I played a lot with designs for kazoos over several years. At one point I even purchased an existing business - I honestly can't remember the name, but he was a craftsman who made very nice wooden kazoos from quality woods like walnut, and cherry. He had decided to tackle another career, and sold me his remaining stock, plus some partially finished parts. For a toy maker, these kazoos just didn't quite fit. Kids like to make noise, not music! I will probably post some pictures, etc. about the noisy kazoos that became a pretty solid part of our product line, but for now, I recently found the samples shown here. The ones above are the actual product. I always was a sucker for puns, odd word play, etc, but that didn't always serve me well in naming and promoting my toys. I look at the phrase "kazoo in the round with astounding sound" today, and a part of me laughs, and a bigger part sort of cringes .... what was I thinking? And what's up with the whistling/singing tree? This design was about as big a flop as the fancy kazoo designs purchased from my friend. But, we did make "Kazounds" our annual gift to our wholesale customers... see below .... perhaps thinking that a flood of orders might pour in when our customers had a sample in hand/mouth? And in keeping with my confessional here, what's up with my face on the snowman?
Luckily The Toycrafter made a lot of very successful toys, so flops like "Kazounds" sort of taught us good lessons, but did not kill us! A couple of much worse flops come to mind, but I'll save them for another day.
