History in The United States
These machines became popular in the United States in the late 1980s, with a significant presence at Pizza Hut restaurants, although they were to be found much earlier. A claw machine labeled "Toy Steam Shovel" appears in a drugstore in the 1939 cartoon Naughty but Mice.
Later on, they spread to other venues, and by the early 1990s, the NFL began to advertise their teams with stuffed footballs of each team placed in some of the machines. Soon after, the MLB, NBA, and NHL also started doing this, although the NBA no longer uses these machines as a means of advertisement.
By the mid-1990s, the machines' popularity had made such establishments as Safeway, Fry's Supermarkets, K-Mart, and Wal-Mart a staple of their locations. Some hotels also acquired them to satisfy their younger guests, as did sports venues that would stuff them with collectibles related to their home teams.
In the 1995 Disney/Pixar computer-animated film Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody climb into a claw vending machine filled with claw-worshipping aliens.
Read more about this topic: Claw Crane
Famous quotes containing the words united states, history, united and/or states:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–117)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“I make this direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United States getting into war, if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)