Hūsker Dū?

:"For other uses of Hūsker Dū, see Husker Du."

Hūsker Dū? is a young children's memory game published in Denmark and also later Sweden 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 is spelled with macrons to lend an exotic Scandinavian feel, a practice later adopted by Häagen-Dazs ("zs" actually being unique to Hungarian), Frusen Glädjé, and the like. (In actuality, no Scandinavian language is spelled with macrons, although some forms of cursive, such as the Sutterlin script, employs them to distinguish lowercase Us from lowercase Ns). The game was also the source of the name of the Minneapolis punk rock band Hüsker Dü, replacing the macrons with umlauts (maybe inspired by heavy metal umlauts).

Controversial advertisement

The American version of the board game was first distributed in the 1950s by [http://pressmantoy.com/ Pressman] . 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 for the game 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 in the commercial by a misguided employee.