SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: Hula-Hoops: The Toy That's A Shape

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1:30the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, it's Joshy again, and up next on our playlist is our episode on hula hoops. This is a Stuff You Should Know classic, and hula hoops, for those of you who don't know, were this hoop that you kept going around your waist by making a hula motion. It's one of the more appropriately named toys of all time, and it was a huge craze back in the 20th century. So get your time machine, leather helmet, and goggles on, and let's go back to the hula hoop. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

2:16Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. How's it going? It's fine. Great. How's it going with you? Good. Jerry's distracting me a little bit because all I see in my peripheral vision is her practicing her new hula fire dance routine. It's pretty dangerous. It's dangerous, but it's interesting to see out of the corner of one's eye. It really is. Yes. Performance art. Performance hula art. Can you hula hoop? I cannot, sir. I'm too self-conscious to. To even try it. Yeah. It's a grown man, 44-year-old man hula hooping.

2:59Plus, when I do it, as I rotate my hips, it makes the sound of like... Say gyrate. Rotate my hips. Yeah. It makes the sound of almost congealed jello just slopping around in a bowl. You know what I mean? I don't want to make that sound. Yeah, but I did see at the East Atlanta Strut Festivals, one of Atlanta's many great neighborhood festivals, I believe the Strut, to me, is known for having the better music of most of the festivals. Okay. And our buddy Craig Johnson's band played. Space Knife? Not Space Knife. Okay. This one was, can't remember the name of this band, but that band is no longer.

3:37Now he's got a new band even. That guy is always coming up with new stuff. You can never pin him down. He's too good. You should check out Space Knife, though, people, on the web. Yeah. You can find it. It's good. It was in our TV show, too. Yeah, that's his alter ego. But anyway, Craig's band was playing, and I was pretty hula naive, hoop naive at this point, and that was a few years ago. And there was this lady doing a hula routine to his band playing, and I videoed it. It was so awesome. So she was hoop dancing? Hoop dancing, yeah. Like the neck, the arms, the legs, moving around with it like supremely talented hooper.

4:18Yeah, if you go onto the web and type in hoop dancing, it's going to bring up some pretty impressive videos. Yeah, and it's quite a workout, I could tell. We'll get to that, but just watching her, I got tired. Right. And so I drank another beer and just listened to music. Yeah, and pretended you were hula hooping in your head. Yeah. You're like, I'm so good at this in my head. But I was like, man, that's a thing again? I had no idea, but it's a big thing. Yeah, hula hooping. Yeah. But it's been around for a while. Yes, it has. For example, Chuck, did you know, as Robert points out, Robert Lamb wrote this article from Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

4:52Oh, yeah. And he says that the hula hoop has been around in some form or fashion since before most of the world's religions. Wow. That's really saying something. That is saying something. So let's get in the Wayback Machine. Oh, we're going way back, aren't we?

5:10Yeah, let's go back to 1000 BC, my friend. and we're in Egypt and they're little children, Egyptian children with dried up grape vines they've made into hoops and they're playing with them. And there's some Egyptian who's like, get off of my patch of sand, kids. Yeah. You know, instead of a lawn. Sure, I get it. That was good. That was all right. So they no doubt used them in similar ways that we did today but one thing they did, which was a big sporting thing to do for a long time, which I don't get personally, the fun value that is, is using a stick to push a hula hoop down the road. I think the fun in it is that the hula hoop as it's traveling down the road, which does seem to be the oldest use of the hoop as a playtime activity, right?

6:03Yeah, it wants to fall. It wants to fall over. Sure. Right, so if you can keep it going, then there's probably a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction that you can carry all the way to bedtime with and maybe have good dreams because of. Yeah, I don't even see, if you had a plastic polyethylene hula hoop, a modern hoop, I don't see how a stick, like how you would even push it. You would want a stick with maybe. Like a fork? No, probably something like a stick with a big wad of chewed bubble gum on it to just have some sort of point of contact. Because as we'll see when we talk about hula hoop physics, friction plays a big part in making hula hoops hula hoop.

6:46Yes. Around the waist, that is. Well, in this case as well. Oh, true. When the stick makes contact with the hoop, you're using friction to push it along. Yeah. Good point. So I see your point. Like if you're going to use a stick on a plastic hula hoop, it's going to slide off or it's going to want to. Maybe it scares me. That's why I think it's dumb. Maybe I would be made a fool of by the hoop. So I'm intimidated. Maybe at first, but Chuck, you would have to hang in there and stick with it. Yeah. And pretty soon you'd be rolling hoops like an Egyptian kid. Yeah, like an ancient Egyptian child.

7:18Yeah. Hoop rolling was a big deal throughout ancient Greece as well and Rome. They decorated them with bells and things and toys. Fifth century B.C., you ever heard of Ganymede? Of course. Ganymede. Ganymede. Ganymede. He was a handsome hero. Oh, he was. The handsomest, supposedly. There's an old 5th century B.C. urn of him where he's holding a rooster that was apparently a gift from Zeus. Yeah. And a hoop, a hula hoop, clearly a hula hoop. And apparently this discovery, I'm not sure why it's called the Berlin painter urn, but it is. Again, no idea. But apparently they said, well, I wonder if hoops played a role in the earliest Olympics.

8:06and I guess they've discredited that idea now but for a while because of this urn, this picture of Ganymede with a hoop, they wondered. Was it a sport? Yeah. An Olympic sport. But the Greeks supposedly did use hoops for physical fitness as like a physical activity in very much the same way it's become popular today. I would imagine an Olympic hula hooper would be sort of like the, you know, of the, what's the sport? The curler of today. You kind of. Like in ancient Greece, like, hey, what do you, I'm going to throw the hammer. What do you do? I'm a hula hooper. Although I would guess it would probably be more akin to the hula hoopers of today.

8:47Yeah, the hoop roller is what the sport would have been. That would be more like curling. Right. Hula hooping? That's tough, man. It is tough. What else? The ancient Britons, they had a game called, a battle game called Kill the Hoop. Yeah, I like this one. When they would roll the hoop and try to throw a spear through it. Yep. Pretty neat and dangerous. And apparently they also used it in the hula method and people would get injured. Yeah, there was a 14th or 15th century. 14th. Was it the 1400s or the 14th century? 14th century. Hula hoop craze in Britain. Isn't that bizarre? It is weird. And yeah, people were getting injured.

9:32There was a proclamation by the early physicians. They would pull up their like crow's mask, their plague mask, just long enough to be like, stay away from hula hoops. Steer clear of those things. Yeah, the warning was hoops kill was, I guess, what was posted on the church door. And this was like in addition to being in the way of a spear that was being thrown at a rolling hoop. Yeah. Like this is just from hula hooping. I would stay away from the hoops altogether if I was an ancient Briton. Yeah, because really if you're like an ancient Briton, You're going from like zero to 60 as far as like physical fitness goes.

10:06Sure. Once you're hula hooping. Oh, yeah. You know? Just because you're not just sitting around eating lamb's brains. Right. Yeah. Drinking mead. What else? The Native Americans have a long culture of using the hoop. Yeah. In New Mexico, the Taos Pueblo people, they use them in ritual dances, private healing ceremonies and did you look up this Chunky thing? No. Did you find the Chunky reference? I did. The Cahokian Native Americans. That was an unusual way to pronounce that. How would you say it? Cahokian? I think in Native American it would be Cahokian. Okay. That's fine. Near St. Louis apparently is where they played this game Chunky which I just had to look it up because it became called Chunky with an EY.

11:02And from what I saw, it was more of a small stone disc than like a hula hoop-looking thing. And it was like Kill the Hoop, though, in Britain, right? Yeah, they would throw a stick, apparently. It looked like a combination of like bocce and Kill the Hoop. Weird. Because I think they would try and throw the spear where the disc would eventually land and the closest to the disc won. Oh. So like they're predicting where the hoop would fall? I guess. This makes sense. Although that's not really like bocce at all. I mean, I get it. There's a proximity element that's bocce-esque. Yes. Yeah, well put.

11:46But I don't know. I don't know. Once I saw that and saw pictures, I was like, I don't even know if this should be in this article. Yeah. Because it's like a small donut. It's a hoop of sorts. I guess so. It's a stretch if you ask me. But it was a big spectator sport. Like 50-acre stadiums of people would watch this. Wow. Would go to the chunky games. Chunky matches. So there was chunky matches in Cahokia. Yeah. And the Pueblo used their, I think as you said, they used hoops. And they weren't the only ones. There were other tribes from all over North America, and Mesoamerica, I believe, that used hoops for dancing.

12:27And apparently it was in 1930, a guy named Tony Whitecloud, who was a Yemez Pueblo down in New Mexico, did like a hoop dance in public and basically brought it back. Oh yeah? Like it had been virtually lost to the ages, at least as far as the average American was concerned. Yeah. Most people didn't know this was a thing. Luckily, Tony Whitecloud was like, check this out. Did an awesome hoop dance. and then by 1991 there were national hoop dancing competitions in New Mexico and they're a big deal still to this day. Yeah, of course. I think, did he kick off the American craze? Yes. No. He didn't?

13:09He was strictly Native American hoop dancing. Gotcha. Not hula hooping. Okay, so let's go to, well let's take a break actually because this is the big revelation here. That's right.

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16:11All right, Josh, we're at that point where mainstream America goes hoop crazy. But to get to that point, we actually have to go backward again in time for a second. Back in the Wayback Machine. So let's go to, I don't know, Fiji or Tahiti or Polynesia. Yeah.

16:33And it's the 18th century. Yeah. See all these British sailors? Can we drink some rum? Oh, man. Okay. Yeah. In addition to the rum we've already drank today. Alright, good. So the British sailors that you see here are noticing a hula dance, right? And they're filing it away in their mental catalog and now when they reach Britain again. Yeah. Why have we been saying it like that? I don't know. They notice that it bears a striking resemblance to what people do with the hula hoop. You gyrate every time you say that, by the way, in your seat. I can't not do it. Okay. So the term hula became applied to the hoop, especially when you used your hips to gyrate.

17:19Sure. To rotate them. Yes. When you rotate your hips with the hoop, these British sailors ended up applying the word hula to it, and it stuck. That's where it came from was Polynesia. Right. Even though there was no hoop involved in Polynesia, correct? Yes. They just kind of ganked that word for their own purposes. It is 1997 all over again. That was a big 90s term, wasn't it? Ganked, yeah. Let's go watch some X-Files. Let's, actually. Yeah, the movie's coming out soon, right? Oh, yeah, they're doing another one, aren't they? Yeah. That thing will never die. I don't think it should. No, keep doing movies.

18:01That's what I say. So we mentioned that the Greeks, I believe, used it for physical fitness, right? I don't think we said that. I think I said it. Okay. The Swiss actually came to adopt it for the same reasons, too, in the 19th century and early 20th century. Yeah, someone named Emile Jacques Delcroze. Man, that was great. That's tough. had a program called Eurythmics, which, of course, I started singing Sweet Dreams this morning. Of course. Because of that, and I've been singing it all day as a result. So that was a special training program, and it was apparently a big deal. It was a big deal.

18:45So Eurythmics used hoops for basically physical fitness, but also interpretive dance, that kind of stuff. It was a combination of, it was like dance training is what I can gather. and it used hoops. The reason that we're mentioning this when we're talking about the American craze is that it directly led to the American craze potentially because Eurythmics spread from Switzerland to Great Britain and it was brought in as part of PE class in Australia and it was in Australia that the founders of Wham-O were inspired to create the modern hula hoop that we think of today. Boom. So it's possible they watched a Eurythmics class or heard about a Eurythmics class with Australian kids and then said, well, this is clearly something of Australian design and let's bring it to the U.S.

19:38and start a craze. They said sweet dreams were made of these. Yeah. And this was Richard Nure and Arthur Spud Mellon. Mellon sounds like M-L-O-N. Like Thornton Mellon. Don't tease me. that movie. The great Back to School. I saw a bit of that recently. And the only thought through my head was like, man, why couldn't I have caught this from the beginning? Because I wanted to see it all. That and, man, his son is pasty. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you were saying that was a line from the movie. It should have been. Yeah, his son, Keith Gordon, who became a great movie director. Oh, really? Yeah, the guy from Christine and Back to School.

20:24Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he gave up acting and started directing movies and directed a bunch of good movies. One called Waking the Dead, you should see. I thought Keith Gordon co-starred in They Live. I don't know, maybe. I'll have to check that. So where were we? Oh, yes. The two founders of Wham-O. They said, you know what? Let's take these wooden hoops. Let's make them out of polyethylene. Let's make them 40 inches and let's charge$1.98 for them and make them all kinds of fun colors. Yeah. And boom, the hula hoop craze in 1958 was born. Like it was the definition of a flash in the pan craze. Yeah.

21:10A lot of money in a very short span of time. Like a summer basically. Pretty much. In 1958, Waymo released it and by the end of 1958, these things were rotting in the warehouse. Yeah. But in the meantime, they sold globally, globally, from the summer to the end of 1958, 100 million hula hoops. Yeah. More than that, I think. Man, my brain. Yeah. You forgot what we were talking about. I almost said Frisbees. Did we do one on the Frisbee? No. I thought we had, but we haven't, have we? No, we did one on the Boomerang. Oh, right. Just like a Frisbee, but not. It's like a dangerous Frisbee. So they sell all these hula hoops.

21:53They make a ton of money, like, you know, over$50 million in a short span of time, which I'm sure they weren't happy with that it didn't last. But they were also probably like an injection of cash like that is great for any business. Yeah, and then they moved on to the Frisbee and made even more money. Yeah, and they did not secure a patent for it. I guess it didn't matter in the long run. Well, they couldn't because it was so demonstrably an ancient invention that nobody could patent it. Nope. But they trademarked it. They did. They trademarked the name hula hoop in the United States, which is why we still call it hula hoop today, I guess.

22:28Yeah. It just became the name. We should probably put the title with an R in a circle for this. Oh, yeah. We should do that like Barbie. Yeah. It was named the number 35 toy of all time by Time Magazine. And they know toys. They know their toys. And then from 1968 to 1981, there were national hula hoop contests. held. And I guess in the early 80s people were finished with it. There were also a tremendous amount of music, like musical singles released, called the Hulu Hoop Song. Oh really? Different people recorded different songs about hula hooping. Doesn't surprise me. Yeah, it was a craze, big time.

23:09Yeah. And you say that they were done with it by the 80s, not true. Oh what, the national competitions? There was, so if you look at hula hooping records, The most recent hula hoop record is from 2009. Well, but was that part of a national competition? Probably. Or just a guy named Aaron Hibbs. He hula hooped, just hula hooped for 74 hours and 54 minutes. Wow. He broke the record of - I couldn't even stand up for that long. He broke the record of a girl named Kim Coberly. She held the record twice in 1978 with 54 hours and in 1984 for 72 hours. Wow. Which is pretty impressive. Yeah, have you ever seen people that do like hundreds of them at once?

23:53Yeah, there's a guy named Paul Dizzy Hips Blair who set the record in 2009 with 132 hoops at the same time. Wow, that's impressive. He's basically probably just like the Michelin Man made of hula hoops. Yeah. Did I ever tell you about the surface area man costume in Athens? No. That was out on Halloween. in Athens in college, and there was a dude, I know the guy, his name was Blake. You may have seen him, he had big red dreadlocks, kind of a short guy, just a ubiquitous Athens dude. He lives kind of in my neighborhood now, I still see him every once in a while. We call him Sideshow Blake, because of Sideshow Bob.

24:32And he came in the bar, in the Georgia bar, and he had these foam discs around his arms, around his legs, around his waist and neck, that were huge, like probably four feet across. And he was surface area man. And that was just his costume. Because when he moved around, he took up like, you know, probably 75 square feet of space. And he would just move through the bar and say, I'm surface area man. And I'll always remember every time I see Blake, I saw him at the grocery store the other day. Was he dressed like that? No, but I was like, he wouldn't fit down the grocery aisle. Does he have dreads still?

25:10Yeah. Does he really? Still rocking the red dreads. He's dedicated. He looks exactly the same, actually. But we weren't friends. Actually, next time I see him, I'm going to just walk by him and go, surface area, man. You should. I'm going to do it. All right. Let's talk about the Hudsucker Proxy for a quick moment, and then we'll take another break. Okay. Did you ever see that one? I don't think I made it through that one. The Coen Brothers? Yeah. Not all of their movies are great. I disagree. I love the Coen Brothers, but some of their movies stink. Oh boy. They're part of my 100 % club, where every movie they've made has been great.

25:47That is wrong. Which other ones don't you like? The Man Who Wasn't There. Loved it. Bob Robertson. They didn't, that wasn't theirs. Well, it was terrible. Okay. Well, The Hudsucker Proxy, too. I liked it. I would put it at Lesser Cohen's, for sure. You'd have to. But I enjoyed it quite a bit. Tim Robbins and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Paul Newman. in a fictitious tale of the invention of the hula hoop. It is not the true biopic of the invention of the hula hoop, but they co-opted it for one of their movies and it was, I think, pretty great. Okay. But that's just me. Okay. All right. So go ahead.

26:27Well, no, that was it. Oh, that was awesome. I just wanted to shout it out. Fine. Well, then let's take a break because we're about to get into physics. Yeah, and hoop games. Yep. After this.