Remember those "as seen on TV" lures?
Remember the gimmicks like the banjo minnow and the helicopter lure? If you don't remember using them, you probably at least remember the annoying infomercials back in the late 90s.
Now more than 20 years later, YouTuber BamaBass somehow found some of these old lures and decided to take them out to the lake for a test. But do they actually work?
You can go ahead and throw out everything else in your tackle box, you won't need it anymore with these lures! Or at least that's what the ads tried to lead you to believe. Especially the minnow with its twangy "paddle faster, I hear banjos" theme music in the commercials. That's how I remember them anyway, but I was still a kid when these things came out.
In hindsight, it's obvious these things were designed to catch fishermen, not fish!
I never personally owned the helicopter lure myself, but I did have a set of the banjo minnows. I think these two caught more fish in this short video than I ever did all the years I had them.
The biggest thing I remember about these lures was those absolutely terrible hooks. I remember missing almost every one of the few bites I had thanks to those. Even worse were the terrible rubber band "weed guards" that actually snagged every little piece of aquatic vegetation in their path!
It makes you wonder why guys like Roland Martin and Bill Dance ever attached their names to these things.
Not surprisingly, it looks like the banjo minnow won in this video because the helicopter lure doesn't look like any natural prey that actually exists.
Did you ever own the helicopter lure or the banjo minnow? If so, did they live up the hype?
NEXT: WATCH: JON B WENT FISHING IN MICHIGAN AND CAUGHT SOME REALLY WEIRD BASS
