What was this educational toy from the 1970s?

April 21, 2021 12:16 PM

4-year-old me played with this peculiar toy for hours, and I'd love to track it down. It was a red letter-sized (?) tray with two wires attached and a deck of cards, each with rows of images. Each image included a circular contact foil. If you touched the wires to the right pairs of images, a light at the top of the tray would light up. It might have been an elephant that was lighting up. Did I imagine this? Anyone?
posted by thisclickableme to Grab Bag (3 answers total)

It may have been "Memory: the card matching game". If you Google the game name along with "vintage" or "1970s" it sounds awfully close. Although I don't remember the contact foil.... I remember Memory and also Operation (which did have the lights and the contacts).
posted by sonofsnark at 12:32 PM on April 21, 2021

Best answer: Further back, first half of the 1960's, Netherlands, I had that toy: Electro. It was made by Jumbo games, so there's your elephant all right. The (roughly A4 sized) sheets had holes, and the bottom of the box had contact pads where the holes were. On one of the short sides of the box was a compartment with a red plastic insert holding a (2R10, "Duplex") battery and a lamp, with the two wires coming out. Due to the construction the matching image pairs had the same location across all the sheets, and it wasn't hard to memorise _that_.

Jumbo still sells an Electro toy, or rather a couple of themed variants, but it's quite different from the vintage one. This is listed on our local online marketplace as the original. I can't remember the print on the box (ISTR it was mainly red, not black), but the inside is as I know it.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:24 PM on April 21, 2021 [10 favorites]

Response by poster: Oh my god, Stoneshop, that's it! You're wonderful! Thank you!
posted by thisclickableme at 2:56 PM on April 21, 2021