WTF is up with Lite Brite these days? My girls got one for Hanukkah and we were really excited about it. I last played with Lite Brite when I was a kid in the 1980s. I haven’t seen one since. Needless to say there have been some changes. It’s kind of like the old Lite Brite was a tube tv (which we still happen to have at our house because we are THAT cool). It had some depth with actual visible light bulbs behind a black plastic perforated panel. It stood up in a triangle and you had to plug it in to get it to work.
The new Lite Brite has basically been updated from a tube tv to an iPad. It’s compact and flat with an LED light inside it. It’s battery operated so you don’t have to plug it in. It even has a little tray attached for the bulbs, which I’m pretty sure my previous Lite Brite didn’t have. All of that is fine and dandy. I would love the new Lite Brite except for one thing: It takes an Olympic Champion Weight Lifter to take the damn light bulbs out of the screen after you make a picture.
Do you see how some of the bulbs are missing? Those are the only ones we could get out this time. Must conserve finger muscle energy to try again.
When I was a kid, the little light bulbs fell out easily. Sometimes if you breathed wrong a light bulb would shoot out of it. I guess that was annoying, but at least you could remove them. Now my kids come whining to me after every creation asking me to help them take the bulbs out. I pull and pull until my thumbs ache. The stupid bulbs are almost impossible to remove. When they finally pop out, they often fly across the room and land in the baby’s mouth. If they don’t land in the baby’s mouth, they either poke an eye out or land somewhere where you can’t find them until the baby crawls up and puts them in her mouth.
I mean, I know it’s a choking hazard, but STILL. It’s impossible to regulate the bulbs to the no-baby areas when I have to remove the bulbs myself every 5 seconds. For an hour. Because it’s SO HARD to remove those bulbs that it takes FOREVER.
What on earth made Lite Brite decide to make the bulbs fit so tightly? While it’s true the bulbs could have fit in better when I was a kid, this is absolute overkill. Children are supposed to be able to work the Lite Brite by themselves, but both my husband and I struggle to remove the bulbs. We’re gym-going adults! There’s no reason for these things to be bolted to the Lite Brite. I just don’t get it. WTF, Lite Brite? WTF?
