Fizz-Nik Party with Colonel Caboose

The fad of Summer, 1961 was the Fizz-Nik (not to be confused with Fizzies, the soda flavored Alka-Seltzer type thingys that made your water taste and look like soda).  And coupled with my local TV hero, Colonel Caboose, from WBAY-TV, Channel 2, besides.  What could be cooler than that for this 5 year old?  Every day he'd entertain me with Popeye cartoons in the afternoon while Mom was fixing dinner.   And if the Colonel endorsed it...well, it just HAD to be good.  Right?  Plus, 7-Up promoted this thing and I liked 7-Up.  I liked ice cream, too.  And space.  Space was a big deal at the time and Fizz-Nik was a cool name.  Heck, it was probably even named after Sputnik, the satellite. 

But much like Ralphie, who, in the movie, A Christmas Story, learns firsthand the bittersweet truth between advertising and reality with his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, I had my eyes opened too.  As I learned later, the Fizz-Nik had no discernible seal between the two halves of the sphere, so naturally it had a tendency to leak at precisely this critical point.  Of course, this didn't become apparent until the initial test flight, so to speak.  Always good at following directions, I tipped it back the way the kid does on the package and voila!  A foamy eruption of soda and ice cream cascaded down my arm to the elbow.  Needless to say, that contraption was soon relegated to the kitchen junk drawer and it sat there for years, being pulled out periodically for another go-round and then, just as quickly washed and dried and put back again as soon as its failures again became apparent.  Why it was never just thrown out is beyond me.  

Coke had a similar device at the time known as the Astro-Float.  Now I never knew about that one until I chanced to peruse eBay one day many, many years later looking for a Fizz-Nik (I wanted to prove to my kids that this thing existed).   I could have had one for the Buy It Now price of $9.99...a bit steep from the 1961 price of 49 cents, but hey, price is no object for a real collectible!   I ended up not buying it, but still, it brought to mind Albert Einstein's definition of insanity which was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And who of us as kids, hadn't done some of that?