It’s 2025 and the first Super Soakers went on sale 35 years ago, changing backyard water gun fights forever. Invented by Lonnie Johnson, the Super Soaker (initially with the entirely accurate if less glib name “Power Drencher”) was a game-changer from a toy company called Larami.
My siblings and I were already familiar with Larami doing for water guns what Activision did for Atari 2600 game cartridges. Translated from the Gen X: this was a level up. You see, Larami already made awesome water guns that captured the G.I. Joe-style action stylings of the 1980s. Before long, most of the kids in the neighborhood had the beauty you see below: a water gun, shaped like an UZI that was motorized.
Not reliant on repeated pulls of the trigger, this allowed the previously difficult tactic of “suppressive fire” in water gun combat. However, we quickly realized that the water reservoir for the gun, awesomely designed to be a removable clip, simply didn’t have the capacity for a sustained fire -er- waterfight. Ever the pragmatic pint-sized warmongers, one of us –honestly, I forget who– decided to borrow the 32-ounce body or a spray bottle from the garage. Now we could blast away for minutes on end… and the mouth of the bottle served as a swivel mount to rotate the UZI at all comers. Only a coordinated assault, probably using water balloons, could dislodge a properly entrenched kid with their UZI/spray bottle mount.
The Super Soaker changed all of this.
The distinct neon yellow and green of the Super Soaker 50 became the standard armament of water-based kid conflicts, with the bigger Super Soaker 100 occasionally making an appearance… and later the terrifying Super Soaker 300, whose backpack reservoir only added to the “flamethrower oevre” as kids fled before its drenching might.
It was only years later that I learned about Lonnie Johnson and his contributions to this glorious evolution of water warfare — and of course, he was not the only one who had a hand in the super-soaking of squirt guns. Writer Brian VanHooker put together a splendid oral history of the Super Soaker for MEL in honor of the water weapon’s 30th anniversary. You’ll learn about Johnson’s background, his prototype, Bruce D’Andrade’s engineering contributions, and even the infamous Oozinator… which is unbelievably NSFW, yet approved as a kid’s toy.
Happy unofficial beginning of summer, everyone!