I remember safety-pinning pillowcases around our necks, affixing hand drawn superhero logos to our shirts, holding our arms straight out and my sister and I would “fly” around the house and yard.
I have fond memories about videogames which blew my young mind and fulfilled ALL expectations, and surpassed them!
When Super Metroid came out the stores were sold out, you couldn’t even buy it if you had the money(big money for a kid). Walmart had a demo SNES with SM in it, there was a line of kids(ok boys but still) waiting for a turn. This kid had been bogarting it for like ten minutes, then when prompted to give he said casually that it was ok as he had the game at home and had already played past this part.
Collective kid groan from the line.
Some really, really good ones here.
I was born in the late 70’s and so grew up during the 80’s.
Hated visits to elderly relatives every couple weeks.
Furniture stores that had play rooms with toys and/or a jungle gym.
Worst errand: Fabric store with mom.
Fast forwarding past the FBI warning.
Cub Scouts, later Boy Scouts.
Forts made from a box fan under a bed sheet.
Changing fuses in the basement.
The bad guys when playing war? The Russians.
Sneaking into the golf course at night and swiping range balls.
Phones with a tone/pulse switch.
BMX vs freestyle bike preferences were important.
Checking every TransAm I’d see for Knight Rider flashers on the nose.
SMB 1, 2, & 3.
Harry Caray (Distinctively voiced, longtime announcer for the Chicago Cubs).
Field trips.
Peeking at the adult selection at the video store.
Jumping in a pile of leaves was legitimately fun.
Hiding in the shower to scare my brother.
Digging through plants looking for that lost baseball.
Intense jealousy when a kid at school shows up with this awesome tiny pocket tv.
Sharks & Minnows at the city pool.
Playing Oregon Trail for a thirty minute block at the library.
A visit to Grandma’s had an exotic treat: Softsoap!
Oh yeah: a couple of towels and your imagination! We lived in the country, so there were only a handful of kids to play with - it was always Cam, Chad, my brother, and me, and sometimes my cousin Morris. I always had to be Wonder Woman when we played Justice League. (Very occasionally, the littlest sisters would play. They were 4-5 years younger than us “big kids,” so they got the really lame characters - the Wonder Twins!)
Catching lightning bugs was always fun… until you accidentally squashed one, and then forgot about the bug guts and wiped your mouth. Bitter!
We had dirt clod wars, but not often, because Cam would get competitive and mean, and start using rocks.
When my cousins came to visit from the West Coast, there was always a trip to the beach with my grandparents, in Granddaddy’s land yacht of a station wagon (faux wood grain and everything.) He bought that car specifically for grandkid outings, and ordered it with a power window on the back, assuming that at least one grandchild would insist on sitting in the rear-facing Way Back seat and get sick. I was always that kid.
Also during those All the Cousins summers: there were 8 of us, and 5 of us were closely grouped in age (all born between August of 1968 and September 1970.) The oldest cousin was too cool for the rest of us, so she entertained herself by being mean - chasing us with Doodoo on a Stick, telling creepy stories. I can still creep myself out a bit by remembering her version of the plot of Children of the Corn, recounted to us on a full moon night out in the corn field behind the house…
And my favorite babysitter and cousin did fun stuff like taking us snipe hunting. Or forget that he had a date on a night he was supposed to babysit. Usually he’d just drag us kids along on a date at the drive-in. If the movie was inappropriate for little kids, he’d shove our heads down when scary music came on. The soundtrack to Jaws still makes me a little claustrophobic. (And after the movie, there would be the mad rush to drop off his date and get back to the house. Usually, my parents had been at the same movie, and arranged a sitter because it wasn’t an appropriate movie for kids!)
What’s your favorite planet?
Mine’s the Sun!
Dunno if anyone else ever did this, but there was a park near our school where a lot of kids used to hang out and somehow, someone realized if you spin in a circle real fast you got hilariously dizzy, and eventually this lead to 20 or 30 kids all lined up at one end of the park, spinning as fast as they could for 30 seconds, and then trying to race across the park to the fence on the other side. This resulted in many situations leading to injuries, including running into a shed, smashing into a fire hydrant, going headlong into a tree, and the actual park in the park with the slides and swings and monkey bars provided plenty of danger by itself. Even if you managed to get across the field to the fence you weren’t safe, since the fence was just the right height you could smash into it and fall face first over it into someone’s backyard.
Hate to be gross, but I want negatives as much as positives in this thread and you’d be hard-pressed to find a guy on the Dope who doesn’t remember the fear of random boners when we all started to hit that magical age. You just had to hope it wasn’t your turn to stand up and read in front of the class when they happened. It was like playing Russian Roulette with more than your life.
Bummer thoughts aren’t “nostalgia”
But, I accept your desire to want negative memories in this thread, too, so…
Playing around with my slingshot, killing a bird I aimed at, realizing how dangerous the world can be.
Seeing mommy descend into her mean (drunken) personality later in the day and staying out as late as possible after dinner before getting into trouble.
That stinkin mean kid at the bus stop. Can I do to him what I did to the bird?
My sister and I weren’t allowed to have Barbies, so when we were invited to friends’ houses we only wanted to play with Barbies.
I never played butts-up, but it was played every day. I did play kickball, though. I was awful, but I’d play it again now.
There were playground toy fads. We had chinese jumpropes, and then kerbangers, paddleballs, yo-yos…baseball cards had a few turns.
On the less bright side -
I was teased mercilessly, especially on the bus. Several bullies liked to throw spitballs into my long dark wide frizzy (not quite Roseane Rosanadana, but it wouldn’t have taken me much to get there) hair.
Babysitting for the kid with the pervy dad. He never did anything to me or my sister, but talking about him years later we learned that both of us got the same creepy vibe from him.
Playing four square on the playground during recess
Watching The Price is Right every day during summer vacation
Eating nachos loaded with all sorts of stuff (sour cream, salsa, taco meat, etc.) at the minor league baseball stadium
Listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller record
Thinking every bump would result in certain death on turbulent airplane rides
Field trip one day and carnival the next day during the last week of school
Buying school supplies: Peachees (those peach colored folders with sports figures on them)and those blue, three ring binders that everyone would write their favorite song lyrics on. We also had to cover our textbooks and most people used brown paper shopping bags. I can still smell the plastic pencil pouch.
The most popular perfume in the late '70s/ early '80s was Ralph Lauren but if you couldn’t afford that you wore Tatiana.
I could go on and on. Will come back later and see what has not yet been mentioned.
Buying school supplies is a good shout. I didn’t even like school, but my fuck did I love going to Staples with my mom and getting a new binder and some paper, and maybe a fancy pen or two. There was a fad that lasted for most of grade 8 where everyone ditched their binders for these things I forget the name of, which had a string or a hook to close them and when you undid it, they expanded and there was a whole bunch of plastic dividers in them you could sort your subjects by.
In addition to this, never will I forget the exasperation of dealing with teachers who thought duotangs were superior to binders in every way. ‘Sorry class, I know there’s 400 pages in your half-inch cardboard poor man’s binder, but this next sheet goes in between page 256 and 257. Don’t worry, it’s really easy to organize a duotang’.
Playing Sonic
The Sonic movie was awesome. Metal Sonic’s voice scared the life outta me when I was 9.
I remember “FLOOR IS LAVA”…they have a Scribblenauts Unmasked mission based on that!
I also used to play Justice League…I was Batgirl.
Spiderman and the X-MEN on Saturday morning Fox Kids and than the Marvel Action Hour on Sunday morning that included The Fantastic Four and Iron Man.
The Looney Tunes. I swore an oath of fealty to Warner Bros. when I was 4.
Watching Wild Kingdom and the Walt Disney show on Sunday nights. Sure, the Disney shows were kind of corny but I liked the ones about mountain lions. Oddly enough, I later learned that this show was also one of Mengele’s favorites.
Pretending to be Odin or Mighty Thor (I wore the colander on my head as a helmet). Playing Ragnarok up on the hill and seeing who could stage the most elaborate death scene.
Wading in the creek catching crawdads with our hands and stepping on broken whiskey bottles. Soaking our feet in hot water to prevent infections.
Raising swallowtail caterpillars and watching them become butterflies. Once a parasitic wasp came out of the chrysalis and freaked out my mother.
Snow days.
Going downtown past the spooky Victorian houses. I thought they were haunted and they seemed to be watching me.
Playing with the the de-packaged light sabers or the sample makeup at the local shopping center and making obscene gestures at the security cameras.
For anyone else wondering, I bet he’s talking about Trapper Keepers.
Loved mine. It was kelly green and covered in puffy stickers.
Saturday morning scifi movies
The ice cream man who came every evening at 11
Sitting on the stoop in Brooklyn
Tar beach…sunning on the roof
Coney Island in all it’s decrepit glory
The dangerous filthy subway
1.5 hour bus ride to the only mall in Brooklyn
Going to the soda fountain and getting an egg cream as a reward for enduring a bad haircut from the mean Italian barber
Packed 5:30 masses on Sunday nights (last chance mass, we called it)
Having all my cousins in the same block/apartment building
Blackouts when the whole neighborhood sat outside on the stoops in sweltering heat
When the boiler broke and school was cancelled
Exploring prospect park and escaping being mugged, sometimes
Midnight showings of Rocky Horror picture show and smuggling liquor in soda bottles
Walking the length of Ocean parkway to the beach because we didn’t have train fare for a round trip.
Hearing the sounds of my mom, dad and brother snoring in our shared bedroom in the tenement
My friends and I used to spend hours on end riding our bicycles from one end to the other of the short dead-end dirt road my friends lived on, skidding at either end. My Lord, the people driving by the stop-sign-end of the road. We must have given some of them heart attacks, thinking we weren’t going to stop.
My best friend and I built a treehouse out in the woods behind his house. I’d say its floor was about 20 feet up. We had a long rope tire swing to get off with, the rope probably sat at about 70 degrees when the tire was up to the launch platform. One of our friends had his ass hanging a bit too low when he swung down, one time. We laughed. He didn’t.
My (same) friend and I used to play one-on-one hockey on a little pond on his property. No skates, just boots.
One hot summer day, he and I decided to ride down to the local creek, and try our luck fishing. It was close to an hour’s ride on our bikes, and we were young enough that my parents would never have let us go that far on our own. Our story? We’re going fishing at his pond. Good thing we didn’t catch anything, how would we have explained brook trout coming out of a tiny pond? lol
My dad used to always watch Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling, and I would snuggle with him and watch it too. I remember many of the names of wrestlers involved: Leo Burke, Stephen Petitpas (hometown favorite), Killer Karl Krupp, The Cuban Assassin. I remember sitting in the car with my mom, waiting for dad outside the grocery store, and Killer Karl Krupp walked by. I hid in the back seat, afraid he’d use his finishing move, The Claw, on me.
Walking down to the laundromat in shorts and moon boots in the middle of summer, spending hours lying flat on the disgusting floor to fish out what seemed like a fortune in the filthiest, stickiest quarters you could imagine from under each machine. Taking the heaps of goopy quarters to the dime store next door, dumping them all on the counter and asking the poor cashier for some candy and as many packs of baseball cards as that could get us. (At 35 cents a pack, it was usually a LOT.)
Coming up with 1 harebrained idea after another to get money to buy more baseball cards. Our best was going door to door selling rocks from our driveway. Another good one- going door to door in July selling vouchers to shovel their driveways next time it snowed.
Watching Star Trek reruns on UHF. Watching Doctor Who 25 mins or so at a time right after school on PBS before I did my chores and homework. Doctors 3 and 4.
Climbing as high as I could get in any tree I found while biking thru the neighborhood before supper time.