Does ANYBODY remember these?

[kjpepper]

I'm having a nostalgic collector item moment and it's making me sad.

So, we're taking a little trip back in time, say to when your heroine was in say, third grade (so this would be 1986/87) and there was a big fad for these particular kinds of pencil cases. They were hard plastic and vinyl and usually had hello kitty or cartoon characters and I remember major NY tourist traps had them too. The cool part was that they had two compartments for writing implements (one in the top one in the bottom) and the rest of the case were taken up by six neat spring loaded features which you got by pressing color coded buttons. One would pop out a small drawer for an eraser or other bitty object, the next one would pop up a pencil sharpener, one popped out either a magnifying glass panel or a mood indicator game out the back, depending on what kind you had, I forgot what the next two buttons did, and the last one popped the top pencil compartment up easel-style so that you could easily grab a pencil instead of having to pick it out of the compartment. You know, it was something ridiculously complex and neat and yet weirdly cute that really could have only come out of Japan. ;) And everyone had one in my school for the next couple of years.

What the hell though, now it's like they never existed. I've gone through ebay with a fine tooth comb and have gotten really creative with Google, but I can't find one example of these items... and I would so love to find one right now. I don't even care what it's got on it, it was just the fact that I would sit there and pop the buttons for hours... (hey, I was an easily amused kid... not that I'm not easily occupied now)...

Comments

[ggirl.livejournal.com]

I remember those. I grew up in Queens and I always used to envy the Japanese kids in my public school classes who had them. I didn't really catch onto the fad until it was almost over, and my parents always used to refuse to buy one for me because they were too expensive. But yeah..those were awesome. The looked like the coolest gadgets ever, with lots of hidden compartments and snap-shut padded covers. Yeaaah.