Candyland can get competitive and Twister is a twisted ankle waiting to happen, but Operation is the low-key worst game of all time. Encouraging children to sharpen their precision skills and improve their dexterity is all well and good, but when the 5-year-old accidentally touches the tweezers to Cavity Sam's body while attempting to pluck out a toothpick-sized bone that's hypothetically paining the battery-operated patient, an earth-shatteringly loud buzzer blares, signaling the end of a turn and a rude awakening to a kindergartener's dream of someday becoming a surgeon.
As if the original Cavity Sam wasn't traumatic enough back in the day, now parents have a whole new way to entice their offspring to join the lucrative medical field. Only this time, it's a crash course in dermatology — pimple-popping, to be exact.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
Dr. Pimple Popper, a.k.a. board-certified dermatologist Sandra Lee, MD, has just announced a collaboration with Spin Master, a leading global children’s entertainment company, to bring a "Pimple Pete" board game to the masses. The objective of the game is to gently extract pull-able gummy pimples from Pete's face, but what makes it an anxiety-ridden, Operation-esque challenge is that, when the aspiring derm rocks Pete's face forward or back in the midst of an extraction, the "mega-zit" on his nose explodes, spraying the losing player with a sharp shot of pus water.
Unfortunately, Cavity Sam's adolescent grandson, Pimple Pete, doesn't hit mass retailers until August. In the meantime, popaholics of all ages can catch Dr. Sandra Lee in her new TLC TV series, Dr. Pimple Popper, premiering on July 11th, where she'll be tackling real-life patients’ debilitating skin conditions and helping them reclaim their lives in the process.
At the very least, the six-episode series will give you some time to study up. Then maybe you'll dust off the old Operation, pop in some AA batteries, and perfect your surgical skills. We're predicting some very competitive family game nights ahead.