Bumble Ball
A hard plastic ball covered in soft rubber knobs with a motor inside. Push the switch and it buzzed, shivered and skittered off across the kitchen floor in no direction at all, while the dog lost its mind. Ertl's Bumble Ball was the mid-90s toy that did nothing and was impossible to put down.
The Bumble Ball came from Ertl, the Dyersville, Iowa, company that had made die-cast farm toys since 1945, John Deere tractors in miniature and the like. The ball was a departure: a hard plastic core studded with softer rubber knobs, with a motor box inside whose batteries were mounted off-center. A knob on the outside was the switch, pushed in to start and pulled out to stop. With the weight deliberately unbalanced, the whole thing vibrated, bounced and wandered erratically across any flat surface, and the knobs sent it careening off in new directions every time it hit something.
That was the entire product, and it was enough. Ertl's trademark filing dates the ball's first sale to February 1993, and it was one of the popular toys of the mid-1990s, sold in a spread of bright colors and then in a see-through light-up version, a mini version and a keychain-sized Bumble Ball Jr. Ertl kept extending the idea: the Bumble Ball Buddy versions put animal heads on it, and the Bumble Ball Bolter was an insect-like creature with long legs, a head of blue synthetic hair and a Bumble Ball for a torso. Dogs loved it too, since nothing gets a dog's attention like a buzzing ball that runs away on its own.
It had its brush with fame when silver Bumble Balls appeared in Michael Jackson's 1995 "Scream" video; fans asked, but Ertl never sold the silver one. The idea later trickled down to toddlers, with Fisher-Price making pull-string versions that vibrated without a switch, and as late as 2006 a clip of a dog with a Bumble Ball in its mouth was a running gag on Animal Planet. Racing Champions bought Ertl in 1999, and the original ball became a thrift-store find.
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