In this thread I describe a toy I had when I was little. It was a battleship that exploded when you hit a panel with a torpedo fired from a submarine. It garnered this comment:
So what cool toys did you have?
One toy I had that I liked a lot was a Schaper U-Fly-It. This commercial shows a twin-engine Piper, and a control yoke. Mine was the one with the Piper Cherokee, only it didn’t have the catapult like the one in the image.
Then there was the Mattel Vertibird. Mine was the air/sea rescue version with a red helicopter, that came with a Mercury space capsule with an astronaut inside. The capsule was a clamshell, with the astronaut’s wire bail sticking out. You could hook the astronaut and pull him out of the capsule, or else pick him up from his life raft.
I had a blue Kenner SSP that was an absolute blast to play with. Mine was a ‘snow dragster’ (I don’t remember its actual name) that had tracks in back and skis in front.
Ideal’s Bing Bang Boing was cool in concept, but I could never get it to work the way it did in the commercial. Probably should have played with it outside on a hard surface, instead of on the shag carpet.
And of course, there was the Hot Wheels set with the Super Charger. The Super Charger also came in handy for a throttle control when I tipped a stool on its side, making it into a space ship.
[QUOTE=Johnny L.A.;16231085
Ideal’s [Bing Bang Boing]
(Bing Bang Boing - YouTube) was cool in concept, but I could never get it to work the way it did in the commercial. Probably should have played with it outside on a hard surface, instead of on the shag carpet.
[/QUOTE]
I remember playing with this at some distant cousins house in the 70’s and not being quite able to get it to work right. Makes me wonder how many takes they shot for that commercial.
My dad bought me a pogo stick. After a summer of practice I got pretty good at it.
When my son was about nine he bought him a unicycle.
I’m guessing it’s because he wanted to try them. He was quite the big kid, himself. I once saw him ride down our small town’s mainstreet backwards on a bicycle doing all kinds of little tricks.
I was big into Star Wars as a kid, so, I thought that my Death Star and giant AT-AT were pretty sweet. Especially the AT-AT…it had friggin’ motorized blasters that glowed.
I also had a large die-cast (lion) Voltron that was about 2 feet tall. I think my parents still have all of these up in their attic…I should get them and sell them on eBay.
Oh…and I remember a time in 3rd grade when the Pogo Ball first came out. I, like everyone else in the school, had one (mine was green and purple). I remember looking at the lockers in our school, which lined each classroom wing, and seeing pogo ball after pogo ball on every locker down the hallway. Good times.
Mattel’s Creepy Crawlers. This is also in a box somewhere. A couple of decades ago I found a toy store that sold more moulds and Plastic Goop, and I picked them up.
There was this puzzle, see, circa late 1950’s. It was on a wood frame, covered with wide strands of cloth (or maybe vinyl), some up-and-down, some left-to-right. Each side of the frame had a roller, so you could turn the strands. There were four different pictures, which you could get by turning the sides. Since some of the pictures were on the up-and-down frames and some were on the left-to-right, it took some juggling to get the whole picture to form, especially since they weren’t printed in the same order up-and-down as they were back-and-forth. I don’t have a picture in my album with it, and have never seen it since. It was the closest thing I’ve seen to 1950’s version of a Rubik’s Cube.
Star Wars action figures and the Death Star playset.
Masters of the Universe action figures and the Castle Greyskull playset.
G.I. Joe action figures with a tank and a hovercraft.
Plenty of Lego.
Oh, I remember one cool toy I liked:
It was an A-Team toy assault rifle that had two different modes. In one mode, pulling the trigger would make “rat-a-tat” noises, and in the other mode, pulling the trigger would fire darts. And there were two kinds of darts: suction-tipped darts and plastic rifle grenades. I think it had a detachable scope and a detachable stock, too. It was pretty bad-ass!
Nice. I have the Millennium Falcon as well…also had two X-Wings, the Vader Tie Fighter, the Degobah playset, the Jabba playset, tons of action figures, a land speeder, an AT-ST, Endor speeder, Ewok Village, etc… None of my stuff is factory sealed (or even with the boxes, and I’m sure most accessories are long gone). It was well used. Star Wars crap was pretty much my entire Christmas and birthday haul from about 1982-84.
When I was a kid (8?) I got a BB Gun for xmas. It was a Crossman pump air rifle that easily shattered bottles at the dump. My dad was as impressed as I was.
I was going to mention those, but it didn’t occur to me how young I was when I got into them. Now I remember eagerly awaiting the brown UPS truck, and building the rockets on my front porch. I didn’t really get into flying them until high school, though. I have two boxes of unbuilt Estes rockets in storage, including a few of my favourite: the Astron Sprint. IMO, this was the perfect rocket. The ogive nose cone was different from any other, and the ellipsoid fins and the tapered bottom section of the tube made it very sleek. And it flew like… well, a rocket!
Anecdote: I took one of my Sprints to where some CAP cadets were flying rockets, and they let me hang out with them and fly mine. When my Sprint was coming down, one of the cadets shouted ‘FIRE!’ and everyone took off to put it out when the rocket came down. They’d never seen a rocket with streamer recovery before, and the red-orange streamers were taken for flames.
I also had the Estes Scissor Wing Transport when I was about 12. A friend of my dad’s took me to a dry lake bed near Daggett. It was a beautiful, crisp desert day, with a perfect blue bowl of sky overhead. When I launched my rocket, the fins on the power pod broke. No matter; it flew beautifully. When the ejection charge fired, the wings spread. It did not fly as it did in testing. It banked to port and entered a spin from which it never recovered. My beautiful ship was smashed when it hit the ground.
I appear to be a bit older than y’all, but the Major Matt Mason action figures were pretty dang cool when I was eight or nine years old. He had this backpack that had a motor in it that allowed him to ‘fly’ up a monofilament fishing line. It was quite amusing.
And he had an alien friend who rode around in a bubble.
