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Hungry Hungry Hippos

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Hungry Hungry Hippos

Hungry Hungry Hippos (or Hungry Hippos in some UK editions) is a tabletop game made for 2–4 players, produced by Hasbro, under the brand of its subsidiary, Milton Bradley. The idea for the game was published in 1967 by toy inventor Fred Kroll and it was introduced in 1978. The objective is for each player to collect as many marbles as possible with their toy hippopotamus model. The game was, at one point, marketed under the "Elefun and Friends" banner, along with Elefun, Mouse Trap and Gator Golf.

The game board is surrounded by four colorful plastic mechanical hippopotami operated by levers on their backs. When the lever is pressed, the hippo opens its mouth and extends its head forwards on a telescopic neck. When the lever is released, the head comes down and retracts. Plastic marbles are dispensed into the board by each player, and the players repeatedly press the lever on their hippo to make it "eat" the marbles, which travel under the hippo into a small scoring area for each player. Once all marbles are captured, the player who collected the most is the winner.

The original late-'70s and '80s television advertisements for the game featured a memorable jingle:

If you wanna win the game you've gotta take good aim
And get the most marbles with your hippo
Playin' Hungry Hungry Hippos
Hungry Hungry Hippos

The 1990s-era advertisements featured a series of brightly colored cartoon hippos dancing in a conga line and singing, "Hungry Hungry Hip-pos!" to the beat:

Hungry, hungy hippos
We're hungry, hungry hippos
We love to feed our face
We're hungry hungry hippos
We're in an eating race

In 2009, the song in the commercial was the "Elefun and Friends" theme song.

In 1991, Innovative Concepts in Entertainment (ICE) created a redemption arcade version of the game, a supersized resemblance of the board game version. The amount of marbles consumed was displayed at the top of the dome for each player. The more marbles a hippo consumed, the more tickets that hippo's player received.

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