5 of the weirdest gadgets sold by RadioShack

In 1921, the Boston-based Deutschmann brothers founded RadioShack, a small mail-order company focused on amateur radio. By 1999, the company had grown into a consumer electronics empire under the leadership of Tandy Corporation, with 8,000 RadioShack locations worldwide and 94 percent of Americans reportedly living within five minutes of a store.

In its heyday, RadioShack was a haven for tech enthusiasts and DIY enthusiasts, offering components, computers, gaming consoles, stereos, gadgets, cables and much more. But let’s be honest, one of the biggest draws to a RadioShack store was the weird gadgets you could buy. From anti-snack refrigerator pigs to robotic arms to space-age speakers to TV/boobox combinations, RadioShack has stocked some truly bizarre gadgets over the years.

With the company now operating primarily as an online retailer following financial difficulties and selling fewer weird products, we’ve rounded up five of the weirdest gadgets and electronics RadioShack has ever sold.

Back in the 70s, RadioShack sold this charming but bizarre Futura high fidelity speaker. This space-age gadget featured an orb-shaped speaker atop a narrow aluminum rod that flared out to a circular base, almost like a trumpet. Thanks to this acoustic suspension design, the Realistic Futura would deliver what it calls “futuristic” sound, with the round speaker emitting omnidirectional sound and the sound then reflecting off the base in a 360-degree pattern, allowing it to fill an entire room.

What’s particularly cool about this odd-looking speaker is that you can place it almost anywhere in a room. You can place it on a desk or table, or hang it on the wall or ceiling. Given that it’s over 40 years old now, the audio quality of the Futura high-fidelity speaker probably wasn’t as high as the spatial audio technology and Bluetooth speakers we have today, but it sounds infinitely stranger and, therefore, more interesting.

If you wanted to feel guilty about having a late-night snack in the ’80s and ’90s, you could get a refrigerator pig from RadioShack. This innovative pig-shaped gadget would sit on a shelf in your fridge and snarl at you when you open the fridge door, deterring you from snacking. The refrigerator pig was light-activated, with an internal light sensor switch triggered by rotating its tail. So, if placed correctly, the rubber pig will be directly exposed to light when you open the refrigerator and therefore will growl.

It really is a gadget of its time. In the ’80s and ’90s, diet culture was at its peak, with mainstream body shaming, home workout videos a cultural phenomenon, and new fad diets constantly appearing. Luckily, these days we’re focusing more on body positivity and wellness. So you can ignore that judgmental pig and have that PB&J sandwich or slice of cake.

Manufactured by TOMY and distributed by RadioShack, Armatron is one of the most iconic RadioShack gadgets of all time, as well as one of the strangest gadgets made in the ’80s. This toy robot first hit shelves in 1984 and featured a crane-like arm that you could control with a set of joysticks, with six degrees of freedom that allowed you to manipulate its “wrist,” “elbow,” “shoulder,” and “arms.” fingers” in the form of pincers. As such, you can use the Armatron to pick up small objects and move them from place to place with impressive dexterity and precision. While this may seem somewhat boring in a modern context, you could easily lose hours with this robot toy, and still get better at it.

Although Armatron looked like a strange electrical gadget, its design was much more complex. The toy was mostly mechanical, with no automation inside. Although it had a compartment for a pair of D batteries, a three-bolt DC motor and switch, gear trains and mechanical transmissions controlled its functions. Today, the Amatron is recognized for having inspired modern robotics and an entire generation of engineers.

In 1987, phones and televisions didn’t function as all-in-one entertainment systems like they do today. Instead, you had to rely on the realistic Portavision TV Boombox, which combined a 4.5-inch black-and-white CRT TV, AM/FM stereo, and audio cassette recorder into one strange portable box.

This battery-operated entertainment system featured two microphones, a tape recorder that could record from the built-in TV or radio, two two-way speakers, an antenna, a headphone jack, a five-segment LED audio output level meter, separate tuning controls for the radio and TV, and more. But this gadget wasn’t cheap, costing $219 (about $645 in 2026).

RadioShack has offered variations of this Portavision all-in-one system over the years, including a suitably colorful ’90s edition. Although these combo systems disappeared for a few decades, they could be making a comeback, as Panasonic introduced its equally bizarre boombox/CD player/portable TV concept in early 2026.

In the late 1990s, Texas-based Digital Convergence Corporation had the idea of ​​creating a gadget that would bridge the gap between print media and the digital world. The company designed and developed the CueCat, a cat-shaped device that connected to computers via a keyboard port and allowed users to access an Internet URL by scanning a special barcode.

After receiving a total investment of $205 million from several companies, including RadioShack, Coca-Cola, and Belo Corporation, mass distribution of the CueCat began in 2000. RadioShack, alongside Wired and Forbes, offered the gadget for free in stores and featured scannable CueCat barcodes in its product catalogs. More than 10 million CueCats have been manufactured, including USB versions, but the gadget faced heavy criticism, with users and experts pointing out that the bulky gadget was intended to solve a problem that didn’t exist at the time. Ultimately, CueCat failed.

Although the cat-shaped gadget is considered one of the worst inventions of the 2000s, it is also credited with laying the conceptual foundation for modern QR codes.