The SSG: Super Sonic Gliders

A Toy that Promised Flight and Delivered Tragedy

Toy commercials from the 1980s were frequently filled with false promises. I mean sure, sometimes commercials showed kids having fun with a toy and that’s all well and good, but sometimes they showed toys that simply didn’t perform the same way once you got them home. The Super Sonic Glider, known by my friends as the SSG, was one of those toys.

Picture borrowed from Reddit because my friend’s didn’t survive.

There is a special place in my heart for toys that are remembered mostly just for being big. I remember the year I got the Star Wars Death Star for Christmas, which was this massive, four-level playset that towered over every other toy in my room. Things like Shogun Warriors and that gigantic, six-foot long G.I. Joe USS Flagg Aircraft Carrier were known at least as much for their girth as they were for their playability. And the thing is, these toys weren’t cheap. That G.I. Joe carrier was nearly a hundred dollars in 80s bucks which, when combined with the fact that it was half the length of my bedroom, explained why most kids never owned one.

The SSG, or Super Sonic Glider, was different. Don’t get me wrong, the thing was gigantic — maybe four foot long and just as wide, which seemed even larger when I was only four-foot tall. Despite being absolutely huge, the thing was affordable. While I can’t find an official MSRP from the time, I seem to recall they were somewhere in the $10-$15 range.

Now before I talk about the SSG I want to talk about paper airplanes. Everybody knows how to make a paper airplane — at least, I assume kids still know how to make them. Maybe all their homework is digital now and they no longer receive an endless supply of homework sheets waiting to be converted into an aerial aviation army. That would be a shame. Then again they have pretty killer games on their Nintendo Switches and probably don’t care about paper airplanes. Anyway, here’s my point. When I was a kid, everybody knew how to fold a paper airplane. I made them all the time. After school while riding the bus my friends and I would fold our graded homework into planes and send them sailing around the bus.

Despite knowing how to fold a paper airplane, none of the ones I made flew very far. A really good one might sail across a room and a sloppy, unevenly-folded one might only make it a few feet. I thought that’s how all paper airplanes flew until I met Chris. Chris was one of those kids who wrote with a mechanical pencil and sometimes wrote his spelling words on graph paper. Chris was meticulous when it came to things like building models or, yes, folding paper airplanes. In the cafeteria one day I watched Chris fold a paper airplane with the care and accuracy of an ancient master of origami — the way my grandma handled her old black and white photographs. His young hands were like a craftsman’s, carefully measuring each fold before creasing it sharply with his fingernail. Every few folds Chris would hold the plane up as if he were checking the weight distribution or its aerodynamics.

It was all fun and games until Chris gently raised his plane into the air and, with a quick but gentle flick, let it go. The plane sailed around the cafeteria for what seemed like minutes — as if it had a tiny motor and a little pilot inside. It went up and down and all around. Up until that point I had thought the key to getting a paper airplane to fly all the way across a room was with a forceful launch. It was one of the first times I witnessed elegance, and certainly the first time I ever experienced it in a grade school cafeteria.

Did you know the world’s record for a paper airplane flight is almost 300 feet, or about the length of an entire football field?

Where was I? Oh yeah, the SSG.

While it’s possible places like Walmart may have sold the SSG, the only two places I ever saw it for sale was at the mall and on television. On Saturday mornings and after school, the SSG commercial would come on. In the commercial a kid would pick up the giant glider and launch it into the stratosphere. Just like Chris’s paper airplane, the SSG wouldn’t just fly a few feet before taking a dive — it would soar! It seemed like if you threw that thing facing south while standing in Oklahoma you had better have someone in Texas ready to catch it! Even better was the fact that the wings could be positioned so that the SSG would perform tricks. One tweak here and the plane would do a loop! A little tweak there and, just like Chris’s plane, the SSG would take a leisurely tour of your entire front yard, gently returning to the hand that launched it minutes later. Throughout the commercial as the boy threw the plane, an off-screen announcer yelled at us, touting the plane’s capabilities.

“It soars! It flies! It’s the S S G, a Super Sonic Glider!”

Have you ever owned a boomerang? I had one as a kid, a Nerf Boomerang. I threw that thing at least a hundred times and despite hitting the house, a tree, our dog, and my sister, not once did that thing ever come back to me. Sometimes it didn’t even come back to the same zip code. It’s specialty was flying 50 feet away in an arcing loop, coming back 25 feet, and then taking off again. Its flight pattern had the consistency of a fruit fly. Around my house my dad referred to the Nerf Boomerang as “that thing I have to keep getting off the roof with the garden hose.”

So the thing was, everybody wanted one of those giant Super Sonic Gliders. We watched the commercials and imagined what it would be like to tape Star Wars men to the plane and send them on a journey. The magic of flight! All of us owned toy X-Wing fighters and army planes… but none of them actually flew. A toy that could actually take flight? That would be something.

My neighbor Mitch was the first kid I knew who finally got an SSG. It came unassembled and was delivered in a see-through plastic bag with writing on it. The plane had to be assembled, not that there was much to it. The large body had slots where each wing (left and right) and the rear stabilizers were to be inserted. Like all great toys from the era, the SSG also came with a large sheet of stickers. There were stripes and numbers and a whole collection of stickers for plane decorating. Everything included was red or blue to go with the white plane. Even the printing on the bag was red and blue. The SSG: flying for America.

Again I want to stress the sheer size of this plane. While standing upright on the ground the SSG wasn’t as tall as we were as grade school kids, but it was close. This wasn’t the type of toy that one simply carried from place to place — it was lugged. Cradled, in two arms. Transported around on that six-foot long G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, perhaps.

I remember the maiden flight of Mitch’s SSG so clearly that it’s like I’m a ghost, standing in his front yard with the same anticipation I had that day. There were only a few of us in attendance, which seems odd. You would think for such a momentous occasion the local newspaper might have sent out a reporter or something.

I can still hear the man’s voice from the commercial in my mind. “That’s right kids, it’s the S S G — the Super Sonic Glider! It flies, it does loops, it defies the laws of gravity!”

None of us knew exactly what the SSG would do when it left Mitch’s hand. The plane was so large that, unlike the gentle push that had launched Chris’s paper airplane, the SSG’s takeoff needed thrust. As the rest of us jittered with anticipation, Mitch hoisted the plane above his head and with the same form one might throw a football, launched the SSG.

The plane immediately did a back flip and crashed nose first into the ground.

Hard.

You know how in cartoons sometimes people fall off a cliff and when they hit the ground all their clothes including their socks and shoes pop off? It was like that. The wings, the stabilizers, hell, even the stickers fell off. Just, POW. The SSG hit the ground with the force of a real plane crash. The plane could not have hit the ground harder if Mitch had climbed a ladder, tied a bowling ball to it, and droped it nose first into the ground. The explosion couldn’t have been more spectacular if we had taped firecrackers to the underbelly of the glider and blown it up ourselves.

As our small circle of friends approached the SSG, the damage was obvious. The carefully carved holes that were designed to hold the wings had busted apart. The stabilizer, which moments before had been one piece, was now two. It wasn’t clear if the stickers had fallen off due to cheap glue or if they had simply tried to walk away and separate themselves from this tragedy. The styrofoam wasn’t strong enough to withstand a single crash. The maiden voyage of Mitch’s SSG was also its last.

Well, sort of.

You see, Mitch’s dad had some duct tape and I had some rope. Maybe a staple gun or some hot glue was involved, who knows. Somehow we reassembled what was left of that thing and while it never flew again the way we were promised it would on television, we spent an entire summer playing with it. We would set up little green army men and throw the plane at them in some sort of twisted version of bowling. We threw the plane off Mitch’s roof to see what would happen and, sometimes, at each other’s heads. We attached a rope to the nose and dragged it all around the neighborhood while riding our bikes. I once saw Mitch riding around the neighborhood on his skateboard while holding the SSG over his head as if he were the Statue of Liberty.

So, yeah. The SSG wasn’t a very good plane… but in the end, it turned out to be a pretty good toy.