With no obvious niche or personality of their own, one might say each was driven by the exact same sort of motor.
Left to their devices, teams would have stayed with the barbaric flying wedge as the preferred attack.
And even when the newfangled "forward pass" was added, it largely was shunned as a fanciful, risky gimmick, and the game remained focused on the plodding brawn in the trenches.
Much like the game that inspired it, electric football has evolved radically into a sophisticated, specialized, precision-based game that Kansas City Electric Football commissioner Kelley Newton likes to call "vibrating chess."
Even what Newton recalls as the relatively progressive era of using screws and bolts to enhance players, making virtual Frankensteins of them, has been rendered archaic.
Advances now include true artistry of fields and surroundings, customization of players and even a certain fulfilling choreography out of what used to be pure chaos.
"Because of its speed, you can really get rattled in this game if you're not ready to compete," said Newton, who played basketball at Oklahoma and now coaches hoops at Kansas City Kansas Community College ... and is ranked in the top 10 nationally in electric football.
With a tool kit that includes flat-nosed pliers, a lighter and up to four grams of performance-enhancing putty per player, Lynn "Weirdwolf" Schmidt of Parkville demonstrates how the modern performer can be genetically engineered to actually do what you assign him to do ... instead of unleashing the whimsical mutinies of the past.
"Tweaking," they call it, in the parlance of the game.
Up to 60 players can be modified for intricate duties, from whirring 15 yards and looping to the right, to standing their ground, to intricately flicking a pass or kicking a field goal.
"By squeezing the prongs a certain way and bending them and doing certain things to them, we can get them to run where we want them to run," said Schmidt, whose nickname stems from the getups he wears to Chiefs games and who has been a pivotal force in the national revitalization of the game. "We also use clippers and lighters, because the plastic on the prongs comes with a little bit of flashing from the molding process. ...
"So you can change a base right away from going nowhere to flying across the field."
Schmidt grew up in a Mennonite family in remote Goessel, Kan. He remembers being captivated by the game as an 11-year-old when his father brought it home from a farm auction as a throw-in with a box of nuts and bolts he'd purchased.
His interest eventually subsided, but he was intrigued anew in 1999 when he came across an updated version in a toy store.
That led to poking around the Internet for information and fellowship about the game, and by 2007 he felt the reverberations enough to help found the national Miniature Football Coaches Association that created a 24-page rule guide.
Schmidt, a graphic designer by trade, now presides over a game that in recent years has grown into having a national tournament and convention (this year it's July 29-31 in Richmond, Va.,), inaugurated a Hall of Fame, been the subject of a 600-page book ("The Unforgettable Buzz") and enjoyed the spotlight in an ESPN 30-for-30 short.
Less authentically, the game a few years ago was featured in a Bud Light commercial depicting former NFL coach Jimmy Johnson playing in a bar.
"They didn't even have bases on the men _ terrible, terrible," Schmidt said, with the pleasant bemusement that seems to be his default face.
As they competed a few weeks ago in the basement of Tiff N Jay's bar and grill in Lee's Summit, Newton playfully chimed in, "Everybody in the electric football world was mad."
Now Schmidt is hopeful the sport can earn a reality TV show. And it's hard to doubt its potential if you see this captivating film by Porter Street Production taken at last year's convention. A more conceptual encore is to be done this year.
"The Los Angeles Electric Football League is on the forefront talking to people in the Hollywood area," Schmidt said. "They've had bites; they just haven't sealed the deal yet."
This might all seem hard to absorb when you think of a game that for years had faded from view. It had become further an afterthought with the explosion of video games.
And, let's face it, with some good reason.
Nostalgia might have been the best thing it had going for it beyond the innovative early years.
When the "Tudor TRU-ACTION Electric Football Game was released in 1949, it "brought a realism to sports toys that had never been seen before," Earl Shores and Roddy Garcia wrote in "The Unforgettable Buzz."
"Instead of flipping a card, spinning a spinner, or rolling dice to determine the outcome of a play," they wrote, "a kid could now line up his players in real football formations ... and watch the action unfold before his eyes."
In the context of the times, the authors argue, the model offered "as much football realism to postwar boys as PlayStation, Xbox and Wii games do for today's computer generation."
By the late 1960s and 1970s, when those of us of a certain age were playing, the game was inexplicably addictive considering the exasperating anticlimax of ... actually playing it.
For the unfamiliar, or even the familiar, this description by writer Vince Rause in a 1989 PhillySport article will take you there:
"The players were little plastic drones, riding on thin celluloid tabs fixed to their bases. The gridiron was a flat sheet of thin-gauge steel. A simple electronic motor vibrated the metal playing surface, sending the players skittering frantically across the field.
"You had no control over their motions, of course; you just ... flipped the switch and watched them go. Sometimes they'd show eerily lifelike reactions – runners boldly sliding off blockers to find the open hole, defenders swooping in to make game-saving, open-field tackles _ but mostly they buzzed along in aimless circles or huddled in jittery gaggles along the end line.
"Sometimes they'd race backwards. Sometimes they'd perform woozy, doddering pirouettes. And sometimes a runner would stop dead just inches short of an easy score, trembling in place as though stricken by a sudden bolt of St. Vitus' dance."
On any given Monday, the KCEF convenes in bars around the area.
They'll meet this coming Monday at Tiff N Jay's to settle the league championship, in which Newton will be the favorite but 24-year-old nephew Bryan Newton aims to take down "the master."
"I'm going to be in the championship game," Bryan said, laughing. "You've got that on record."
A game that nationally attracts old and young, liberal and conservative, Muslim and Christian, male and female draws a diverse group locally, too.
Among those competing with Schmidt and the Newtons on a recent Monday night at Paul & Jack's Tavern in North Kansas City are Billy Rodgers (as in Big Billy's BBQ), his 24-year-old son Zach and Ken Van Pelt, a longtime Kansas City school district art teacher and war games devotee who was one of the guardians of this game when it was at its apparent lowest ebb about 30 years ago.
"It was a toy that had gone out of production," said Van Pelt, who through thrift stores and garage sales assembled what he called whatever "hand-me-down leftover mishmash" elements he could.
When he told a friend about it his rekindled interest, the friend recalled having one in his attic and dug it out.
They eventually got up to 12 boards and formed a league of their own.
This is the second season of this specific league of about eight members, but Schmidt and others hope expansion is soon to come.
While they relish the competition, their hobby is about the fellowship and face-to-face engagement _ something all cite as part of the attraction, something evident from the camaraderie among them.
So this is as much about playing as it is about spreading the word that the game you loved to hate still is here.
It's better than ever, yes, but it hasn't entirely abandoned its origins.
Clad in an Oklahoma uniform the other night, Newton's designated ballcarrier had an open field before him as the metal sheet vibrated.
Suddenly, for no reason at all, he veered out of bounds.
"Awww," Newton moaned, "he was supposed to turn up."
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