Thanks, Pixel.
This is what I came in to mention. We would build square little forts and cover them with our blankies. At one point I thought maybe I had dreamed that we had such a toy but Mom confirmed they really existed.
I had that 
A good friend had one of those and boy did we ever get it when we shot it off inside.
Me too, I had forgotten about that. It was awesome.
Lots of fond memories in this thread and it seems many of the contributors are my contemporaries. I’m surprised one of the coolest toys ever hasn’t been mentioned the Erector Set.
You could crank the siren, the doors would slowly open, the missile would raise up, and your parent’s faces would get more and more red…
I was going to reply to this before, but board problems prevented it.
I never had Fort Apache. But I did have loads of green army men. Some came with tanks. My friends and I would line them up in opposing armies, then take turns shooting rubber bands at them. The prone gunners were the hardest to hit. We also used to build little villages out of scraps of wood, with sticks on rocks as levers. Hit the end of the lever with a rock, and the hut would ‘explode’. At some point, I took to painting the army men with my model paints – flesh-tone skin, black M16s, brown stocks on M1s, camouflaged uniforms.
Not a ‘cool toy’ as I imagined when I started the thread, but fun to play with.
This thread reminds me of a comment my wife once made about her (now grown) children: “It’s a miracle any of them lived to adulthood”.
“Survival of the Fittest.”
My (older) brother had an Eldon Bowl-a-Matic. Here’s a video of one-
Of the zillions of toy guns I had as a kid 2 were the coolest. In fact, one wasn’t even a toy, it was a real freaking gun! In my neighborhood some of our dads came back from Korea with, ahem “souvenirs”, i.e., somewhat junky Colt 1911 .45’s. Firing pin pulled out and a block of wood glued in the magazine well and it became the coolest toy a boy could have at the time. Slide worked, hammer cocked, trigger released the hammer.
And not one of us committed a crime with them. Imagine that!
An actual toy gun I had was a Johnny Eagle. It was cool as hell with cartridge caps, working action and ammo mags.
These 2 things help make up for the stupid electric football game I got one year. Even in the early 60’s I thought it was lame!
I did have that but I also had something similar. It was a construction set of plastic girders that you “welded” together by melting plastic rivets. The idea was you were to create skyscrapers by welding the girders and sticking on face pieces. The reality was you were getting burns and inhaling the fumes of melting plastic. Good times.
An Uncle of unknown relationship-perhaps he was a great uncle, or an uncle once or thrice removed-came through Arkansas from California and gave me a Dick Tracy tommy gun and .38 special with shoulder holster. I was extremely pissed that the other side while playing war didn’t admit they were dead from the tommy gun. I wore the .38 in the shoulder holster at Disney land.
Oh Og… I had completely blanked out the lameness that was an ‘Electric Football Game’. Nothing ever really worked. You could adjust the little plastic comb things but that only made them jerk left rather than right. And did you ever, ever see one of them run straight for more than about 2 centimeters? But, it came in a big bright box and my Dad knew I loved football, so what could go wrong, right?
We were a boardgame kind of family. My brother and I would convince our cousins or our parents to play those kind of games. Toys were fun but games got us to actually talk to each other. It is hard to form a relationship when your only interchange is “Carry out this order, private and take out that ammo dump,” whilst armed with a bb-gun and a pair of old painting goggles that obscured your vision. I almost got seriously hurt at least 5 times before I was 12 years old. Never broke a bone until I was a middle-aged adult. We played hard back then. Not like now. Not at all. And this sounds like ‘old man’ talk but really truly, life as a child in the 1960s was utterly different than it is now unless, maybve, if you live out here in the woods. That is to say, a child living in a suburb of Atlanta has about the same probability of playing like we did back then as she has of walking on the moon.
But, I digress.
Do any of you remember a board game called ‘The Green Ghost’? There was a bit of a fad back in the 1960s for phosphorescence. This particular game was apparently supposed to be played with the lights out because the ‘spinner’ that determined your move was a rather stout ghost that glowed in the dark.
The thing about that electric football game was that it looked like it should be awesome, but somehow every game was just a mess. Do you remember there was a passer (and I think a punter) piece. Did anyone ever complete a pass with that thing?
This
I recall my cousin showing me his electric football game, and my thinking, “You are doing this…why?”
I had a similar game, except that it was an owl.