It says it uses a saxophone mouthpiece. The body appears to me to be the spring off of a wooden screen door. http://www.tomheroes.com/Comic%20Ads/classic%20ads/gahoon.htm
rumba? you’d post a link that mentioned rumba?
I think this ad makes many salient points, which I will enumerate (not necessarily in order of importance):
- 9 out of 10 PLAY IT in 10 minutes.
- NOT a humming toy.
- NOT a whistling gadget.
- Plays “Sweet”
- Plays “Hot”
- It’s a real musical instrument.
- Features the mysterious new simplified Principle. (I wonder if that’s anything like the Think System?)
Notice that, being a lady, she left out rumba?
Danger! Danger! Little sisters can pull on that thing and then let it go, dentists don’t like being woken up in the middle of the night.
They really knew how to write sales copy back then. I find myself inexorably drawn to the gahoon. Especially as the more you play the better you get, unlike other instruments which require practice. 
I would not minimize the “Think System”. That’s how I learned to play the second octave on the whistle. I didn’t bother reading the instructions, I only looked at the fingering chart. I had my family and friends convinced for quite a few months that it was magic that the whistle would just play into the second octave seeing as how I did nothing different with my fingers or anything else observable by them.
Does anyone own one? Are there video clips anywhere?
I guess the idea is that bending the spring opens a gap between the coils. So it’s going to play like a slide whistle.
Best played wearing formal dress, obviously. And for close ballroom dancing:
She: “Oh Bobby, the Gahoon is playing our tune! It makes me swoon like the moon in June!”
He: “Aw gee, Janie, that’s just swell kiddo! You smell nice.”
She: “Jeepers, Bobby, is that a Gahoon in your pocket?”
He: “Er … Why yes, yes it is!”
9 out of 10 play it in 10 minutes. The other guy went bankrupt after paying for years of Gahoon lessons.
Here’s another (in color, now $1.98!): http://comicsmakenosense.blogspot.com/2008/11/food-fight-friday.html
I love how the reed ligature is sideways.
Blurb on Tony Pastor: http://www.parabrisas.com/d_pastort.php
Yeah, interesting concept. Quoting the description in the pitch:
Instead of opening air ports, you merely bend the coiled-spring stem. This shortening or lengthening of the air column determines the tone, half-tone, or quarter-tone.
Opening air ports. In this economy. Right. But back on point, the concept has a peculiar sense to it, for as you bend a coiled tensile spring a gap in the coil would result. There’s the length of your air column for you, as bend determines, and the gaps also mean you don’t have to wait for the condensation/viscous ejecta to ooze its way down to the bell.
Sort of operates like a slide whistle in end result but with a reed, and snakeoid instead of plungeoid. I imagine manipulating the lowest notes must be a s^n#f@b!+ch and unrelated inconveniences like getting your tie, ascot, or jabot caught in it are of course a risk, which are obviously two reasons why it never caught on. I’m also pretty sure no one who bought it ever thought of the the coil gaps voiding “condensation” (such a nice word) all over the spring’s exterior, and on one’s hands, too. That would go over quite well at parties, don’t you think?
[EDIT: MTGuru beat me to the coil gap hypothesis. But I have a further inspiration. This doodad would double quite nicely as a flexy weapon, if the tension was right. Cue the reel “The Gahoon that Beat His Father”.]
Oh stop. Have you seen the outfits you get to wear when you rumba?
I’d rumba if I got to wear that 
Is that an Andalusian superhero action figure?
I would just like to thank Walden for posting this fascinating thread and, in so doing, having introduced yet another repetitive, never-ending rhyming fixation into my head.
Tune? On a gahoon? I’ll swoon!
Reflected like the moon in a gahoon was the spoon . . .
Apparently, its lineage is not traceable:
It was developed by one of the ancient East Indian Celtic groups, the Chennai, who also created tartans.
From Nanopedia:
Gahoon (gə hōōn’), n., -er, -ist. Any of several musical single reed folk wind instruments popularly held to be inspired by gleanings in the sport of dumpster diving [unattested]. Commonly a saxophone or clarinet head and reed affixed to a tension spring which is manipulated to modulate pitch. From the Irish > guth uain> , lit. “lamb’s voice”.
So-named apparently for its bleating quality. Anecdotally it has been noted that, just as in the case of lambs, the gahoon’s auditory character will often be taken as an enjoyment and emblematic of pastoral idylls at first, until frequent exposure transforms its effects on the hearer from experiencing something endearing to an increasingly “acquired taste”, a charming bleat subjectively turning to noise and noise turning into a racket, becoming ever more and more hair-tearingly abominable to the point of appalling emotional pain, unremitting without apparent hope of surcease, even from Heaven, short of nothing less than utter destruction and death itself for either the hearer or the immature ovid, the gahoon, and/or its player. This is known broadly as “The Shepherd’s Paradox”, and points to why people have been known to eat them. Lambs, that is, not gahoons or their players. And it points to why they never caught on. Gahoons and their players, that is, not lambs.
I’m wondering… what would happen if you put a Generation/Feadog style head on a screen door spring. I’m just saying’
I may have to pull the heads off a couple of cheapie whistles and head down to Home Despot…
You wouldn’t.
