The Twelve Best Uses for Silly Putty
As a responsible and highly respected toy blogger (please let me humor myself) I can’t just write about how the newest G.I. Joe is giving me cold sweats. Older toys need some loving too, so I decided to go back to the classic toy Silly Putty.
Silly Putty was in fact one of my favorite toys as a kid. I can’t remember how many of those wonderful plastic eggs I’ve cracked open over the years. In order to better serve the world, I’d like to share my top 12 uses for the wondrous invention known as Silly Putty in order to encourage others to go out and buy some right away. (Yes, I am in the pocket of Big Silly Putty)
1. Germ spreader: If you have a cold do yourself and others a favor and play with Silly Putty. Make extra sure to get your germy, unwashed hands all up in it then leave it around for others to find and play with. It’s fun for the whole family!
2. Diseased finger extension: Wrap some Silly Putty around your index finger. Now point at people and pretend you have some disturbing jungle disease as it melts and loses it’s shape. Its almost as fun as actually having a real physical disfiguration to match your mental one.
3. Plastic explosive: Relax FBI Google searcher man. I’m talking about using Silly Putty as an accessory for other toys. Slap some on the side of your Batmobile and have Robin say, “Batman, it looks like someone set us up the bomb!” for the start of some crazy toy role play plot.
4. Monster: Speaking of using Silly Putty with other toys, I always enjoyed using it as a monstrous blob when playing with G.I. Joes. Cobra always had some sort of crazy invention, so Silly Putty was perfect filll-in for some rouge Cobra terror weapon on the loose. If you had enough Silly Putty (and believe me, I did) some poor Joe or Viper would be slowly dissolved after he was encased in a shell of the blob-like creature. Steve McQueen would have been proud.
5. Flatten it: I really enjoy squishing Silly Putty as flat as I can to see how thin I can spread it out. With a lot of work, you can get a regular amount of Silly Putty so flat that you’ll barely question why you’re wasting your life playing with Silly Putty in the first place.
6. Meeting Annoyance: I usually try to trap air in Silly Putty. If you fold it over carefully enough and seal in enough air, you can get a mildly satisfying snap as the air escapes when you squish the putty down. It kept me entertained through a recent business learning extravaganza. Thank the maker for “kinesthetic learning devices”, or I’d have died of boredom without some Silly Putty to snap and to annoy the hell out of others.
7. Really ineffectual brass knuckles.
8. Added “parts” for Mr. Potato Head: I think you know what I’m saying. (I’m talking about a Potato Head penis) It’s great fun until the putty naturally loses its shape and starts turning into formless goo. Mr. Potato Head then becomes Exposed to Extreme Radiation Mr. Potato Head, and no one needs that.
9. Make a truly disturbing handmade hat.
10. Smell it: Sure Play-doh gets all the press when it comes to malleable toys, but Sillly Putty has its own great scent that is irresistible. Someone should make a Silly Putty body spray. Hey, anything has to be better than Axe.
11. Rubber ball, baby! This is one of the top classical uses of the eternal putty. Roll it up into a ball and bounce away to your hearts desire. While it doesn’t even compare to a super ball, picks up every speck of dirt off your kitchen floor, and it holds its shape as well as Oprah, I don’t see etch-a-sketches or Playdoh bouncing around the room.
12. Lifting newsprint. A classic that’s slowly dying as print quality gets better. (There’s a doctoral thesis in that somewhere) Still, newspaper print is a great source of Silly Putty fun to this day. While most people prefer to stick it on the Sunday funny papers to have a portable, stretchable image of Billy’s stupid bulbous head from The Family Circus, I think a better use of Silly Putty is in the weekly obituaries. “Hey, look at Gammy! Her face is huge!”
Liked this Post? Here’s the Best of Toybender:
Top Ten Weirdest Toy Ads
Eight (untrue) Facts about the Magic Eight Ball
Defending Toy Collecting
toy, toy collecting, Mr. Potato Head, Silly Putty, List, funny
October 5th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Man I loved that stuff when I was a kid….worked great in my lil bro’s hair when he pissed me off too.
October 6th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
I’ve always wanted to take a Clayface figure and cover him with Silly Putty ’cause it gets that fantastic drippy-melty look…
Also, I stuck a bunch of it at the top of the wall in my classroom and had each student predict how long it’d take for it to reach the floor… good times.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:44 am
“It’s great fun until the putty naturally loses its shape and starts turning into formless goo.” Yeah, that just about describes my “extra parts.”