The Best Thing That Happened This Week: OMG, Zoo Keys Are Back!

Zoo Key, photo courtesy The Philadelphia Zoo.

Somewhere in our house, we’ve still got it: the elephant-shaped Zoo Key we bought on our third-grade field trip to the Philadelphia Zoo. The key you stuck into the special box beside the exhibit of monkeys or alligators or giraffes. It’s hard to imagine, now that we all have super-computers in our pockets, but turning the Zoo Key made that little box talk — like a radio, like the still-novel TV — and tell you all about the critters at hand. It was magic. It was power. It was so, so cool.

We were sad for days when we heard, back in 2007, that the Zoo was doing away with the keys, moving onward and upward to focus on “new initiatives.” (Boo, hiss!) But this week, the Zoo announced that the Zoo Keys are back, available for purchase at the almost-1960s price of $3 apiece. But the best news of all: The old keys still work! Come the debut date of April 6th, we’re gonna be in line for our tickets! First, though, we have to find that key. …