and it’s lego, not legos.
…but wanted reeeeeeal bad:
A big wheel. God, these rocked. I had a stupid metal trike.
An easy-bake oven. The pictures on the box and in the ads! Those dinky-sized but perfect cakes! I still want one. Even though I am a big girl now with my own full-size oven. and yes, I know that cooking with a lightbulb sucked, but I’m still a sucker for what the ads made it look like it was capable of
Kat already said weebles,
Kilgore Trout already answered with He-Man
That leaves me with only two words to say:
Stretch Armstrong
I loved my Stretch Armstrong until it burst and covered everything in a strange Semi-liuqid .
My favorite was without douth me Six Million Dollar Man action figure . He lifted a plastic car engine . You could see his bionics in his arms and legs and he had a small lens in his to look through which was his bionic eye . I loved it .
I also had a stuffed Yogi Bear with a really hard head which I used to terrorize my friends with .
Brat Man - got one. Also have the Stretch Armstrong convertible - which does stretch. Well, my son has them. But I play with them. When no one is looking. Get your mind out of the gutter.
- Lincoln Logs
- The Barbie 747 Airplane (well I don’t remember EXACTLY what it was called, but it was this cool vinyl thing that opened up and turned into an airplane. No I am NOT a product of the 60’s - this thing was REAL.
- A really wierd shaped portable radio that you could put around your wrist. No I am NOT imaginging this either.
- Mr. Potato Head
- Ants in the Pants. It was a game. A wierd game, but still a game.
- Those racing cars where you had to insert a T-shaped plastic thingy that had “teeth” on it and you pulled it out through the car really hard and the teeth grabbed on to a gear by the wheel in the middle of the car (it had like one big wheel in the middle if I remember right) and then you set it down and it raced off.
You know, I should probably just go lay down. Y’all are going to think I’m outta my mind.
Weebles rock the f@ckin’ house, y’all. And they don’t fall down, either.
Had a big barrel of Lincoln Logs too, those were great. I used to make log cabins for the centerpiece on the table at Thanksgiving. My mom still has her set from the late 40s - even the eaves are made of wood. How funky is that?
My absolute favorite toy of all, however, was the set of Tuf-Stuf Alphabet blocks. Not just blocks with the letters on them, but the actual shape of the letters. Actually two sets. One in a tub, one on a truck. Many of you who grew up in the 60s and 70s may remember Tuf-Stuf - came from Mattel, this thick funky plastic material. They made play tools out of it, too - the chainsaw with the pull string that made it rattle comes to mind. (Infinite amounts of fun as a teenager playing Texas Tuf-Stuf Chainsaw Massacre.)
Anyway… the 'rents sold the alphabet sets off a long time ago - don’t even remember them disappearing. Guess I better hit eBay up and see what I can find there.
[ul] [li]She-Ra, Princess of Power. Never quite large enough to ride Barbie’s horse, a tiny bit too small to ride…[/li][li]My Little Ponies. Flutter Ponies were my favorite, followed by those Scratch-the-ass-and-Sniff Ponies.[/li][li]Jem. She’s totally outrageous. I had a pair of star earrings that I’d grab while loudly proclaiming “SYNERGY!”[/li][li]Etch-a-Sketch with the Smurf overlays. Make little Smurf mazes. It was great.[/li][li]Lite Brite. Regardless of the fact that my father hated those pegs even more than Barbie Shoes. (“If I step on one of those things ONE MORE TIME!”)[/li][li]Speak-and-spell. “Singular. Plural. Possessive.” Getting a new cartridge was a road-trip tradition. As was my family screaming for me to turn the damned thing off about an hour into the road-trip. And yet my spelling STILL sucks.[/li][li]Simon Says. It was me versus the machine, man, and I wasn’t going to be beaten by a couple blinking lights. [/ul][/li]
I think I’ll stop by Toys R Us tonight.
Missy, I too had a Barbie airplane (I can still smell the vinyl in my mind!) but mine wasn’t a 747… there was no upper level But the thing was like an upside-down U shape (or, the cross-section of an airplane, duh) which opened up to show seats, barbie’s serving area, etc. Then two flat cardboard-wrappd-in-vinyl parts folded out to serve as a 2-D nose and tail.
is that what you had, or should I start being pissed that my parents cheaped out and and got me a lousier version that yours?
Nope, Cranky - you are correct! Same one! I just said 747 since that is what popped into my mind when I typed airplane.
It’s nice to know I’m not hallucinating! 
I was about to post that I remembered the Barbie airplane too. I didn’t have one, but my best friend did. I had the Barbie camper instead. 
And evilbeth - I loved Fashion Plates! I spent SO much time on that…had a blast making different outfits. And I had Strawberry Shortcake dolls too. And the little gazebo with hammocks for them. I think I still have a few of them around here somewhere in storage…
my lego sets
tyco slot car sets
g.i. joe collection
Let’s see…
evilbeth, I remember the Jaws game! Very cool, especially the little boot and stuff.
CrankyAAOM, me too. Metal trike while cousins had cool Big Wheels. Wished for an Easy Bake Oven, which my mom would never get me because I already baked in our real oven from a very young age, so what was the point in getting me a toy one? She just never understood. In the same vein, every year I looked longingly at the Snoopy Snow Cone Machine in the Sears Christmas wish book. Never got it. Could go postal any day as a result.
BagLady, I took my stuffed cats to school with me. My mom actually asked special permission for this, because I was the youngest in the class and had just transferred in. (Okay, maybe that offsets the Easy Bake Oven a little bit.)
vanilla, no one would ever believe it, but I saw candy cigarettes in a store last week. They are now called Candy Sticks (oh yeah, okay, I get it, they don’t have anything to do with cigarettes, it’s just a coincidence), but they are just the same: almost-like-real-brands-of-cigs look to the box, vaguely-similar-to-real-brands-of-cigs names on each, and, I’m sure, just as unutterably cool to the kids today. I was just amazed that they actually do still make and market them. Perhaps there’s still hope for youth to have some fun without worrying too much about corruption.
As for me:
Lincoln Logs
Erector Set
Spirograph
Hot Wheels with the orange plastic track, especially the hard plastic section that turned into a 360 degree loop. I was constantly laying those out all over the basement.
[ul]
[li]Legos[/li][li]Another building toy whose name I can’t recall. Plastic rings with four hollow legs on the lower side and plastic bumps on the top side that fit into the legs, so that they could be stacked with some stability.[/li][li]Baseball cards[/li][li]Electric football games with the little plastic men that moved around carrying a felt football as a result of the vibrations of the metal game surface, which always got stepped on and irredeemably bent by my younger sister. I probably got as much enjoyment out of applying the adhesive number decals to the plastic men as anything else.[/li][li]Whizzers: tops that you wound up by rubbing the tip, which turned independently of the body, across the floor, and which came with various accessories on which they could be balanced, etc. One of my most serious malfeasances as a child was sticking the spinning tip of a Whizzer into my sister’s hair and having it wind the hair so tightly around it that a huge clump had to be cut to extract the Whizzer. My favorite thing about them was that, holding the body to your ear as the tip wound down, they sounded exactly like the engine of a Volkswagen (we had several VWs when I was a child).[/li][li]Water rockets. Rockets that operated by pressurizing water inside the rocket with a hand pump, then releasing the pressure. Had both the handheld-pump type and one that had an elaborate launching station. I emulated Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon on his rocket-motorcycle by positioning a small aluminum slide on one side of ditch near our house and using one of the handheld water rockets. I assume these have long since fallen victim to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, since I haven’t seen one since my childhood.[/li][li]Cooties. I don’t know that we ever actually played the game, we just liked putting together the bugs.[/li][li]Spirograph. Whether you came up with a drawing that you liked or not, there was something very cool and satisfying about the way the gears wound around each other.[/li][li]Daisy BB guns. It was a function of the time and place, I know, but I’m appalled at the things we did with ours, with parents either blissfully ignorant or indifferent.[/li][/ul]
Falcon, I had the Barbie Camper too. I also had the Barbie Townhouse. Now that was pretty cool. I think every little girl should have a doll house (my daughter doesn’t have one yet, but every birthday I find myself pricing them at the stores).
Somebody else mentioned “Simon”. I used to love that game too as a kid. Also “Operation”.
Anybody remember “Hungry Hungry Hippos”?. That was another of my favorite childhood toys.
I also had the big Barbie head. It was basically just Barbie’s head, about the size of a normal human head, and you could style its hair and put makeup on it. Of course, I chopped the hair off into a mohawk and drew a Kiss mask (I thought Gene Simmons was a god when I was about eight or nine) on the face with permanent black marker. My mom was absolutely mortified.
Ahhh…memories
I had a very weird childhood when it came to toys. Even though we lived on the bleak open space of the Canadian prairies, I had all these odd British toys. I am the only child on my mother’s side of the family–her brother and sister never married, so I had 2 well-off relatives in Scotland (plus my Granny), sending me Dinky toys, British comics, board games like “Coppit,” etc. Lego, too…by the time I was 10, I had about 2/3rds of a 50-gal drum full of lego!
I had a bunch of Dinkys from British TV shows, like Captain Scarlet, and Thunderbirds. Very cool stuff. http://superm.bart.nl/scarlet/dinkies.html I still have my Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle, which shot missiles out the front, mad retractable tank tracks, and a spring-loaded side door that shot open. Dinky really made great toys…too bad most of mine wound up at the bottom of a friend’s sand pit!
Didn’t anyone else have Major Matt Mason? I had the whole setup, Space Crawler, Callisto, Space Station…http://www.phd.msu.edu/storto/mmm.htm funnily enough, I don’t recall any of my friends with Matt Mason, they all seemed to have GI Joe.
Had lots of fun with the Secret Sam briefcase, http://www.timewarptoys.com/secretsam.jpg until the damn dog chewed up my last plastic bullet…save the last round for yourself, Shadow!
I had the Mattel Creepy Crawlers set, http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/3452/creepy_crawlers.jpg and don’t know how many holes I burned in the carpet with that one!
Hot Wheels http://www.redlinesonline.com/rearbomb.html were great, with the Powerhouse, until Sizzlers http://www.geocities.com/Baja/Trails/6896/ came along, of course…
Rackensack, I remember Wizzers! http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/wiz.html, and also the very cool water pump rockets! This guy makes his own, including a 10-gallon monster called “Big Bertha!” http://www.h2orocket.com/ Cool, but I’m kinda glad I’m not his neighbour!
Oops! Forgot to add that Archie McPhee in Seattle (one of the coolest stores in the world, BTW), still sells the classic 7-inch water rocket! http://www.mcphee.com/bigindex/current/10160.html
Thanks for reminding me of this–I never would have remembered the name but I spent many hours with this!
My favorite books were the Oz series (can’t bring myself to watch the movie) and of course the Laura Ingalls Wilder set.
One toy I remembered but thought maybe I imagined them was these Tinker Toys, but they were huge so you could build structures out of them, big enough for kids to sit in. They were bright plastic colors, not wood like regular Tinker Toys.
Also:
Clue
Uncle Wiggly
Lincoln Logs
Spirograph
Lite Brite
Sorry
My first-ever, she’s all yours, dog.
My cousin Bruce, who lived next door.
My working cannon that fired BBs.
My bike.
My sibs, when they weren’t picking on me.
Books, books, books.
Rackensack/Rodd Hill - My brother got Whizzers one birthday. They were fun to play with, but I too simply adored that winding down sound. And I inadvertently let it chew its way into my own hair a few times (yes, once well wound, there was only one way to free it), which doesn’t say much good about me, I guess.
gigi, Uncle Wiggly was our number one board game, but I didn’t think most people would recognize it. And I remember seeing those giant Tinker Toys too, so you didn’t imagine them.
-My hippity hop.
-Creepy Crawlers (can’t believe my folks let me use that!) I used to spend all of my allowance on thatliquid plastic gunk, and make legions of insects.
-Whoever invented the superballs was a genius.
-HotWheels, HotWheels, HotWheels (and it troubles me somehow that my son has never liked them as much as I did. I remember the first time I saw him intentionally crashing the 25 year old cars. I wanted to tell him to be careful with them, then remembered how we used to play with them!)
-I enjoyed my chemistry set, but didn’t get much beyond smoke bombs.
-Always had a fondness fo silly putty.
As far as plain stupid fads go, anyone remember those things with 2 discs on a loop of string with a ring on each end. When you pulled on the rings, the discs spun?
Or how bout the metal loop with the plastic disc with a magnetized axle - when you squeezed the handle the disc would move back and forth over the loop?
There was a time in the 70s that everyone had those.
And not a toy but, man, I remember what a status symbol it was the 1st time I got a transistor radio. Probably in 4th grade or so. AM/FM no less! The big thing was to try to sneak that earpiece in your ear during class to catch the Cubs games!