I have two brothers, so there are two sets of things I used to play with: MY toys and OUR toys.
MY toys included the Strawberry Shortcakes, Easy-Bake Oven, My Little Pony (I only had one, which wasn’t much fun), Fashion Plates, and Lite Brite. I love Lite Brite. Do they make it anymore?
OUR toys included Transformers, Thundercats, Cootie, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, Hot Wheels, and He-Man figures. We also had Battle Beasts, which had a little sticker on the front which was heat-sensitive, and you could rub it to find out which “team” a particular figure was on–fire, wood, or water. (Kind of a rock, paper, scissors thing, I think.) We also had a lot of driveway toys, including the Sit and Spin, which was banned from the house after we used it to spin various toys off into the stratosphere.
A half-hour or so of Hungry Hungry Hippos was guaranteed to elicit some ice cream bribery from my mom so we would stop making so damn much noise
Best all time-
An Evil Kinevil motercycle that you put on a stand and cranked the stand and fast and hard as you could. When you jammed the crank to a stop The motorcycle took off like a bat out of hell. You could make ramps for it and everything. Durable as hell, I dont know how many flights of concrete stairs he flew down! God I wish I had one today!
also this tabletop helicopter that was connected by a flexible rod to a base which was wired remotely(barely). you could control the speed and the rotors would actually lift it off the ground pull another lever and it tilted forward or backward and flew like a real helicopter (only in a circle obviously). You could try and hover it and pick things up with a hook… or just fly 80 mph in a circle. Lots of wind with that one. They would NEVER sell such a thing today… the rotors were eye level to a kid when it was on a table and they spun VERY fast, pretty dangerous.
I would pay out the ass for either of them if I could find them today!
I had a bit of G.I. Joe stuff but positively freaked when I visited a friend and he had a mountain of Joes and accessories. He even had the g*ddamn G.I. Joe Mercury capsule that played a .45 record in the base.
Mine was a little special though. A family freind’s daughter was a few years older and made some civvies for my Joe. He had blue jeans and a little Hawiian shirt to wear on liberty. Of course she couldn’t make shoes so he had to wear his combat boot, just like a regular soldier on liberty.
Oh, I forgot…Anyone else have Zebra Disk guns? We used to have the best war games with those. And the disks would fly an impressive distance, unlike those plastic ball guns.
By the matrix, why have Transformers only been mentioned twice??? Wrong age group (I was 4 in 1984 and was pretty bang on the TF craze era)? No toys come close to them! GI Joe was for unimaginative numbskulls, TFs were for creative people who liked their fantasies crazy. Remember - Autobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons. Man, remember how popular the kid who had the full set of the Constructicons was? Wish I still had my Transformers. sniff
M.A.S.K sucked. He-Man was just a Conan wannabe (literally). The Gobots were pale amateurs.
</transformers evangelising>
Lego was cool too. If any of you guys reading are about 12 and thinking about getting rid of it, don’t. You’ll kill yourself when you’re 20 and wishing you could still make a pneumatic dinosaur in yellow and black, or The Happiest Medieval Battle Scene In History (They’re always smiling!! always…smiling…).
Harri-canary, a blue and yellow biplane attached to a cable you cranked. The crank would turn the propeller and you could control it’s flight around a circle.
Similar to above and unfortunately it only worked only for a day was an aircraft toy that consisted of a central pedestal with arm and cable that was attached to a plane. You had several different planes with detachable motors. A control consol was connected to the pedestal by a cable and it controlled the planes. When you worked the controls the planes flew by the thrust on the prop and you could fly the planes around the circle and up and down at high rates of speed and bring them in for a landing on a big plastic sheet that was placed on the floor to resemble country side and the airport. I really loved it but it malfunctioned Christmas day and it never work again.
My uncle had this game; I did not. But I was playing it every time we went to his house.
Did you have AT LEAST one guy who, no matter how you set him up and which direction you faced him in, would do nothing but slowly turn in circles, as if rotating an invisible planet?
Oh, I had that “rod” hockey game that’s akin to foosball. You still see it in really old arcades and on those ESPN and/or beer (I forget which) commercials.
My sister just got my four year old niece Hungry Hungry Hippos, Shadowfox.
We lived on 12 acres about 30 minutes outside of the city growing up, so we played outside mostly. Anyone remember a take off of tetherball called “Zim Zam?” It was basically a pole that you stuck in the ground with a coil at the top. Attached to the coil was a thin rope with a tennis ball on the end. The object of the game was to get the rope all the way to the top or bottom depending on your goal.
Anyway, when not running around like a wild child in the woods, that was my favorite outside game, and inside definately have to be my Atari 2600!
