Over the past three or four years, I’ve made it my personal mission to bring back Mold-A-Rama’s machines to the Oklahoma City Zoo. Remember them? They were those gigantic retro relics from a better past that would spit out wax mold figurines of various zoo creatures. They were amazing. Not only were they molded before your very eyes, giving you a fun, memorable collectible that would last forever if you didn’t leave it in a hot car, but their strong smell alerted all the other kids at the zoo to how cool you were and helped cover up the stench of the pachyderm exhibit.
I took the mission to bring back the Mold-A-Ramas very seriously. In fact, I even pressed Mayor Mick and Councilman Ed on the issue during our mayoral candidate Q&As back in 2014. This was Mayor Mick’s response.
Yeah, Mayor Cornett totally dodged the question and popped the Monkey Ship member berries. It sunk during the great zoo flood of 1984. There were no survivors.
Councilman Shadid took our question a bit more seriously:
Score one for Ed Shadid! Apparently he did very well! Thanks to our question, he went into action and pressed zoo leadership to bring back Mold-A-Rama. It worked.
Via NewsOK.com…
The Oklahoma City Zoo is bringing back a guest favorite this year with the return of Mold-A-Matics, machines that make wax animals before your eyes.
The zoo removed the machines about eight years ago and there was a mild uproar from visitors who enjoyed collecting elephants, giraffes and lions, among others.
The zoo will have eight machines on its grounds with each dispensing a different animal. The machines have the look of the 1960’s and 1970’s. And there’s a good reason for that. They are that old, though each has been restored and modernized to collect dollar bills. The machines made their debut at the 1964 World’s Fair.
Wait a second. Mold-A-Matics? I thought they were called Mold-A-Ramas? Is this some sort of cheap, Chinese knock off, or is the Mold-A-Matic the Carl’s Jr. to Mold-A-Rama’s Hardee’s? I guess I’ll have a new question to ask our mayoral candidates in 2018.
Either way, we’d like to thank Ed Shadid, The Oklahoma City Zoo and ourselves for bringing the Mold-A-Whatever machines back to the zoo. It’s the first step in making the Oklahoma City Zoo great again. I can’t wait to collect them all.
Thank you so much I enjoyed those with my grandkids and now I have a chance to enjoy them with my great grandkids
But when will they all be in place?!!
5 are in place now: Elephant, Grizzly Bear, Giraffe, Gorilla and Hippopotamus!
3 more are coming soon!
Each are $3. All machines take credit and debit cards, as well.
You probably have to be pretty old to remember these, but bring back the zoo keys. They were shaped like an elephant with the trunk sticking straight out being the key part. You would insert in a box in front of the exhibit and turn it and a recording would go off telling about the animals you were looking at? It had to be in the 60s they had those
Quick google search turned up this.
https://www.facebook.com/StoryBookZooKey/posts/509664252513538
They had the zoo keys in the 90s or early 2000s.
I guess I am old. I remember both the zoo keys (Foreman Scotty sometimes gave out gold ones didn’t he?) and the animal mold machines. I also remember the monkey ship, which, along with the seal exhibit, inexplicably always had a single kid’s shoe in the ditch separating it from the railing. I always wondered where the kid with one shoe was…did he/she have to walk out with one bare foot?
I had a Zoo Key in the 60’s and the trunk broke off in the machine 🙁
They had something like this a few years ago.
I remember putting 3 of them on the dash of the family station wagon after a long summer day… went to molly murphys to eat… came out of restaurant and had a chimera dripping into the vents.
Uh, so I guess you have all forgotten that they took those out because a child chewed on one of those toys, choked and died. Guess I am the Debbie Downer of the day, but perhaps this decision might should be rethought.
I hate to be Debbie Downer, but that’s not why they took them out.
Or maybe parents should take some responsibility, and not give their kid a wax figure if they’re still chewing on things…?