Hūsker Dū?

For other uses, see Husker Du (disambiguation).

Hūsker Dū? is a young children's memory game resembling Russian Roulette, published in Denmark^{[citation needed]} and also later Sweden^{[citation needed]} and North America in the 1950s, and is still in print. The name means "Do you remember?" in Danish and Norwegian.

Game play

The game board consists of a surface with holes in it, laid on top of a dial which contains small pictures. The dial is rotated before the start of the game, so that each image falls under a hole. Each hole is covered up by a marker. On a player's turn, he or she removes two markers to reveal the pictures underneath. If the images match, the player gets to take the two markers as their score. If there is not a match, the markers are replaced and the next player takes his or her turn. The winner is the player who takes the most pawns.

The name of the game, unlike the Scandinavian phrase, is spelled with macrons. In actuality, no Scandinavian language is written with macrons, although some forms of cursive, such as the Sütterlin script, employ them to distinguish lowercase Us from lowercase Ns. The Minneapolis punk rock band Hüsker Dü, which took its name from the game, replaced the macrons with umlauts.

Controversial advertisement

The American version of the board game was first distributed in the 1950s by the Pressman Toy Corporation. The board game proclaimed itself a game "in which the child can outwit the adult."

A notorious advertisement for the game that aired during the 1973 Christmas season featured subliminal cuts, with the phrase "Get It". Even though subliminal messages are commonly believed to be ineffective, the FCC received complaints about the ad and issued a public notice calling subliminal advertising "deceptive and contrary to the public interest."

The Premium Corporation of America voluntarily removed the commercial from the air, claiming that the subliminal message was inserted by a misguided employee.

Another early ad featured a voiceover by pro wrestling announcer Mean Gene Okerlund.

External links

• Hūsker Dū at BoardGameGeek