That's a strange way to advertise the cheap "luxury" plastic it was made of...

I'm sure it wasn't sticky when it was new. It's 17 or 18-year-old cheap plastic, I guess it's decomposing. Either components within the plastic are slowly reacting with each other, or with the oxygen in the air around it. Put it in a glass container for the next 20 to 40 years and you'll have the bare electronics rotting in a in puddle of carcinogenic soup. - Edit: Just read a comment that says it was sticky right out of the box back in 2004... Lovely, Mattel! Just swell!

or maybe before it was packaged it was probably either dropped in juice or the juice spilled on it

The plastic is degrading. The oils separating from the coating due to age

@@Zeina107 thank you I was hoping somebody would say this. But to add to that, this is usually caused because of lack of airflow, causing the vapor from the degrading plastic to be trapped and stay on the device. This is why they say open up certain collectibles to air out

And oh god, the smell

And the graphic quality makes me want to yell

On this, I refuse to dwell.

It'll make you wanna jump into a well.

"Barbie, i don't feel well..."

It's a deep fried meme, but as a portable video player for kids

And if there's any noise that sounds even better when it's bitcrushed all to hell, it's the sound of someone obnoxiously sucking on a straw. Not like that sounds anything like static or a corrupted sound file.

Ah I thought I was hearing things😅

@@Iamafishproductions it's perfect for shitposting.

The immediate sound of sucking seems like the most appropriate thing for this device. This thing sucked back then and it sucks now but even worse. Made of horrible degraded plastic and capable of both the worst looking and sounding media you could possibly force yourself to look at and listen to.

They were all bad but at least the GBA one didn't force you to buy a secondary device just to use it. I just recently watched a video about the video now line and yikes it was always bad every single version. The juice box was at least one and done but wow, did it fail at everything right out the gate including needing a separate kit to even be able to do MP3s.

Now only if he could cover mini DVDs then.... Yes, there were actually movies and TV shows officially released on mini DVD.

Oh there’s plenty more sadly…

@@Astolfo2001 saw one for cat woman the terrible otts movie at a store..Can’t say I was impressed. Big reason why I never considered it.

@@Roninkinx Oh these things were prevalent. There was roughly about 5 years where they were everywhere. Most of them were complete garbage and a few of them were actually decent even good but they still were no match for the far better quality of any official products from like apple or any of those. Or even some of the phones at the time.

I mean we were very close to the new age that was coming with things like smartphones and high quality media players from people like Apple. This thing came just as the market was basically collapsing for the cheap garbage for lack of a better word crappy media players. Once you could basically take anything (audio or video) and compress it or make it work on a device with a resolution closer to DVD these things were dead in the water.

Even back in the days before streaming the very limited selection of episodes and movies for such devices did not motivate me to even look at the things.

@@shenloken2 Yep, I just could never figure out what people saw these things. I mean kids are willing to settle for less than great stuff usually but this is awful, and they all were.

Same here.

The true progression/evolution of digital media players are smartphones, tablets etc. We had to crawl before we could walk but wow to think we've come this far in less than two decades is crazy. What people tolerated or I should say kids tolerated back then amazes even me.

@@JohnDoe-wq5eu I was in HS around this time. No one really wanted portable video that much, it wasn't talked about. We just used a TV. When the iPod Video came out, a few people had that, but the video capability (which was way better than on one of these crappy things) was still little more than a gimmick that impressed for 5 mins and then we moved on.

@@nthgth Yeah, as far as I'm concerned it wasn't until basically cheap smart phones came along that it became an easy and simple thing to transfer videos to it.

My cousin, Roshan had a Mattel Juice Box when he was a kid. He had one of the YuGiOh carts. I'm guessing he sold it sometime after.

GOD, I remember the RZone. I remember the ads vaporized a kid's head because the Tiger Electronics wireframe red graphics were just TOO MIND-BLOWING, and I was old enough to laugh. Thankfully my days of being taken in by ads for crappy videogame consoles were long past me by then (my parents never forgave me for letting me talk them into buying a GameGear, assuring them it'd be the last portable I ever needed).

I miss my childhood.

Was it the head-mounted version or the handheld one?

@@magnatcleo2043 Yes.

I remember the Toys r Us "R Zone". I think the last time I ever saw Toys R Us was right around the same time they started closing their stores. I went in started looking for anything that was still worth the inflated prices even though everything was supposed to be __% off. Actually had there R Zone discount card or whatever but I don't think I used it once or maybe once ever in the 10 to 15 years they were doing it. The fact it was the same name as those terrible tiger electronics toys is always hilarious to me. Almost like a perfect foreshadowing of how poorly it was going to do for Toys R Us.

Yeah that soft touch plastic that was everywhere in the late 90s and early 2000s is complete garbage now. It turns to sticky goo and best case scenario you can just rub off that thin top layer with a little isopropyl alcohol. Worst case scenario the whole thing was made of that terrible plastic and it's just one giant gloppy mess. Luckily most things from that era aren't worth really revisiting not even to laugh at.

I mean, you could just try to remove the casing and get a 3D printed replacement if you REALLY want to preserve them

That's mean to Soundwave.

@@phelous I know. I'm sorry. I should've known better than to call Soundwave inferior

@@phelous maybe Sound Recorder...Armouraker...the bootleg one

Fake soundwave... inferior

UMDs could hold more than a CD with single layer: While sadly not as much as a DVD, with the PSP's hardware it probably could have handled more intense compression techniques. I feel like the Juice Box going up against UMDs should be not unlike ants against *Gods* if you ask me.

@@torondin Yeah as not very successful as everything that wasn't a Sony owned property was on UMD. (and in general the format was incredibly flawed) The video quality was so much better than anything outside of an incredibly expensive device at the time or a portable DVD player. Looking back I cannot understand how kids at the time put up with the horrible compressed uglyness that was these videos and barely better compressed music. It's unfortunately one of those kids will tolerate things that adults never would sort of things I guess.

Now with streaming there’s absolutely no going back to that period in time. I suppose I don’t miss the early 2000’s as much as I thought I did.

those were awesome honestly psp is underrated.

@@shenloken2 For the most part I'd say that's absolutely true. Except when you're away from either Wi-Fi or a phone signal suddenly that basic technology becomes incredibly important. I know for a fact I have stuff on my phone that I can play I want to have a down time because I know they'll be moments where I'll want to watch something and won't have access otherwise.

I dread the thought of how much crunchier the recordings of the device running would sound after compressing this video to work on it.

@@magnatcleo2043 that would essentially be live footage of Hell

I’ll make it a tiny computer after I replace the front part removing the “legurious” front part and replacing it with hard plastic

It would also explain why the plastic is sticky. It's the remaining liquids of the employees who died in the robot hands of Glados.

The juicebox is a lie!

That was my childhood and I wouldn't have it any other way 👍🏻

Funny enough, the original Japanese version of Yugioh had Maximillian Pegasus actually be aged at 25 instead of the much older gentleman that we see in the 4kids dub. This befuddled me so much because from the start I always thought he was older from the get go. And then Bandith Keith himself was also aged way younger than what the dub portrayed. Which despite all the silliness...that little bit of knowledge let me appreciate a little more the dubbing of 4kids and understand some of their thought process.

DiC and cloverway say hello...

"It is implied I'm being punched." Actual 4Kids -dialog- decision.

Has 4kids went to the other dimension or are they still doing something? I'm asking as someone not from the USA.

Oh dear. That either means the plastic degraded really fast, or they decided to launch it that sticky. I'm not sure which is worse.

@@magnatcleo2043 I mean considering the fact it was basically "put out to die" as they say in the waning days of the cheap media player craze before it died off completely. I had no idea these things were basically dead in less than 6 months but hearing that doesn't surprise me one bit.

Was the juicebox cartridge also empty for you

@@tylern6420 to be honest, I don't really remember. I probably would never have remembered only once to begin with, if not for Phelous. I haven't thought about that thing since 2004. LOL I know I never actually used it, so I'm going to have to say mine was empty as well. Otherwise I probably would have at least checked it out with the thing it came with.

Either it’s made with really cheap material or it’s meant to be sticky and wet. Maybe that’s why they called it a juice box!

Sad

Anyone else think Phelous is a stoner?

@@smb-c3po If he is he's found the absolute perfect job.

@@JohnDoe-wq5eu It'd make sense, he lives in Canada and everything's an old RPG over there

@@smb-c3po please stop. Get help 😅

I think I got one with end-of-school-year money as a kid when we were visiting my grandparents or something. That or birthday money. Nice Magileine icon btw.

did it take 4 minutes for the cartridge to work?

Length and quality we're both ridiculous/horrendous. I had to be reminded oh yeah we're talking 16 or 32 megabytes here. I highly doubt there was ever even one 64 MB version.

Yikes...

That’s because the blue side is made of a softer plastic. If I remember well, the chemicals used to soften the plastic are trapped in the sealed packaging and cause that stickyness over time (instead of evaporating slowly).

@@the999th That seems possible, I've had stuff that was touched so apparently the oils from people's skin also help deteriorate the plastic and also apparently it's being exposed to the air and or any period of time and that plastic starts falling apart. That cheap soft plastic coating that was on everything is apparently just a ticking time bomb it's only a matter of time before it degrades and turns into goo.

no, it is the rubber coating suffering reversion.

@@lordeilluminati All I know is it's irreversible and inevitable.

Now that would've been something ambitious. Probably would've been too expensive for the time.

@@ExtremeWreck I like that "too expensive" was the first thing that came to your mind and not "appallingly stupid and a health-hazard." Because you're right: it was the '90s, those two factors wouldn't have occurred to them.

@@Alucard-A-La-Carte Yeah, $500 & all for an appallingly crappy health-hazard item made for your kid to have. NO THANK YOU!

Technically, -1 years. The Blackberry Quark launched in 2003. And the line between PDA/Smartphone was growing increasingly blurred.

@@XanthinZarda Was thinking of the first iPhone, but sure, fair enough. Man, PDAs feel so long ago... and yet we're all kinda sorta carrying one in our pockets. Crazy cool, if you stop and think about it!

2005 would give us things like the PSP, the iPod video and other devices that completely destroyed the juice box in every conceivable way including the ability to load your own content.The biggest problem with these things besides the atrocious sound and video quality was the fact you were trapped in some crappy little ecosystem with only the ability to buy authorized stuff from whoever put the device out. That would all change very very soon.

What's weird is the direction he was cutting looked like it was with the blunt/dull side of the knife. I couldn't figure out how it was cutting the plastic.

I should be thankful that there was never any Barbie or He-Man related content on the Juice Box...

It didn’t start sticky. Rubberized plastic breaks down over time and turns to this mess.

Lol I thought so too. That would be a weird gimmick but at least it would have something notable about it, even if ill advised.

What does that mean? Am I supposed to know what the juice box says?

Apple juice box

I was an anxious kid, and I actually DID watch a lot of the same movies/shows over and over again, but I'd never want to do it on the go. And especially not with such low audio quality.

@@Alucard-A-La-Carte and I imagine there certainly were kids that this was like a fidget spinner to. But I think that more kids got bored of it fast then really loved it. I mean one could own a GBA & watch some vids but also play games. Yes a GBA is more $ but if one could afford it I think the sales numbers say it all. I admit it's a cool idea but at a time before streaming & before flash memory the need to keep cost low vs storage restrictions, lackluster screen/compression/audio quality just was too big a problem to overcome.

You were just supposed to keep buying vids but this thing was expensive. It was like $90 at release. It didn’t last long enough to get content. Small flash ram and SD cards were not cheap in 2004.

One of the many reasons I dont wanna be a marketer. Having to sell shit like that just hurts.

Ah yes, the good old days when you could just flat out lie to customers and that was somehow okay. Still sort of like that but this is the worst I've ever seen. Probably best it flopped as if it hadn't they'd probably have been sued.

Now let's hide out in trash like Bonesteel!

SWEET!

Agreed😎

Late 2004 early 2005 was really the end of these crappy little media players. 2005 would give us things like the PSP, the video version I believe of the iPod and various other far better versions of the technology including better low-cost alternatives. Stuff like portable DVD players were cheaper and easier to get than ever and in general the world had left these crappy little players in the dust where they belonged. It really is a shame that there's like a landfill somewhere just full of this horrible crap but that was company thinking at the time push out a concept and damn the consequences.

@@JohnDoe-wq5eu Ah, glad you mentioned the portable DVDers, because IMO they were _sorta_ like the Juice Box but of course, they still had a good decade of popularity across the western hemisphere. In a certain way, it is a shame their makers didn't think ahead of time to the point where home DVD machines would inevitably turn obsolete, because a lot of those players could've had the potential to turn into a sort of massive media storage or even _mini-portable computers_ that could give lower income people a chance to have the laptop experience. A dedicated mid-tier mothercard with a basic chip-grapher and soundcard along with a triple USB port could've meant keyboard, mouse and external memory support, and extending the viability of the DVD player, with their nice 5" screens and alright speakers, _well into this era as well._ I think that, seeing how our world is a tad short on viable precious electrometals like lithium and cadmium, we should design tech with functionality, limited as it might be, well into the future. The USB stick is my premier example of tech I can very well still see in use even two decades from now. Make the best with what we have now, so our descendants can enjoy tech as well. Which is a diametrically opposite of the *absolute mongs that made the disposable DVD media.* Look it up, _mind blowing how those people operated under the assumption we have infinite resources on Earth!_ *ALL THAT PLASTIC WASTE!* Lolz.

If there's a video format that Ninja Turtles or Ghostbusters or even Mortal Kombat is on... Who you gonna call?

[Old Man Vince:And now to do a shitty Stunner Job at Wrestlemania 38.]

@@BigEOT3 That was truly hilarious. The man may be in excellent shape for his age but holy crap can he not act his way out of a paper bag.

Yeah... pretty much.

I just hate how many of these low quality terrible devices there were at the time. In a few short years you would see a complete shift away from these pixelated monstrosities and toward things of DVD quality and better. It was like going to the dark ages before the grand enlightenment.

So to be fair it's cheap crap, lol.

@@phelous To be fair to me, I didn't fully think that through! 😅😅

The ones for kids were always werid. Though I had a video now it was one of the few ways I could watch cable shows back then on the go.

It's less ridiculous and more just atrocious. What children were willing to put up with is truly amazing to me although I like to believe most of the smart ones were finding out how to get them off the internet at the time or any other way possible. At least the stuff for the GBA was essentially just a supplemental thing for the GBA. Yeah it looked and sounded like crap but at least it was cheap and you could get it on your already existing portable game console. The idea of paying for these even worse in most cases little media players is horrible. It would all change when people could finally put whatever they wanted on a device.

@@JohnDoe-wq5eu I mean to parents it might have made sense cheaper than a DVD player same with the media that came with it.

@@Zxzero36 Yup for those parents that only read bullet points on the front and look at things merely at face value. Anyone that had a general concept would know the DVD player would be the better deal as you could especially back then still get movies from Blockbuster or any number of still existing video stores not to mention I believe things like Redbox or Netflix. (Honestly I'm not sure about Netflix and Redbox as those may have come after Blockbuster and Hollywood video were already well into their decline and soon closure) these players were either a cheap alternative for children that they were worried would break something nice or they simply didn't care. This definitely feels like what a parent but more likely good intentioned grandparent would get for a grandchild unintentionally getting them total garbage. I think what I'm trying to say is the only people that would think this is a good deal were people with zero technological skills whatsoever or understanding of how things work.

mmm it's so facinating

Strange and often Tacky wastes of money.

@@eamonndeane587 nowadays you can watch videos and TV on your phone.

Well, that's what you got when you couldn't afford neither a portable DVD player or an MP3 player.

Most of the things that I still want that have this layer of goo on it I just use a strong rubbing alcohol and a paper towel or something similar. And you just rub until all the goo comes off. Unfortunately some stuff is literally all goo instead of just a thin layer. Those ones are either complete garbage or you gotta 3D print a new piece for it or something.

@@JohnDoe-wq5eu That was exactly the case with the mouse I described. It has somehow absorbed a cable right into itself. So I had this mouse, with goo dripping all through the cables, and one of the cables was sticking out of the side of the mouse like it had grown some kind of strange umbilical cord. That mouse ended up in the trash. I wasn't expecting that to happen, nor do I ever want to see anything like that happen again. The cleanup job after that just pissed me off.

@@BlackburnBigdragon Yeah the worst ones are the ones that are hiding away in boxes, closets or drawers somewhere. They especially do not like heat so if they've gotten it all hot where they're being stored they will completely turn to goop if they've been exposed to even moderate heat. I recently went back to a huge collection of old multiple console controllers I had and so many of them had that damn layer I did one and that took a little while but it was worth it as the result was a completely usable and non sticky controller. But things like this that we're always crap and just aren't worth the effort I wouldn't even bother trying to save. Just not worth the effort. But you're right it's mostly the surprise you haven't checked on something way too long you totally forgot where it was or forgot it was even in there and like a horror movie you open it up and find just a complete gross mess. I've luckily not found too many of those but my mom had one of those soft touch keyboards and they are horrible. It didn't help that we lost the little dongle to it also so there was really no reason to even try to save it. But yeah I hate that they ever thought that was a good idea. And it's so prevalent there are so many things covered in this goo now.

Just call it a disgusting abomination.

Video technology at the time was limited.

That's kinda just it XD. As a kid I was hyped to just have my favorite cartoons like Ed Edd n Eddy ON THE GO! At the time, the fact it had recognizable enough visuals and audio was good enough for the kids. I was honestly stunned that the GBA had the power to play like recorded audio, but yeah, these did not hold up well XD. I can see why they're mostly promoted towards kids.

@@scottylewis8124 Yeah, Iget they wanted something cheap but functional. But man, the sound quality was just soooooo bad.

@@hansgonk7122 I get it. Everyone's gotta get their fix. XD But there was some value waiting for it on TV. ;)

Indeed😅

Nah, man. Coward Turtles Next Retirement is bad as fuck, but it doesn't deserve a fate like the Juice Box...

Rather _not_ having a sound chip, and having to use CPU for sound.

That's an insult to the GBA!