Ok heres one for you…who remembers Stretch Armstrong, the guy whos arms and legs could stretch like rubber bands? Well what kid DIDNT pull them to the breaking point and who remembers the jelly goo that came out after the arms and legs snapped off?
I was of the action figure generation; Transformers, Space Lego, Star Wars, Action Force… even those little transparent blue men with metal heads and old skool trainers, riding on big robots. Mechanoids, or somesuch. However, dominant species of the action persons must be Play People (as they were marketed in the UK), elsewhere known as Playmobil.
The proletariat of the posable doll genus, everyone I knew had loads of them. Appealing to girls and boys (you could get them as police bikers, US cavalry, nurses, children, pretty much anything), the cheapness of their manufacture meant that their individual worth was as nothing compared to, say, a Speeder bike Stormtrooper (I had one which was accidentally bundled with two guns, I recall. He rocked).
Anyway, the upshot of the story is, when adolescence rumbled through my hormones, and testosterone fuelled me to perform acts of mindless destruction, these little fellas were on the front line.
My first taste of plasticide came in my best friend’s garden, when one happy afternoon we took a .22 air rifle to serried ranks of his sister’s Play People (not to mention their ambulance). It was a constructive lesson in ballistics, not to mention some of the best fun I’ve ever had. There’s a sweet spot on the chest of a Play Person which, if hit correctly, makes their heads fly off. Head shots do this too, of course, but the overall effect is not so dramatic.
Forty or so Play People later, my bloodlust was merely kindled. I knew at home that I had many dozens of Play People, many of whom deserved nothing more than a savage end to their otherwise benign existences. I faced one problem: I did not have an air-rifle.
What I did have, however, was a bonfire site at the bottom of my parents’ garden, not to mention a near-inexhaustible supply of newspapers, cardboard boxes and other highly flammable materials. And so it was I changed from a gun-happy 20th Century vandal into an Aztec priest, eager to shed the blood of others in a fiery offering to the implacable thirst of his savage deity.
For a whole summer, my cousin and I spent every available day building elaborate funeral pyres, towering ziggurats of debris in ever more wonderful shapes, and studded with whatever dangerous fuels we had liberated that day: polystyrene, firelighters, half-empty aerosols… if the Internet had been around, we’d have been making napalm and weedkiller pipebombs by the beginning of the second week.
The sole linking factor was the presence of a Play Person (sometimes more than one, if the occasion merited it). He/she would be present, either in some fiendishly-designed casket, ensuring that their immolation came at the height of the pyrotechnics, or else as centispiece to the mounded fuel, their end to be watched with mounting excitement as the flames licked ever higher and brighter.
It was not long after this that we discovered the even headier joys of purloined cigarettes, alcohol looted from dusty drinks cabinets (one of the first things I discovered is why nobody drinks Advocaat), and the fascinating detail that all the girls we knew were developing breasts, so our days as nascent neophytes did not last long. But still I cannot see the bland rictus of a Play Person without recalling what it looks like melting to naught, shimmering through a haze of flame.
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I was very humane with my G.I. Joe action figures (I didn’t have the big ones. I’m talking about the little 4" boogers). Whenever they were injured over the course of a particularly hostile engagement with the forces of COBRA, I always used to use masking tape and toothpicks to patch them up. Cut the masking tape into strips, break a toothpick in half, and you’ve just made a pretty realistic-looking arm cast. Don’t break the toothpick, and you can do a whole leg. As the injuries got more and more severe, I used to teach myself first aid on them (I once had Duke in a neckbrace, an arm cast complete with support-his whole arm was broken, not just the forearm, and had to be immobilized-and even crafted a little wheelchair for him until he regained the use of his legs).
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I still say thermite is more impressive, as well as more challenging to prepare. 
Balance may be right. Being a liberal, I accept that in this wide world we must allow for normal differences of taste.
Not everyone can be expected to enjoy the same form of senseless brutish violence - each of us is entitled to choose what seems right to him, to her or to it.
I stand corrected.
Laser surgery was a particular favorite of ours…all you need is a nice sunny day and a good quality magnifying glass. Excise limbs and/or regraft other limbs (the plastic stayed sticky long enough to reattach other parts…)
We also did the bit with the Lysol can as homemade flamethrower…tried using it to create the “illusion” of a house on fire with my sister’s FisherPrice play house for a video we wanted to shoot…all worked well until the roof really DID catch on fire, and we had to douse it with water and hide the evidence :b
I can’t go on!
Oh, the humanity!
All we ever did was break the wire on GI Joe’s cable car from “Force 10 From Navarone”.
My toys met with flammable death in the usual fashion, until one day my personal bad influence and good friend and I discovered the wonderful combination of airplane glue and shotgun shell firing caps. The glue would eventually burn hot enough to ignite the cap, and send action figures (or various pieces thereof) hurtling in several directions. Quite graphic.
I have to be the first to say it… welcome to the boards, Gridbug. That was a hell of a first post. Good to know all those Play People did not die in vain.
And I also have to add… kids, do NOT try these at home. It’s dangerous, stupid, and possibly deadly. Just because we were incredibly dumb and survived, doesn’t mean you will.
Not that that ever stopped anyone…
Lego was the main instrument and also subject of destruction in my youth.
We’d build Lego forts as strong as we could and put my friend’s toy soldiers in them,it was always his turn for the soldiers because they were Germans.
Next we’d bombard the fort with hard, dense objects, like larger Lego brick bombs and you got a point for every ‘dead’ German. It was most satisfying.
Fireworks and plastic models were made for each other, the friend with the German soldiers also had lots of German aircraft which would sometimes explode splendidly but to get more realism we’d try to get the explosion in mid-air risking fingers and eyesight in the process trying to time the throw exactly right(which made it all the more fun)
Model warships were very poor as they usually turned turtle before the firework exploded but we did put some ballast in the Bismarck(yup same kid had German battleship models too) and this did explode quite well before crusing to the middle of the pond, well beyond our friends reach, burning and sinking.Took us best part of a year to destroy all those Germans but you could hardly use British models now could you.(US models would do at a pinch)
Another favourite was to play chicken with those ultra hard and bouncy superballs which were pretty new when I was a kid.
Naturally we couldn’t afford one of these highly desirable ‘things of the moment’ so our friend with all the German modelels was ‘persuaded’ into playing.
All we did was to find a corridor or passageway, the narrowed the better, and hurl the ball at one wall with absolutely every bit of force one could muster, anyone in the same passageway was now in imminent danger of severe pain at the very least with a 100mph superball madly rebounding. Corridors were great for this as the ball would bounce off the ceiling too, a blind corridor was better still.
(Incidently didn’t you have some kid live nearby whose parents bought him every damned toy worth having?)
Using bicycle pumps to fire chewed up paper wads at one another was a big favourite but since we all wore short pants it stung like mad on the legs.
Where I lived was fairly hilly but for some strange reason parents seemed to buy their kids roller skates as presents, not those sophisticated ones with elastomer suspension and boots but those horrible strap-on things with no brakes.
I dunno maybe they just wanted their kids to roll downhill under a bus or something but they were useless as toys in that area.
Along with those skates everybody used to get hardback books of their favourite cartoon and comic magazine charactors which were read within about five minutes.
We went through a craze of putting one of these books on top of a roller skate, sitting atop and charging down the hills luge-style.This caused consternation among the few cars that populated the roads in those days and kept the heel bars busy for months replacing soles and heels of scraped away shoes and puzzled parents considerably who wondered why it was that ‘they didn’t make kids shoes like they used to’