Monday, November 28, 2011

Remember the Tazos?

Last week while returning from office, I had this conversation with my friends in the car.. It went from the TV serials we have now which have been aired, since we were at school, to the amazing cartoon shows we watched when we were kids. As the talk shifted to collectibles which we had from the basic pencilbox show-offs, to the pencils which had shifting nib-points, we came across the infamous craze for Tazos during those days.It was the time when 'Lay's' stepped into India and they had this brilliant strategy of giving a Tazo with every bag of potato chips.and the strategy definitely worked.
 The Tazo's was the only true 'collectibles' we had during those days. These round UFO shaped discs beared some cartoon characters in them and some points which was how the tazos and their uniqueness were identified. The rarer the charachter the higher was the tazos worth. Basically the tazo's were meant to be played by having one perpendicular over the other and realeasing one from the other, which when released would fly in a parabolic manner. It also had some short building slots, which when connected can be built into shapes or structures. But none bought a tazo for the purpose of flinging it dumb or constructing weird towers.Tazos were valued more than money and I remember seeing people exchanging around twenty to fifty tazo's for a single rare one. Shops were targeted based on how many rare tazos kids got from them. Some even go for long drives just because his friend got a rare tazo from a shop which was fifteen kilometers away. There were many names for the Tazo's too.. maybe it depended upon region to region varying. the glow-in-the-dark ones were called radium tazo's and there were tazo's with a character similar to Felix the cat which was called as 'Birla' tazo's which was the rarest among all.. we kids those times used to look up at a guy who had more than five or seven of those tazo's with respect and awesomeness.. :)
  It went Viral throughout the Country that at a particular point schools started to ban the usage of tazo's.But out of a sudden the tazo craze went down suddenly to a level that the chips company stopped giving freebies with their bags.and that was the end of it.though many other products came out with similar stuff, nothing was able to even compare with the round plastic discs. ;)


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