I collect toys. So, I was just wondering what were some of your favorite toys while you were growing up.
A few of my favorites:
Mighty Max the maximum man
Micronaughts
Big track (Had to share that with my brother because it was pretty expensive for that time)
Mego superheros (still have a few).
Anyone else?
I started with the old twelve-inch GI Joes, and graduated from there to the Mego dolls… superheroes at first, but then went for Planet Of The Apes in a biiiig way. Had all the Monsters, too… so Batman and Cornelius could and did duke it out with Frankenstein, Dracula, and their Gorilla Soldiers.
I also remember, when I was VERY young, being utterly enthralled with a Mattel gadget called the Strange Change Time Capsule, in which you could place little colored plastic blocks, and they’d expand and become dinosaurs (heated memory plastic), and then, when you were done playing with them, you’d heat 'em up again, then put 'em in a little plastic vise thingy, and turn them back into little plastic blocks, until next time… LOVED that thing…
Every ten years or so, Mattel comes out with a new version of their old Thingmaker toys, where you use a little oven to make brightly colored latex bugs. Every ten years, I have to fight the urge to buy one of the silly things so I can waste a day or so making brightly colored latex bugs, like I did when I was seven…
STAR WARS!!! I loved those friggin’ toys, and had a bunch of them. I was rather spoiled as a child, and remember coming downstairs one Christmas to find the Hoth playset, a couple of figures, a snow speeder, and a big AT-AT walker. My parents completely made the battle of Hoth for me, it was great!
He-Man was another big favorite of mine. I had a lot of those, but part of what I liked best was the ability to pull their arms off and swap them out. Plus, the villains were just so hideous looking, it was great!
Transformers: Especially the big metal ones before everything was made into plastic. Loved the cartoon, loved the toys. Same with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Thundercats!
Same goes for Robotech and Jace and the Wheeled Warriors. The villains from the latter didn’t have drivers, just wierd green brain thingies.
The Mad Scientist playkits…I had Disect and Alien (where you put all the guts into an alien body, fill it with slime, then disect it), and another set where you created creepy monsters by putting this clay like substance over scary little skeletons. Mix in some baking powder with the clay, put them in a vat of water, then add some citric acid and watch their skin bubble off. It was AWESOME!!!
Then there’s the constructive toys. Legos, and the really cool Robotix! So many hours spent making cool monsters and robots and trucks and smashing the hell out of them, it was great.
My favorite childhood toy was my Lionel electric train. An interest in electric trains was fairly common for people my age. I am a 54 year old man.
For the record, my interest in, and affection for electric trains has never wavered. My guest bedroom looks like a well stocked train store.
Long live Lionel Trains.
Hmmm I’m probably showing my age here but dinky toys/matchbox cars, comic books, card and board games were the things I was most interested in as a child.
WWE Wrestling ring, all Wrestling action figures, Hot Wheels and GI Joe.
The hot wheels especially were fun because I would make “freeways” that would stretch from my room to my mothers room which was only a few feet in the real world but miles for the cars and I always had plenty of emergency vehicles on hand for the inevitable 3 car pile ups that happened two times every 10 minutes…my freeways were dangerous. All these cars are still in my house but my lil’ brothers use them now but sometimes I still help them build a 3,4 or 5 lane freeway because our Hot Wheel/Matchbox/Other toy cars collection has grown that big.
I remember this one thing, but I can’t recall what it’s called: It had two main parts, a motorized stair-looking thingy and a slide going from the top to the bottom of the stairs… It came with four multicolored plastic penguins, which you would line up on the lower end of the stairs. When you turned on the motorized stairs, the penguins would climb up it and ride down the slide, climb back up, and so on.
I have fond memories of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stuff. I had a regular Michelangelo, a detective Donatello, an astronaut Raphael, Usagi Yojimbo, an evil robot turtle (Metalhead, I think), and a big mosquito (Needlenose?).
Oh yes, the video games. We had an Atari 2600 (and I remember *E. T. * scaring the crap out of me at the tender age of four), a NES and eventually a Genesis.
I knew it was a horrible game, but jeez…
Anyway, I liked the Magna Doodle. It’s this white screen set in a plastic frame with a magnet pen attached to it. When you move the pen (or any other magnet) over the screen, dark particles appear on it. You erase by moving a lever across the screen.
Is that the same as a Creepy Crawler set? Man, I used to burn the crap out of myself with mine, but it was my favorite toy.
I also liked “Mouse Trap” (I think that’s what it was called). The object of the game was to set up a Rube Goldberg mechanism to trap a mouse (duh). It cracks me up to think how many times we played that game and each time, I was so excited to see it work. I was (and still am) easily amused. 
My Beanie and Cecil Disguise Kit was pretty cool too. It had a foot-long Cecil with a black hat, fake moustache and a cape, all for Cecil. I don’t remember there being a Beanie.
Yep, me too with the Micronauts. That stuff was expensive in 1970s ($16 for Super Acroyer, I think he was called). But those were some badass toys. Japan was the ultimate toy source in 1970s. I never had any of the big Shogun Warrior-type toys, though. I guess they cost too much.
We also played a lot with toy cars (Hotwheels and Matchbox), as well as the Tyco-type electric cars.
Star Wars figures, any type of “figure,” which were really just dolls for boys, but we didn’t want to face that fact. I had (and still have) the doll of the Emperor from Battlestar Gallactica. He looked like a frog and thus was a kind of cute frog doll.
One weird toy I had in 1977 or was the doll of the diver that came with the “Mousetrap” game. I called him Morgan and build houses and whatnot for him out of shoeboxes.
In 1976 or so my friends (girls) in the neighborhood gave me a Ken doll. I like him too. But before you accuse me of having been a sissy boy, keep in mind that it’s OK for boys to play with dolls: I read so in the book Free to Be, You and Me.
Amen to that. It’s the only toy that I’ve ever been insulted over. 
I really wanted some Micronauts. I think they were too expensive.
I really wanted a Big Trak. (Note correct spelling: no ‘c’ in Trak) Apparently also too expensive.
So my favorite toy was a Wheel-O. It’s essentially a bent wire plus a plastic wheel with two magnets that stuck to the wire, and would roll around and around and around. Very simple, but still fascinated me. And it was cheap.
I also loved to play with plastic dinosaurs. And spare parts from the rain gutters we had installed. The gutter parts became houses for the dinosaurs, and combined with a small patch of the garden formed “Mud City” and provided months of entertainment.
Lest you think I led a toy-deprived childhood, I loved Legos, too. Not sure why those weren’t deemed too expensive; perhaps they were cheaper when we lived in the Netherlands. Or possibly it’s because I only got the little sets. It’s now that I’m an adult that I get the thousand-brick sets.
Also acquired in the Netherlands were several sets of Exin Castillos, which were pretty much lego-like blocks specifically designed to build castles. Those were great.
An import toy I got was a racing car set based off some Japanese animated cartoon. There were five futuristic cars that could join together to form one “supercar,” but I’ll be danged if I can remember the name of the show or any details. I just remember having hours of fun putting those cars together…
As for Micronauts, I never got into the line, but I did have the gigantic white battery-operated mobile base/spaceship that you could rearrange and reassemble.
I’m going to have to jump on the He-Man and Star wars bandwagon myself.
Favorite He-Man toys - Clawful and Roboto (insert Styx or Simpsons quote here)
As far a Star Wars go - Hammerhead and the Wampa Ice Monster. Greedo was also a fav. And I guess I need not mention Boba Fett.
That mad scientist playset was awesome too! Who ever knew that you could have so much gruesome fun with a fish tank and an alkaseltzer!
Basically though, it boiled down to anything with monsters. The old Blackstar and Dungeons&Dragons toys come to mind. Anyone else remember laserlight technology? It basically consisted of a lighter flint in the back of the toy. When it you made it spark, the eyes lit up! Technology rules!
And let’s not forget Inhumanoids! Those giant Metlor, Tendril and Decompose figures were awesome!
Other cool things that come to mind: My pet monster, Bogglins, Muscle Men (though they traumatized me later as I traded my original edition Anakin Skywalker for about ten of them to my cousin. Screw it, I regret nothing!), Thundercats.
Geeze, I could go on and on… What a great feel-good thread!!!
I had a stick. . . .and a box.
Seriously though, Legos. Legos. Legos.
We never had a lot of legos–none of the super-expensive kits that my (spoiled rotten) cousins had. But there was NO end to the crazy games/competitions my brother and I created to play with the most basic of the Legos.
Our fave game was “Armored Truck.” The only rule was that it had to have wheels, and the object of the game was to build one truck each, which we’d then slam into each other across the kitchen tile. Whoever’s truck broke first lost, and repairs were not allowed. This game was the best when the spoiled cousins were around, because they could build the prettiest trucks ever–bells, lights, whistles, guns, antennas etc, but my bro and I would build a brick with wheels out of the standard Lego kit. Our boxes smashed their pretty, fancy wheels generally within 3 or 4 collisions. Rare retribution for all the other games we (the bro and I) lost.
And baseball cards, which are not so much toys–but “kid stuff,” that I still play with today.
I had a book “How to be a spy”. I spent hours writing notes in lemon juice, deciphering/creating codes and finding secret hiding places.
Other then that I had Ted. Ted I loved. When I was overseas dad sent Ted to the tip. 
(I’d still love to have Ted back)
A few people have mentioned lego. If my child does not look back on his childhood and remember lego I will kill him 
He is 12 now and I have bought lego for every birthday and xmas since he was about 4.
Oneday I long to roam around a house that is free of lego creations. Of course oneday he longs to go to legoland.
Yup. When the widget came back in the late seventies, it was called “Thingmaker Creepy Crawlers” and then in the eighties, nineties, and current versions, it’s just “Creepy Crawlers.”
I had a set of the metal molds from my first Thingmaker that could be used to make a shrunken head, a horrible rubber tongue with stitches in it, scars, a bone to fit in your nose, a black eye, and all sorts of horrible things. I loved it. For some reason, Mattel has never re-released any of those molds; all Thingmakers now come with bug molds, and that’s it, although they’ve rereleased the Creeple People expansion set for making weird heads, arms, and legs to decorate pencils with, and lots of their other old items.
They also made a great gadget, “Incredible Edibles,” for making gummy bugs and other interesting things to eat. I really liked the toy, and I loved the candies; only gripe was that my folks wouldn’t get me the refill packs as fast as I could use them… they’ve never re-released that one, either, although nowadays they make something called a “Queasy Bake Oven,” for little boys to gross out their moms and sisters with, apparently…
They still MAKE “Mouse Trap,” don’t they? I remember my sister getting a Mouse Trap game for her eighth birthday, and we about went crazy trying to make that stupid thing work properly. Turned out that the diver has to be facing backwards, or he won’t dive into the tub properly…
I called the Mouse Trap diver “Reuben” and the Battlestar Gallactica Emperor “Morgan.”
♪Free to be, you and me!♪
My pee-pee. Sigh.
My brother and I played with a lot of the toys mentioned. GI Joe, Matchbox, and Big Trak, we even had a Wheel-O (I agree, simple but very fun).
I had this cool jewelry making contraption. It used plastic beads of different shapes and colors. I’d pour the loose beads in at the top, and then turn this crank (seems like it had huge plastic gears that were fun to watch) and then a string of beads would come out at the bottom. Couldn’t find it in a search, but I had tons of fun with this.
One of my favorite board games belonged to my dad. I cannot remember the name of it either, but it was a type of whodunnit game. The board was a layout of a cruise ship, and I remember it came with real keys. I think you had to earn the keys, to gain access to the cabins for clues. I also liked Milles Bornes quite a bit.
Not really a toy, but our family had a lot of fun with a tape recorder, too. One person would sit in the living room with the recorder and manipulate an object in the room several times, while recording the sound it made. When the rest of the family was called back in, we’d take turns guessing the sound. Jeez, sounds boring, but was a lot of fun.