The Tantrum Tyco R/C Car
When I was about nine years old there was nothing I wanted more than the Tyco Tantrum. The Tantrum was a remote-controlled car with front wheels that would spin on command, sending the car flying for “bone-breaking back flips” and “airborne twister action.” There was a commercial that ran nonstop on TV that promised “the madder it gets, the badder it gets,” and that was all I needed to hear.
After months of begging, my parents got me a Tantrum for Christmas. It was just as awesome as I hoped, but I doubt I got more than a few hours of fun out of the thing. It came with a set of not-swappable, rechargeable batteries. That’s pretty cool in retrospect, but it also meant the car was useless if you lost the batteries, and they disappeared almost immediately. My Tantrum probably did its last bone-breaking backflip in the first few months of 1998 and lived out the rest of its life at the bottom of a toy box. – Thomas Germain
