Mr. Bucket: Buckets of Fun
Mr. Bucket: Buckets of Fun
Picture, if you will, a sizable suburban house, complete with peeling, decrepit white-picket fence and plastic play sets dotting the patchy green grass. The year is 1998. A charming but tacking flag hangs outside of the house, declaring, “Happy Birthday!” in shades of Dixie cup purple and teal. You enter the house, and who do you see seated atop a pink plastic Fisher-Price bench than teeny-tiny Kris, surrounded by her birthday boon. Among the pile of presents is a set of Rugrats plush toys whose hands velcro together in a chain, a travel-sized play-pretend hair salon, a Little Mermaid beach towel, and the dreaded clothes. Little Kris Lexia was normally happy just to rip off the shiny paper and hold her new treasures close, but this birthday she felt a distinct disappointment. You see, there was one toy she wanted more than than anything a little girl could fathom that she had not received: Mr. Bucket.
Mr. Bucket was the ultimate in childhood pleasure. Released by Milton-Bradley in 1992, Mr. Bucket was pretty much what you would assume: a bucket. But Mr. Bucket was not just any bucket,as the instruction manual warns. He was a well-oiled machine on wheels who could literally run circles around you while flailing his red-and-white-striped arms in the air. The players’ goal was simple: be the first to get all three of your colored balls inside of Mr. Bucket at the same time, using a matching colored shovel. Sounds easy enough, and also a little raunchy, right? It gets better, friends. Roughly every five seconds, the bucket makes a mechanical ding and he unceremoniously spits out your balls. The 90s were a simpler time. There was no crime in teaching children how to properly handle balls.
Now let’s go back to that fateful day in 1998. You can see why the lack of Mr. Bucket was a devastating blow to a discerning 90s kid. But Kris held out hope that she would one day receive that coveted plastic bucket. The years passed, and she had to make do with other, less exciting buckets. She even started her own landscaping business to finance her dreams. Unfortunately, this was not to be.
But this story has a happy ending. After twenty-two years of a Mr. Bucket-less existence, Kris Lexia received a momentous birthday present. At long, long last, she was united with the yellow pail companion of her childhood fantasies. And let me tell you, he lived up to all of her expectations.
Seventeen years came and went, and Kris had all but forgotten about the coveted toy. She had moved on to bigger and better things, like collecting stuffed alpacas and learning how to hula hoop. But in the back of her mind, the blue-eyed bucket still remained, bubbling to the surface now and then to disrupt her happiness. Fortunately for our heroine, she was kid sister and best friend to one of the finest retro pop culture archivists of our time: Syd Lexia. He plotted and planned each birthday to surprise her with a “new” classic toy she had pined after. Despite the tradition, she never saw it coming when she tore open the dusty cardboard box that she would finally, finally have a Mr. Bucket of her own. Let me tell you, folks, the laughter that came pouring out of her was like a thousand bells ringing in the summer breeze. She rushed to put oversized batteries into the bottom of the bucket and set to finally experiencing the long-awaited joy. He was everything she had ever imagined: if you put balls in his top, as sure as God made little green apples, he would spit them out. He entertained her for a whole ten minutes before she got sick of him, a record-breaker for a toy marketed to toddlers. Then he was returned to his cardboard box where he remains to this day. He awaits the day that she once again has a mighty need to place balls inside of buckets.
Posted by: Kris Lexia
07/29/15
