Eggcitement.

My wife saw this gadget and thought it looked like Easter fun. 

The Eggmazing Egg Decorator is a clever idea. You put your hard-boiled egg in the battery-powered device, and rollers spin the egg while you color it with the food-safe markers provided. A clever way to decorate Easter eggs beyond just dipping them in vinegary dye and splotching on stickers. It did look like fun. 

It also looked vaguely familiar. 

Back in the stone age, before electricity was invented, there was Dudley's Decoregger -- as seen on TV. (Our televisions were made of rocks -- haven't you seen The Flintstones?) This too was a lathe-type device that spun the egg while food-safe markers made the drawings. The difference is, instead of you holding the marker, you turned the crank to rotate the egg. The markers were held in a clamp. 

Read these dumb directions! 

They were advertised on TV heavily, which is why it was seen there (duh), pitched as a product from a man in a large rabbit costume named Dudley with a dopey voice. Can we find the commercial? Alas, we cannot. But we can find an ad for another Dudley product:

It makes McDonaldland commercials of the era look like an Avengers movie. 

Nevertheless, the Decoregger was not a bad product and worked as promised, although in the hands of small children hardly produced the beautiful results seen in the commercial. What ever did? So you got some eggs with lines drawn around them. Whee! And at least Mom wouldn't have to keep the art up on the fridge forever. Even hard-boiled eggs don't last that long. 

I don't want to sound jealous of today's tots with their electric decorating aids. The little cherubs will also fail to produce museum-quality art, as we know. The whole thing is, will they have fun? I say yes. I quite enjoyed egg-decoration day as Easter approached and remember it fondly. The smell of white vinegar would linger at the kitchen table for hours, but it was all worthwhile.