How much fun can you have with a red-nosed bald guy, a magnetic wand, and some iron powder? If you said “a ton,” then you obviously had a Wooly Willy. If you didn’t have a Wooly Willy, then you will never know the time-draining capabilities of this brilliantly simple invention.
Wooly Willy resides in that special hall of fame along with toys like the Rubik’s Cube and the Magic 8-ball. They are staples of childhood that have been around forever — at least it seems that way. Even if you didn’t have one, you no doubt have at least a peripheral knowledge of it.
Wooly Willy debuted way back in 1955 and hasn’t aged a day since. Of course, bald people seem to superficially age at a slower rate than people with hair (Patrick Stewart is immortal), so maybe the fact that he’s never had a chance to go gray has something to do with it. With that red nose of his he’s clearly an alcoholic, so it’s actually remarkable that he looks so good.
He’s certainly a happy-go-lucky guy, with that constant and consistent big dumb grin of his.
Wooly Willy is what you get if you smoosh together Mr. Clean and an Etch-a-Sketch. Kind of. Sort of. Not really, but just go with it. As a kid who was unable to draw anything that even remotely resembled anything, it was oddly satisfying to be able to take a magnetic wand and drag clumps of metal shavings around on a cardboard surface until Willy’s appearance slowly transformed. It was as close to “art” as I was going to get. I mean, there is clearly no Wooly Willy hanging in the Louevre (obviously, as the shavings will just fall to the bottom), but it was satisfying nonetheless.
I think it was the amount of options that kept me coming back. You got a decent enough amount of those metal shavings to give him a near infinite amount of permutations. Hair. Hairless with a beard. Just muttonchops. Hair and a mustache. Just a beard. Ear hair. Bigass eyebrows. Eyebrows that connected to his mustache. The John Waters-style pencil mustache. Soul Patch. Goatee. Krusty the Clown-style side-fros. At this point I’m just naming hair things. But dragging that magnet under the bottom of this hair bastards face made each of them happen, and all he could do was grin about it.
It was a strange sense of power. I could make him look like a king or a fool. He could be the handsome Errol Flynn type, or he could have the worst handlebar mustache this side of the cover of any album from the seventies.
You’ll wear your hair the way I want you to, Willy! Muahahaha!
Of course, because time is the cruelest bitch this side of Joan Crawford, eventually the magnet grew weaker and weaker, until it had trouble performing even the simplest hair-tugging tasks. Luckily, according to my 5th grade science teacher, magnets literally grow on trees, so it was easily replaceable. Far less replaceable was if your Willy suddenly sprung a leak, which meant bye-bye shavings. Oh, the indignity of a bald man suffering hair loss.
The good thing was that they were cheap, so replacing them was fairly easy. Cheaper than Rogaine, at least. Soon you could be sliding hair around and making your Willy look as hairy or weird as you wanted it to look, at which point you could either take a picture of your Willy or at least show it off to your friends. And it always pays to be a good friend, so letting them play with your Wooly Willy was just good sportsmanship.
I wonder how many hairdressers and stylists were born at the business end of a small and colorful magnet. Hopefully they didn’t grab the customer’s head and tip it forward afterward.
That’s a good way to not get a tip.