My auction buddy Janet initially spotted them. About eight crazy-tube objects had been arranged on a wooden post like tree branches by a flea-market couple in a space next to us last weekend.
They resembled the piping under the sink in my bathroom, but these were in bold colors. We couldn’t figure out what they were. “Go ask him,” I prodded Janet. Finally, when she saw the female half of the couple walk near the tubings, she ambled over.
These were marshmallow shooters, Janet reported back to me. That still meant nothing to us and to a lot of other people who kept stopping by and asking about them. One small group of people recognized them – young boys, a few girls and some men.
For most of us, they were a mystery. We watched as the wife repeatedly demonstrated the toy for all who inquired. She took a mini marshmallow from a small Ziploc bag, popped it into the long end of the toy and blew into the other end. The marshmallow whizzed out toward a pond just behind our spot at the flea market.
Each of their $6 shooters or guns came with a bag of marshmallows. The couple apparently sold a lot of them, because they kept replenishing their wooden tree.
I wondered how they were made, so I inquired. The husband makes them, 50 at a time, from PVC pipe that he cuts and glues together. “She paints them,” he said. Theirs were in a bouquet of dark colors with silver accents – red, royal blue, green, purple, yellow, black. Some had combinations of two colors.
They’d been selling the shooters for about three years, starting with plain white ones. He said that he had also made a bow and arrow that shoots marshmallows.
The toys apparently are pretty popular. She told of one woman who bought 40 for a family reunion, and they were a hit. “No one wanted to give it back,” the woman told her.
Not everyone, though, thinks they’re great. At another flea market, someone told them to stop selling the toys to children because they were shooting people with marshmallows. I could understand that frustration. The shooters could start out as innocent fun but then become increasingly annoying if someone were constantly aiming at you – no matter how soft the ammo.
One woman who bought one for her adolescent son warned him not to shoot it inside the house. Good luck.
And what happens to the little marshmallows dispersed all over the ground. They become dessert for birds or cats, the woman said. I noticed a few of them floating around the flea-market area (which was actually a parking lot), tossed about by a brisk wind.
Although a new discovery for me, marshmallow guns apparently have been around for a while. You can buy them commercially or make one yourself at home. I found numerous sites on the web for both. The shooters are designed to blast small marshmallow up to 30 feet, but you can also buy ones that shoot large marshmallows up to 40 feet.
They range in price from $10 to $25, and some of them have an LED sight on top to help you zero in on your target plus a much fancier shape than the utilitarian ones at the flea market. Even the venerable Hammacher Schlemmer sells them for $25, and offers on its site a demonstration of how they work.
At the flea market, I watched as a trio of teenage boys approached the shooters, also unsure of what they were. One speculated that they were made of PVC pipes but could go no farther in identifying them.
The woman dutifully demonstrated the toy with a fresh marshmallow, turned toward the water and blew into it. The boys stared blankly at her. One of them jokingly shouted out a “Wow!” gave the shooter a thumbs-down, and laughed.
Unlike the rest of us, they were not impressed.
