Hūsker Dū?
Hūsker Dū?[nb 1] is a memory game that can be played by children and adults, published in North America in the 1950s. The game is, as of August 2012, owned and distributed by the New Jersey company Endless Games.
Game play
The game board consists of a surface with holes in it, laid on top of a dial which contains small pictures. The dial is rotated before the start of the game, so that each image falls under a hole. Each hole is covered up by a marker. On each, turn a player removes two markers to reveal the pictures underneath; if they match, the player gets to take the two markers as their score, but if they do not, the markers are replaced and the next player takes his or her turn. The winner is the player who takes the most markers.
Controversial advertisement
The American version of the board game was first distributed in the 1950s by the Pressman Toy Corporation. The boxed game proclaimed itself a one "in which the child can outwit the adult."
A notorious advertisement for the game that aired during the 1973 Christmas season featured subliminal cuts, with the phrase "Get It." Even though subliminal messages are commonly believed to be ineffective, the FCC received complaints about the ad and issued a public notice calling subliminal advertising "deceptive and contrary to the public interest."[nb 2] The Premium Corporation of America voluntarily removed the commercial from the air, claiming that the subliminal message was inserted by a misguided employee.
Another early ad featured a voiceover by professional-wrestling announcer "Mean Gene" Okerlund.[1]
Notes
- ↑ In Danish -- as in Norwegian -- "Husker du?" (written without the macrons above the u's) means "Do you remember?".
- ↑ William Poundstone is said to have documented this, and a blurb for his Biggest Secrets book suggests it may be in that work that he did so.