You basically held the top in your hand at an angle, with the rubber tip touching the floor, and rubbed it across the surface in an arc as hard and fast as your sweaty little fingers could manage in order to “rev it up.”  The voom-voom-VOOM revving sound was enough to get your heart beating fast.  But once you set it down and watched it scream across the linoleum like a three-inch high Tasmanian devil, the fun really began.

And there was no end to the fun that could be had with these durable little toys. Mattel provided some accessories such as a plastic bowl where you could watch it twirl around the sides.  But usually we simply used our imaginati0n and staged mock battles (crashing into each other at top speed was almost always mutually-assured destruction.)

Or pretended they were tornados and sent them zooming across the floor to wreak destruction on our little brother’s play farm or village.  Or sent them bouncing down the stairs.

The Wizzer rated high on the Mom-hating scale for two main reasons. One, revving it up on the floor usually created ugly streaks of rubber residue. Two, revving up the top to full speed and then putting it in your sister’s hair was too much fun for most little boys to resist.

Mattel astutely offered Wizzers in different color schemes to promote collectibility (the head of the top was usually divided into two colors) and provided sticker packages so you could customize them.

The original Wizzers disappeared long ago but the name survived. By the late 1990s, Duncan — who had purchased the rights to the Wizzer brand — was manufacturing these gyrating gems. Evidently they have disappeared altogether from the Duncan catalogue however, although they are still available on eBay.    For more history on this unique toy, wiz on over to this excellent and comprehensive website: http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/wiz.html

After years of declining margins due to competition from Japan, in 1979 the company exited the amateur filmmaking business it had once dominated. Thus began a rather rapid dilution of the brand.   By the time the company was purchased in a leveraged buyout in the mid-1980s, the company had made 36 acquisitions in about a dozen years, 35 of which reportedly proved less-than-satisfactory.  The company that had once had a sharp focus on what it did better than anyone else had become a bloated conglomerate with interests as far ranging as vocational schools and mail sorting equipment, and, intriguingly, even personal computers.  Check this out: Bell&Howell Computer

One of the more collectable B&Hs is this 1974 sound camera: 1974 B&H. In today’s high-tech world of high-def camcorders and blue-ray discs, it’s easy to forget that until the advent of the camcorder and VCR in the 1980s the vast majority of home movies were silent films! Personally, I think that only adds to their charm.

Give the strong equity of the brand it had spent decades building for its core amateur film business, it seems curious that Bell & Howell chose not to preserve its unique identity.  Certainly it must have had at least as much awareness among enthusiasts as Kodak well into the 1970s.  For a brand that was synonymous with “home movies”, it seems it would have been a natural to help guide consumers in making the transition from film to videotape.  Yet, to my knowledge, no consumer camcorder or VCR ever featured the Bell &Howell brand. Although they did play in videotape early on, at least on the commercial side — as this 1968 users manual attests: 1968 Bell & Howell Videotape Recorder

Bell & Howell, once the serial acquirer of more than 100 companies, itself became the target of a leveraged buyout in the mid-1980s. In 2001 it became ProQuest and since then the Bell & Howell brand has been sliced and diced across so many different products, services and companies it has become utterly undifferentiated.  Example: www.bellandhowell.com takes you to a German company called bowebellhowellthat apparently bought out some of B&H’s document preparation and mailing equipment subsidiaries in 2003.