Here's a blast from the past — from 7/8/02 to be specific…
Time to recall another toy from my childhood: I was never particularly into toy guns but around the time I was eight, Mattel brought out what momentarily seemed like a Must-Own. It was the Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun…a tiny toy derringer built into a belt buckle. The premise here was that you were caught unarmed by the bad guys. "Put your hands up," they'd command and, since they had more conventional Mattel cap pistols (like the lethal Fanner 50 model) trained on you, you'd comply…and it would look like you were done-for. But! What they didn't realize was that you, shrewd lawman that you were, were wearing your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun belt buckle. Just as they were about to pull their triggers, you would stick your tummy out and spring the control on the obverse side of the buckle. Suddenly, the derringer would pop out and fire at whoever was standing in front of you! What a secret weapon.
Of course, in real life, it didn't work precisely the way it did in the commercials. Few toys of my childhood ever did. First off, if you exhaled too much — or sometimes, for no reason at all — the derringer would spring out and fire before you were ready. The answer to this was that there was a little lock on the bottom of the buckle. Just before you were ready to fire, you had to take the lock off…which, of course, telegraphed to the bad guys that you were up to something and they would kill you before you could.
Another problem was that, in the commercial, the good guy would pop the buckle and shoot one bad guy, then snatch the derringer off the buckle lever and use it to fire several more shots, felling the other villains. This looked neat in the commercial but once you got your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun, you discovered that it could only fire one shot before you had to stop and reload.
This took about five minutes. Mattel Shootin' Shell guns worked with a three-part ammo. One part was a plastic bullet — this was the part that actually fired. The derringer came with ten of these and after you shot people, you had to run around and find your plastic bullets so you could reuse them. Often, you couldn't, so you had to run out and buy another pack of plastic bullets.
You would insert one plastic bullet into a metal casing with a little spring in it. The derringer buckle came with two. Then, you'd take a page of Mattel's special caps — little round, green ones on a sheet of peel-off labels. You'd apply one cap to the back end of the bullet casing and you'd have a complete bullet you could insert into the gun and fire.
It was all a clumsy, awkward assembly and half the time, the cap would not explode so the plastic part of the bullet would be launched with an unexciting thud.
I remember having a semi-wonderful time with my Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun for about three days, or until I'd acted out the big ambush scene with all five of my friends. Then I stuck it in the back of my closet and got out my Chutes-'n'-Ladders board game. It didn't make a loud bang but at least it didn't force me to crawl around in the grass looking for my plastic bullets. Paladin — the guy on Have Gun, Will Travel — never had to do that.