Toy Abuse

In My Humble Opinion
1

When I was but a wee nipper, I used to beat the hell out of my toys.

Fourth of July was a highlight. My brother and I had an extensive Star Wars action figure collection; when one got too scratched and beat up from extensive use, we’d buy a new one, then tape explosives to the old one and blow it up. I don’t know how many stormtroopers we went through. Two of them, I recall, were candidates for destruction because my brother (who’s two years younger) had, for some reason nobody ever clearly understood, colored them red and orange with permanent marker.

Similarly, I’d get those plastic model kits (Revell, Snap-Tite, etc.), put together the airplane or car or aircraft carrier or whatever, and then go down onto my grandparents’ beach on July 4 and blow them up. Couple of M-80s inside a battleship, and the bits go flying. Wheee!

Back to Star Wars figures: My brother and I would build “slip towers.” These were constructed out of wooden blocks, and could be up to three feet tall. There was an opening in the top, and a complicated channel inside the tower. You drop the action figure in the opening, listen to it clunk and slide around inside the tower, and then emerge from a slot in the bottom. Of course, right under the slot, we had a flat piece of wood and a fulcrum, so after the action figure emerged, it would land on one end of the slat, we’d pound the other end, and the figure would be launched through the air. I have no idea where we got the idea to make slip towers, but we sure built a lot of them, and they usually ended in the lever launcher at the bottom.

We’d also play a hide-and-seek game, where one of us would go upstairs, and the other would spend half an hour hiding all the action figures we had at the time (like 50 or 60). Then whoever was upstairs would come back down and try to find all of them. We usually did, but not always: There was one time we couldn’t find our Hammerhead. A few hours later, we heard our grandmother yell from the kitchen. We ran in, and discovered that the Hammerhead had been hidden – get this – underneath a burner on the stove. Now, of course, he was all melted on one side: saggy head, flat arm and leg. He became our stock “dead body” character when somebody had to be dipped in acid or hit with a flamethrower or something.

I also remember having a Steve Austin (Six Million Dollar Man) action figure. (Can’t call 'em dolls, nope.) You may remember: You could peel the skin back on the arm to reveal the “bionics,” and there was a hole through the head with a cheap lens thingie to simulate his telescopic vision. I remember we played with it for a while, but it got boring really fast, so we took it out back and hit it around the yard with an aluminum softball bat until it was in many, many pieces.

There’s lots more: Micronauts, Tinkertoys, and so on, but this is enough to give people the idea.

So, anybody else get medieval on their toys?

2

With the older-model Barbies and Kens, you could bend the arms up until they popped off, they jam it straight back into the body cavity until only a little thalidomide-like flipper hand was sticking out of the shoulder socket.

Once you had Ken properly crippled, you could walk him around like Frankenstein and making zombie noises. Scared the pee out of the littler kids.

Otherwise, the only toy abuse I did was to use my giant teddy bear to soak up the milk I didn’t want to drink at dinner. I’d pour the milk out on the linoleum when mom wasn’t looking and quickly blot it up with the bear. He got pretty crusty and spiky after several uses.

3

Did you know that Matchbox cars will melt when you pour sterno on them and light it? Newer Hot Wheels probably will, too, but not the ones I had as a kid. Those were solid metal, not the pressed powder crap that is out there now.

Model airplanes make a black smoke cloud that is easily visible from a couple of blocks away, too.

4

I used to dispose of my broken Revell models by “napalming” them(plastic burns really good). I also broke the top two wings off of my X-wing fighter so it would look like a regular jet .

5

I used to take the heads off of my Barbie dolls.

I had a short time in fifth grade where I liked to mash up toys with big rocks (living in Nevada there were a lot of rocks/boulders). I still have pieces of a toy motercycle, a matchbox car, and a little plastic man that I smashed to bits. Those were good times.

6

About 8 years ago my Mom called to say she found my old GI Joe’s in a box, and wanted me to have them back. This sounded great, because I remembered having the navy stuff that’s supposed to be worth a lot of money. What I found in the box was 4 action dis-figures with fingers, hands, or feet, cut off or melted. I had painted tattoos on my Nazi soldier. One Joe had a nasty chest wound, fake blood included. As for the Navy stuff, it was all crusty and moldy. Worthless now, but priceless when I was 10.

7

When I was still a little poohpah, my mother purchased a Winnie-the-Pooh for me from Sears. I loved the heck outta him and still have him, but he endured a hand-washing from me and my sister that left him eviscerated. We washed him in the tub, then hung him by his ears to dry over an air vent in the bathroom. The foam stuffing dried out and got all crispy. He’s about half his original size and feels like he’s stuffed with pencil shavings. He also lost his original eyes, but now has glued-on eyes that make him appear to be a zombie.

My wife and I now refer to him as “mummified Pooh.”

8

All of my Barbies got dreadful hair cuts. I shaved one doll’s head and died the stubble pink with an old lipstick.

:smiley:

9

I used to take my sister Kim’s Barbie dolls, tie them up, remove their heads and then do them the “favor” of washing thier hair…with LOTS of shampoo…much to my mother’s dismay.

But nobody dare mess with my teddy bear!

Theodore’s Mommy,
Patty

10

My friends and I had a lot of duplicate SW figures. (For some odd reason, we seemed to have several Chewbaccas. And R2-D2s. And stormtroopers.) So, we would take them out into a friend’s yard, and bury them about halfway in the dirt. Then we would go into his garage, and pick up a pair of channel locks, about 10 Ohio Blue-Tip matches, and something flammable in an aerosol can. (Can you see where this is going?) Hold the matches in the channel locks, light them, then hit them with the aerosol. Goodbye, Chewbacca! Bwaaaaaahahahahahahaha!

Bizarre corollary: Several years later, my friend Matt and I made a homemade flamethrower by filling up a pump-style pesticide sprayer with gasoline. We could get a good 8-10 foot flame out of it.

11

Anyone remember “Estes” model rocket engines? We had a lot of fun learning about aerodynamics by strapping those baby’s to just about anything that was light weight. Cardboard, duct tape, a toy, and a rocket. Gas soaked tissue in the payload area of the regular rockets looked good at night when the parachute charge when off. Potato guns, tennis ball cannons, home made fireworks, the little green army guys and lighter fluid. Gee, is there a name for this sort of behavior?

12

Not exactly abuse, but more an amusement…

My sister and I used to have the Fisher-Price Circus and Fisher-Price Zoo, complete with wooden animals and people, both of which had plastic movable legs. The moveable legs made it easier to dress them in our Barbie clothes. As I recall, the Ringmaster looked especially fetching in a lavender-checkered, low-necked, country frock. The giraffe was the only one tall enough to wear the pink evening gown.

OTOH, my sister’s ex-boyfriend worked at a Big Boy restaurant, and would subject the dolls to hours of horrors: burying them upside-down in the salad bar ice; sending them through the dishwasher, ending up as a sad-looking hunk of plastic; impaling them with knives.

The best one is my father’s film he and his best buddy made when they were young. They borrowed the best-buddy’s sister’s toy model cars and made a stop-action film of an accident. Pretty quality stuff for a couple of 10-year-olds - several cars and trucks caroming out-of-control along a country road, then all bursting into flames in a spectacular crash, with the aid of some lighter fluid (you can see the best-buddy’s hand holding the lighter fluid can in some of the shots). The sister didn’t even know the cars were missing until years later when she saw the film, then proceeded to whomp the heck out of my dad and best-buddy (they were in their thirties by then).

13

thinksnow, your post reminded me of what we did once.

One of my friends and his brother had an elaborate HO-scale slot car racing set set up in their basement. They had the track laid out as a Grand Prix circuit, with straightaways and hairpins and such. They spent hours creating hills and whatnot out of plaster, and decorating the landscape with trees and bushes and grass. But something was missing.

They also had a model steam engine that really worked. (Just as an aside, does anybody else remember these?) Anyway, solid fuel pellets about the size of a Mentos candy fired the boiler. The pellets could be lit with a match.

What was missing from the slot car track became apparent when we looked at my friend’s collection of metal Matchbox cars and the solid fuel pellets. Cramming a pellet into a Matchbox car and lighting it resulted in a car that was still recognizable as such, but was obviously melted from a fire. We did this to a number of cars.

The melted cars were then placed strategically around the slot car track, looking like crashed and burned racing cars that had never been cleared away.

14

Ahh yes…Hess Trucks
Collectibles, but not to a 6 year old.

See, have a friend sit about 10 feet away, facing you. Pull back, and crash the Hess trucks head on about, oh 15-20 times. Yep, thems was good times.

BTW, the tanker ALWAYS lost to the firetruck, hands down.

15

Of course, you all realize that Woody and Buzz are plotting your doom even now, right? :smiley:

I was not a particularly destructive child, but my klutziness bordered on awe-inspiring (witness the fact that our family doc once offered my parents bulk rate on stitches). I was the first kid in the area to totally demolish a Tonka truck (one of the old-school trucks–not one of these cheap pieces of junk with plastic bits). How was I to know that the hayloft floor sloped that way? (A 25 foot drop onto concrete can reduce such a truck to shrapnel, BTW.)

The replacement for that truck got melted. That was the day young Balance learned how to make thermite…and how not to transport it.

16

[Miss Gorilla/Miss Non-Gorilla falsetto Monty Python voice]
I’ve got a friend who feeds Barbie parts to his macaw!

[/Miss Gorilla/Miss Non-Gorilla falsetto Monty Python voice]

No really, check it out. Scroll all the way down.

17

Pyromania. We never did this.

But we did scrape the black powder out of the rocket engines and use it to make bombs.:smiley: Back then, they sold “Hobby Wick” in hobby stores. It was a wick with a predictable burn rate. I don’t know how many model cars were blown up this way.

I remember one slumber party in 7th grade where we blew up bombs on an hourly basis until the bomb we made from one of a friend’s mom’s lip gloss container woke up people in two houses (Mike’s mom slept through all this.) Shortly after that, I made the mistake of burning some Hobby Wick in the house when my mom was home. I’d probably still have it today if she hadn’t taken it away. Well, that, or I would be missing an eye…

18

You boring people had no imagination.

The only way for a child to dispose of old toy cars or trucks is with a Molotov cocktail - our old friend the petrol bomb. Fill a bottle with petrol, stick in a rag, tip the bottle to wet the rag, light, and throw. An impressive pool of magma is left behind, but no toys.

Also your parents will wonder why the grass does not grow on that patch for about two years afterwards.

[Sorry - I forgot Americans don’t talk English. Petrol is called gasoline in the American language.]

19

Do you remember a show called “Friday’s”. The guy who played Kramer was on as a little kid that was always blowing up his army men, setting them on fire etc.

20

I used to pull the legs off of those cheap plastic bugs you’d get out of vending machines. I had an entire drawer full of crippled bugs. :slight_smile: