Published by Ideal in 1969, Poison Ivy teaches kids the hopelessness of it all—without actually managing to teach kids about poison ivy.
Kiddies take turns pulling a leaf from the grassy green pyramid of despair. If the leaf they pulled has a green stem—congratulations you have yourself a leaf. If they pull one with a red stem—they have poison ivy and must take a bandage cap and place it over one of their fingers for the duration of the game and can no longer use that finger for leaf plucking. This continues until there is only one person left who hasn’t bandaged 4 of their fingers.
If this sadistic little game isn’t a lesson in schadenfreude I don’t know what is.
“Okay Timmy, now it’s your turn to pluck a leaf.”
“Because you might get horribly afflicted.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You have to. It’s the fun of the game.”
Furthermore, why do these kids want these leaves so bad? Even if you’re the “winner” of this game, you end up with a pile of leaves and bandaged fingers.
In no particular order, I will now list other flaws and gripes:
- Poison ivy has leaflets of 3
- Poison ivy doesn’t have a red stem without getting red leaves
- Poison ivy doesn’t grow in pyramids amongst ficus leaves
- Slapping a bandage on poison ivy fingers is not advisable
- The carefully planted flowerbed pyramid is labeled “POISON IVY” so ignorance is not an excuse
I expect the Poison Oak and Poison Sumac expansions to up their game.