Hula Hoop

Give it a spin and keep those hips moving! The Hula Hoop turned a plastic hoop into one of the biggest toy crazes of the 1950s.

Simple and fun for all! Put the hoop around your waist, give it a good spin and start moving your hips. If you get the rhythm right, it keeps going around and around. If you don't, it drops to the ground about two seconds later.

Kids had been playing with hoops in one form or another for centuries, so Wham-O certainly didn't invent the concept. But in the late 1950s the company came up with the plastic Hula Hoop and suddenly just about everybody wanted to see how long they could keep one spinning.

The craze was enormous. Wham-O sold about 25 million Hula Hoops in a matter of months. Kids spun them around their waists, arms and legs, and people started figuring out how to do tricks and performances using more than one hoop at a time.

There’s not much to blame if you're not very good at it - the Hula Hoop itself is just a big plastic hoop. No batteries to run down. No computer to glitch. No complicated instructions. Just you and a big plastic hoop that keeps falling around your ankles.

Hula Hoops are still around, apparently some people can keep five or ten of them going at once. I think if you can keep one going, you're doing better than most of us.