Foto-Electric Football
Pop Warner football has long given young quarterbacks, linebackers, and
free safeties the chance to hone their gridiron skills on the field,
but what of those budding head coaches and offensive/defensive
coordinators? There’s no Little League for play callers, but Cadaco
came up with a way to train the future men behind the clipboards and
earpieces. The answer was Foto-Electric Football, the brainiac’s
approach to American football.
As a clue to its focus on brains over brawn, the game’s predecessor
was 1936’s Scientific Football. If you think that sounds like a bit of
an oxymoron, you obviously weren’t cut out for the life of a
Foto-Electric Footballer. Nevertheless, Cadaco decided to leave out the
hoity-toity stuff and rename their product with titles like Touchdown,
Varsity and All-American Football. The inheritor of Cadaco’s
fascination with the gridiron was Foto-Electric Football, popularized
in the 1940’s.
The aim of the game was good play calling and a bit of good
old-fashioned luck (the recipe to any coach’s success). Opposing
players called offensive and defensive plays from a set of see-through
overlay cards (12 on offense, 6 on defense). When the plays were laid
down on the box-like playing field, the “electric” part of the title
kicked in. A small light bulb inside the playfield illuminated the
results of the players’ hard work, supplemented with a set of three
dice (or spinners in some later versions) and an easy-to-read
“Foto-Electric Football Chart.”
Gameplay followed standard American football rules, and rather than
working against a clock, the game allowed 30 plays per quarter. A set
of dials in the scoreboard kept track of everything important (score,
down, plays left this quarter, etc.), and a moveable mini-football
tracked your progress up and down the mini-field.
Several updates of Foto-Electric Football arrived over the course
of the next few decades, including several “Hall of Fame” versions. The
long-running series eventually fell prey to the electronic football
craze and the rise of video games in the late 1970’s, but not before
one last hurrah. 1977’s Pro Foto-Football replaced the electric light
with a cheaper, more compact “Play Revelator” (essentially a black
sleeve for the play cards), but the rules remained the same. This
fourth-quarter comeback was short-lived, however, and the future
coaches of the world were left to test their play-calling skills on Nintendo and so on.
|
 |
| 
