My girls conducted a war among their dolls and stuffed animals last weekend. Judging by the bodies left strewn on the field, it was pretty savage, though I was informed that the good team had won.
None of this is true. There were, and are, still tons of toy guns and toy soldiers, and always have been. G.I. Joe was huge in the 80’s and into the 90’s, and there have been tons of even more realistic military toys sold alongside them in stores for decades. There was a huge G.I. Joe movie just a couple years ago with the usual issue of toys and play weapons to accompany it.
When I was a kid (in the 90’s), I had a pair of toy six-shooters and numerous other toy guns meant to resemble real weapons (with plastic orange caps, naturally), and I still see things like this in stores now. Hell, Nerf guns have gotten more like real weapons; you can buy automatic Nerf guns, Nerf sniper rifles, Nerf gattling guns… You can go to a Toys R Us right now and buy toy weapons to your heart’s content. And squirt guns have gotten several times more complex and formidable in the past couple decades. They just introduced a Super Soaker that reloads with magazines for god’s sake.
And I’m from Michigan.
Also, are you aware that far fewer superhero comics are sold now than in the 40’s-70’s?
Rudyard Kipling: The Female of the Species
AFAICT, that didn’t happen in the Houston area until the early-mid 1990s. When my brother (born 1979) was about 10, he had a kick-ass toy AK-47 (black w/simulated wood stock & foregrip), and the coolest toy bazooka- it was olive green and black, and had a speaker that would make a rocket-launching sound and explosion.
I think the spate of police shootings of kids with realistic toy guns that happened about then had as much or more to do with the decline of the toy gun; mothers didn’t want their boys shot by the cops, so manufacturers made them stupid and brightly colored, and the kids just thought that was lame, so they didn’t sell.
Yeah, I was a child of the 80’s and played with toy guns, cap guns, water guns, etc… until I was too old for them. The only thing that changed was that our parents didn’t let us play with the realistic looking models anymore out of fear that we’d get shot by the cops, and so they were all brightly colored plastic from that point on.
And The Super Friends were a bunch of pussies. I mean seriously, I think it was 1985 before one of them even threw a punch.
I was ten years old in Ohio in the mid-1970s, and a girl. We had guns. Cowboys and Indians was our favorite game the year before in Kentucky. I had a bb gun (!) (never did shoot a squirrel, but I tried), and a cap gun. The bb gun was later - say 1979 or so, and in Minnesota.
For reference, here’s what appears to be Toys R Us’ “weapons” section. It’s unfortunately titled “toy blasters and foam play,” the latter of which sounds like a fetish I don’t really want to know about. A lot of the Nerf weapons and swords (you can get a Nerf hatchet), and some medieval weapons that look cool as hell (check out the war axe).
Also, re-reading the OP, I don’t understand it at all. Leaving aside the fact that its premises regarding toys are totally false, the prevalence of violent video games, especially first-person shooters, totally invalidates the argument, because boys never stopped playing games about cowboys and the military. There were lightgun games in the 80’s, a ton of them in the 90’s (remember the fuss over Lethal Enforcer?) and then the explosion of first-person shooters that followed Doom that has been going strong ever since. And there is absolutely no shortage of gun peripheral for today’s consoles.
I don’t allow my son to play cowboys & Indians and I don’t let him dress up like an “Indian” on Thanksgiving. But that’s because I’m tired of stereotypes. He think its of poor taste, so no issues there.
He loves superheroes. Somehow Batman (who doesn’t kill people) is just not the same as the white dude taking out the native.
“Bad guy v. good guy” is one thing. “OMFG LET’S UZI UP!” is another.
imho, of course.
My mom was nutty too. I’d make guns out of wood, she would take them away, I’d make another one. Squirt guns were okay though. Dad would let me shoot the rifles at the county fair, and plenty of kids had cap guns and BB and pellet guns I could use. I never noticed a lack of toy guns at toy stores from the 60’s to the present. I doubt the unrealistic expectations of a few moms has had much impact on the toy gun business.
“Refused”? Why not just say they stopped buying them and stores stopped carrying them? No nanny state, no concerted effort, no stupid right wing whining talking point.
People also stopped buying Howdy Doody puppets, skirts with poodles on them, Dukes of Hazzard lunch boxes, and Count Chocula.
Cowboys and Indians was replaced by paintball guns that shoot real projectiles and the most violent video games imaginable.
I never played Cowboys and Indians. The “wild West” wasn’t my preferred imaginarium – I was a astronaut in the ‘60s, so I had more sparking rayguns than six-shooters. I also had far more little plastic dinosaurs than green army men. I guess I was marked as nerd from the beginning.
My girls had toy swords and blasters from the time they could stand up, and they used them to ful effect. (We raised them to know that princesses are expected to kick ass when needed.)
I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to kids’ toys between my childhood and my daughters’, so toy trends of the '70s and '80s are mostly unknown to me.
This thread is the first I’ve ever heard about banning cowboys and indians. In fact, I’ve never even heard from anyone in real life even criticize the game – only wankers on the Internet and the printed page.
Which isn’t to say I think it’s fun, or that I even played it growing up – I didn’t – but if it’s been banned (!), it’s news to me. Most anti-PC screeds are way overblown and this looks like no exception. I think the game just died out naturally due to the decline of the Western as a form of entertainment.
All I know is that there are still KIDS ON MY LAWN!!!
I have a feeling Nunzio and Starving Artist might get along very well.
We weren’t allowed to have toy guns, but my dad had several .22 rifles/pistols and a 9mm pistol we were allowed to shoot under supervision. We were taught gun safety from a very young age. He had a circa 1800s .22 cat&rat rifle sized/shaped for a child (it’s difficult to fit adult hands to the trigger).
Of course any child with a rudimentary imagination can find a stick shaped like a gun to play with…
In the 70’s there was somewhat of a backlash against war toys. GI Joe, when I played with him in the 1960’s had been a proud member of the military with a vast arsenal of weapons that included a jeep with mounted recoilless rifle. By the 1970’s, he had grown a beard and was part of something called Adventure Team and was busy doing things like searching for a mummy’s tomb.
Surely if this was an example of the ‘nanny state’ then this would be something that the state had implemented? As I don’t know very much about this and am going just from your description, it is surely the latter.
Huh. I’m a girl and had My Little Pony and a castle for it. I was also an avid reader. I read a book about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, totally fell in love, and from them on, my ponies used to besiege the castle after it was taken over by enemy mauraders. No guns, but plenty of swords and lances and such-like.
Sometimes they used their Camaro as a siege weapon, though. 
Nonsense. I grew up in the '70s. We had toy guns and military action figures. In the early '70s it was cowboy-style guns and 12-inch GI Joes. By the '80s it was more futuristic-looking guns and 4-inch GI Joes.
What actually happened after Star Wars came out was an explosion in the variety of toys. Little green army men faded away because they sucked in comparison with Star Wars figures and the like.
Where exactly does the “nanny state” come into this? I can’t recall a single governmental action to restrict any kind of shooting-based toy, except that in the late '80s and early '90s, some police departments wanted to discourage toy guns that were too realistic-looking.
I grew up in Ohio. We weren’t subject to any “concerted” effort. We liked the new toys – computer games, Star Wars, GI Joes, Transformers, Micronauts, complex Lego sets – because they were better. And none of them were any less violent in theme. What they did do, however, was encourage a less physically active style of playing. We were less likely to chase each other around pointing toy guns at each other and instead have our action figures point their little guns at each other.
Comic books have changed a lot since the '40s. They’re written for adults now.