Devices No One Flipped for Make the List of Top Flops

A flying saucer as easy to operate as a car, an electronic paintbrush that paints pictures on TV screens and a computer that plays Tic Tac Toe were listed Thursday as some of the biggest commercial flops of the past decade.

Gadget, a New York newsletter that tracks trends in the world of wacky inventions, put the devices at the top of its 10th anniversary list of the most inventive failures on the market.

The flying saucer was called the Discojet, manufactured by Discojet Corp. of Davis, Calif. The $10,000 flying machine had a top cruising speed of 200 miles per hour and a payload of 425 pounds. The flying saucer’s promoters said it was as easy to operate as a car and had the “most attractive features of the helicopter and the light airplane.”

It was supposed to debut in January, 1977, but never became airborne.

In June, 1977, the newsletter called the Telepalette, manufactured by Teleplay of Sacramento, “one of the most exciting video gadgets that we have heard of . . . so new that it’s not yet commercially available.” That was the last ever heard of the “electronic paintbrush” supposed to paint pictures on television screens.

And then there was Merlin. Manufactured by Parker Bros., this electronic game “was versatile in ways that the massively popular devices that followed weren’t,” Gadget said. The newsletter described it as a “small computer that will outsmart you at everything from Tic Tac Toe to a computer version of blackjack,” but Parker Bros. apparently outsmarted itself out of a market.

Also on the list was the Hologram Movie Package, manufactured by Holex Corp. of Norristown, Pa. For $100, it was supposed to make holograms--three-dimensional pictures--of a woman blowing kisses. The world is still waiting.