Fisher-Price Corn Popper

Push it along and watch those colorful balls pop! A simple Fisher-Price classic that's been entertaining little kids for generations.

Simple, colorful, and noisy. Push the Fisher-Price Corn Popper across the floor and the little colored balls under the clear plastic dome start bouncing around. Push it faster and they pop even more.

Introduced in 1957 for young children learning to walk, the idea is about as simple as a toy can get. The wheels turn as you push it, the mechanism makes the balls jump around inside the dome, and that's pretty much it. No batteries. No buttons. Just pop, pop, pop all the way across the room.

As a little kid, that was all I needed. I couldn’t get enough of pushing it around the house, making all those colored balls jump, and that wonderful noise (wonderful as a kid, not as wonderful as an adult when my own kids had one). There’s no sneaking up on anyone with a Corn Popper - everyone in the house knows when it's coming.

More than 65 years later, the basic Corn Popper is still around and still looks very familiar (though not identical to the one I recall from years ago): long handle, two wheels, clear dome, and bouncing colored balls. Unlike a lot of toys over the years that branched out into entire franchises of variations and movie tie-ins, the original Fisher-Price Corn Popper is still pretty much the same. And that's a good thing.