What It Was, Was (Electric) Football!

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

My brother Don was a football star in Huntsville. Don went to Huntsville High and not Lee, so most of you never met him. While Don was a star athlete, I tended to drift more to the mediocre academic type. I never played competitive sports, but I considered trying out for the Lee football team once. I changed my mind.

Many football games start in the month of August, so I thought I might do a little piece about the football game I did play. It was the Electric Football game that made the players move by a motor vibrating a metal football field with a loud buzz when it was activated. We played with the field set up on the floor or on our "I Love Lucy" yellow kitchen table. The players had small strips of plastic on the base and that was what made them move. The speed (and noise) of the game could be changed with a small twist knob on the motor. The things are still around but the players' shape and color has changed greatly. Now they wear the colors of real teams and are not just molded plastic. The price has changed also, fetching between $70 and $90 now - a price my family could never have afforded. 

I know this is more for the male readers, so I apologize to you ladies.

Please guys, let me know some of your own memories of these games in the comments below.

The Wayback Machine

In 1948, Norman Sas succeeded his father, Elmer Sas, as president of Tudor Metal Products Corporation and invented Tudor Electric Football.

Norman Sas based the game on a vibrating car race game made by Tudor. The early #500 Electric Football models were the first tabletop football game which featured actual moving players as they reacted to the vibrations created by the electromagnet motor under the metal field. Passing and kicking was another unique feature of its design.

Electric Football was an immediate success and maintained popularity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Tudor has sold 70 million Electric Football games to date. This commercial success led other toy companies to develop similar games.

Tudor produced the first all-plastic 3D players, and in the 1960s, an industrial designer named Lee Payne showed Norman Sas a more realistic set of player prototypes. Tudor introduced these players on its first large game, the #600 model. Besides figures in five different poses, Payne sold them on the idea of painting the figures using actual NFL uniform colors. He was instrumental in working with the creative services department of the NFL to obtain the license for marketing the NFL uniformed teams.

Feeling a little better but still not out of the woods yet, but I'm getting there. Someone send me some comments so I don't have to do the whole Lee's Traveller by myself next week.

Last Week's Questions, Answers, 

And Comments

Lance George, "Lynda Johnson Darnell was one of my first grade teachers in 1970.   RIP."

Max Kull, LHS ‘67, "'Born to be Wild' - One of the memories it stirs up for me is from the 1985 Albert Brooks pic - 'Lost in America'. A couple of LA yuppies who chucked their jobs, purchased a Winebago, and hit the road. Seeing that vehicle tooling down the interstate with that song in the background...probably not the picture that Steppenwolf had in mind.