doodle, and the various copy cats and contenders. Hell, they probably even developed an app designed to simulate a Magna Doodle, for all I know.

This current generation may not mess with it, but when it comes to the doodle toys, I was definitely into them. and out of all of the doodle toys I knew of and owned myself, the Magna Doodle reigned as king.