If I am not mistaken, it was called, “Don’t Wake The Dragon.” I had this game, right along with “Mouse Trap.” Mouse Trap was terribly difficult to play without accidently setting off the trap, and all of our games took forever because we kept having to pick up the pieces of the trap.
I also remember the Fashion Plates. That was my most treasured toy for the longest time. If you pressed too hard while you were rubbing the paper, it would come out WAY too dark, and you’d wreck the paper, which is why I wouldn’t even let my own mother use it. I was very protective of it.
Anyone else have “Dolly Pops”? They were little plastic dolls with these pop-on plastic outfits. I had the fashion show stage where you put the dolls on the platform and turn a crank, and the dolls would make a circle, going through one curtain, and out the other, around the back of the stage, and out again.
I had a metal suitcase thing that opened out into a Cape Kennedy launch pad. As i recall there was another toy in the same series that opened into a western fort with soldiers, but I was always a sucker for space things. After about two months of use the metal edges on the thing were ground down to razor sharpness.
I also had a toy similar to the Vertibird that was a little airplane with a slot car motor in it. It was connected to a wire that supplied it with electricity from four or six D cells in the central pylon. It was controlled with two handles, one to turn the motor on and off and the other to vary the length of the control wire to make it climb or dive. I remember my friends and I taking turns sitting close to its flight path and trying to see who could get his head closest as it went by. Miraculously, no one was blinded.
This thread brings back so many great memories. Slime. Talking GI Joe. Creepy Crawlies. Whizzers. Hotwheels Sizzlers.
I had the metal cavalry fort. IIRC, it was called Fort Apache. It had plastic cowboys & indians. My parents gave it to me when I was eleven and had outgrown the whole action figure phase, so I gave it to a charity drive for toys.
Does anyone else remember the toy cars with the T-shaped plastic strip to drive the rear wheel? They were like dragsters and the plastic strip had teeth in it that meshed with teeth on the rear wheel. When you pulled the plastic strip out quickly, the took off. I think they were called SST.
When I was really little, I had a stuffed dog with ears that attached via buttons and snaps. He had a shoelace in him somewhere. I believe this was an educational toy, so preschoolers could learn to dress themselves.
God, I miss Slime! I had an aunt who was sort of a nurse-wannabe. My mom stuck a big ol’ wad of my Slime up the leg of her pants near her knee, then complained of a cramp in her leg. Nurse Auntie ran her hand up Mom’s pant leg to massage it out, and smacked right into the Slime. Flung it all over the place screaming. Ruined Mom’s pants and socks, but I’m still laughing a quarter century later, so I guess it was worth it.
Remember Lemon Twist? A black plastic loop that fit around your ankle, with another rubber tube attached to it…maybe 2 feet long. At the other end of the tube was a plastic lemon filled with some rattle-y things. You twirled it around with one leg, while hopping over it with the other. I could do that for hours.
And I had one of those Hippity Hops, but mine was topped with a Donald Duck head, with handgrips that stuck out from his head.
jack@ss: Those SST cars (that does sound familiar) propulsion was used for a bunch of the early Evil Kenival toys as well, if I’m thinking of the same thing you are.
We called 'em rip strips. T handle on the end of a long red plastic zipper looking thing, wound up the torque in the back wheel?
The later ones used a platform with a windlass sort of crank on the side, to the same effect: You put the bike in the red (they were all red, I think) ramped holder, turned the wheel on the side until the engine was screaming, then hit a little release, and away he went.
Usually, straight into a flaming puddle of lighter fluid.
Does anyone remember what these were: two, I think, knights or robots or robot knights with horses, one was maybe red and one was black or white, and they were made out of many parts that were connected by magnets. Perhaps you could interchange their parts or combine them with the horses. I wanted these one Xmas and never got them, and I’ve never ever found them or known what they were since.
On my 6th birthday we had a party with a bunch of local relatives, and I got a Ka-Boom! game. To the best of my recollection, you connected a balloon onto a rod (it’s almost kinda naughty, now that I think about it) and there was a plunger that you would push that would blow up the balloon. During your turn, you would spin a spinner that gave you a number indicating how many times you were to pump the pump (which would cause the balloon to expand). If it was your turn and the balloon went “ka-boom” while you were pumping, then you were the winner (or loser, I don’t remember which).
When first opening the box, we discovered that there weren’t any balloons in it. I remember then all my uncles and I piled into a car and went to K-Mart to talk to the manager, who then gave us balloons. I was very impressed that they all saw the importance of getting the balloons that very night for my toy.
Yeah, my friend had one too. I remember that film and I especially remember the adventures of Mickey, Donald and Goofy in a haunted house. The kicker with this thing was that you could speed it up, slow it down and play it backwards!
Thanks for the props. I used to be ULTRARonJeremy until my email account become overflooded with spam and offers to increase my bustline and lengthen my johnson (as if).
If I remeber correctly, the Evel Keneval bike was pretty powerful…I used to get that bad boy screaming until I unleashed him into my sisters room
Possibly the oddest “toy” (and I use the term quite loosely here) that I ever owned was a peculiar Rube Goldbergian contraption involving ball bearings, a sort of diving platform with a chute on top, and three little round trampolines. The diving platform had a battery-powered Archimedean screw that would carry the ball bearings to the chute at the top, and the idea was that they would then bounce from one trampoline to the next, *boing, boing, boing! * and land neatly (kerplunk!) in a little exit ramp at the end, from which they would roll on a little track back to the base of the diving platform and begin the journey all over again.
This was an educational toy, and the lesson it taught was this: the world is a fundamentally imperfect and uncaring place where even the most modest goals are often completely impossible. No matter how carefully those little trampolines were adjusted, no matter how perfectly level the surface I set them up on, that goddamned ball bearing never, ever made it past the second goddamned trampoline before careening off in some goddamn random direction. Still, I somehow could not stop torturing myself by fooling with the accursed thing. It seemed like such a simple concept on the back of the box! All the ball bearing had to do was bounce across three trampolines! What could be simpler? What was I doing wrong? My self-confidence was being eroded away.
Eventually, the goal of getting that ball to the last trampoline became important out of all proportion. I spent hours adjusting, measuring, chasing ball bearings, adjusting, adjusting… Next time, I told myself after each new failure, next time I would surely hit upon the perfect configuration; all the elements would be in harmony, the bearing would at last complete the circuit, beyond the third trampoline to the exit ramp, and return to the source; the heavens would open up and the Quest would finally be achieved.
As it turned out, our dog broke this vicious cycle of desperation by chewing up one of the trampolines. Good dog, Misty. That’s a *good dog. *
I had something similar to it. Except it was a prop-driven spaceship with various accessories (a lunar landscape, an exploding flying saucer, astronauts and aliens).
Also, any of you remember some of the toy weapons of the Sixties ? There was one in particular, during the secret agent craze. A briefcase with a working camera in it and a pistol that you could fire from inside the briefcase (shooting hard white plastic bullets). Or the Johnny Seven One Man Army (see for description) ?
I had a “vertibird”-type toy that was the USS Enterprise from Star Trek and the blade was in the saucer-section of the spaceship. It didn’t work too well, but it was fun when it was working half-okay.
I love this thread. My Star Bird was my favorite toy. Ever. It’s still at my parent’s house, missing one of the interceptors and the gun from the turret.
I also had a bunch of die-cast (small, 4-6" tall) Shogun Warriors. It’s funny to me now, because these are all totally unrelated manga and anime robots that I run into all the time watching anime on Cartoon Network and Techtv. Mattel licensed them from Bandai and repackaged them, and didn’t even bother to give them any kind of backstory beyond “Protectors of the world!”. We didn’t care. The Star Bird toys didn’t have any backstory either, now that I think about it.
I never had “Chutes Away”, but I wanted it so badly I could feel it. The annoying spoiled kid on the other side of the block had it, and we’d pretend to like him just to get to play with it (and all of his other cool toys). He also had the Raleigh Vektar, which I would’ve wanted had he not gotten one before anyone had heard of it. That was a total POS of a bike. It was always breaking down. Not in a “it makes a funny sound” way but in a “the handlebars fell off and he broke his nose” kind of way.
The only more dangerous bike in the neighborhood was another kid’s http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/9338/yellow1.jpg swing bike. It was cool because you could do a medium speed 180 without leaving the sidewalk. What wasn’t so cool was that it would sometimes decide to try to kill you without warning. More Swing Bike Info
'Twas tanstaafl’s link, originally. Found me a Starbird there.
Speaking of Shogun Warriors…
Anyone else ever see the Rodan they put out to complement the Godzilla? Kid on my block had one many many moons ago. Sucker was huge.
[sub]And a decent collection of Micronauts junk could kill an entire weekend. It’d take you all day Saturday to set up all the missile launching freaks (along with the star/axe/missile throwing Shoguns) on opposite sides of the room, and all day Sunday pelting each other with little bits of plastic. Good times…[/sub]
Fireball Island, a great game with a 3d molded plastic board and little bridges you had to set up before the game. You moved your man through the paths to try to get to the jewel in the middle, but occasionally you’d have to drop a fireball (red marble) on a certain spot. It’d roll down through different valleys and knock your guy out or knock over some bridges or whatever. Great game.
Micro machines. I had a lot of these. They started out with just cars, but ended up expanding into boats and planes too. I had a 747 with a ramp so you could load up a bunch of cars, an aircraft carrier with an elevator to get the planes from the inside to the outside, an auto-carrier semi-truck, and a train that ran on a little grey track and made noise.
I also had a slot-car track that was designed to look like a monorail train thingy and it glowed in the dark and had a tunnel and had a section where it went vertical on a wall, up a foot or so, did a 180 degree turn and came back down.
Also (probably early 90s here), I had a set of toys made by Hot Wheels, I think, and they were these little jet-looking things. You inserted a plastic piece into the back of them and mashed down on a little plastic airpump and shot the little guys across the room. I had probably 6 or 8 of them, and also a big cardboard track you could put together in different ways and put little plastic obstacles/targets on.
Finally, I had the Hot Wheels Indy 500 set. This was a big plastic set in about 4 pieces. You had 2 lanes and you and a friend put a car in each and you pulled down on this lever thing. It shot the car out and around the track. Fun fun fun.
The Fireball Island thing reminded me of some game which has probably been discontinued on grounds of political correctness or something, but I wanted it so damn bad when I was little. The whole concept was that you were going to steal this jewel from this giant freaky tiki idol, and you had to cross this Indiana Jones-style bridge with many fragile boards. Because I never played it, I have no clue whether the playing pieces were supposed to be dropped through after rolling dice, or whether gravity was supposed to add an element of futility to the game by striking randomly.
Of course, when I saw this thread, I thought, “Shark! Shark! Shark Attack! This shark is like a maniac!” The game featured this big mechanical shark that would chomp its way slowly around the board. You played a little plastic fish and had to roll the die quickly in order to stay ahead of the shark. It required a lot more hand-eye coordination and reflex skill than most board games, because that shark just chomped along in an inexorable circle. You couldn’t really win that game, you could just lose last. It was very Darwinian, or maybe just Hobbesian. But I played it all the time. I think it was the appeal of a shark robot. I wish I still had it.
My little sister also had this bizarre rubber teddy bear, which had a hole in its back so it could be filled with hot water. The concept was that the bear would be warm and cuddly, but the water was never warm enough (or the rubber skin was too thick) and the bear was hard to dry off, so instead of warm and cuddly, you had unsettlingly moist and clammy.
Now that I look at the Fireball Island game box, I think that’s the same game I described vaguely in my first paragraph. If I recall correctly, I thought that it was a game that only boys could play. God only knows where I got that impression.
He hangs from my ceiling even as we speak(well converse anyhoo). His claws are spring loaded. His beak makes this cool ratchet noise when opened. Sadly, like most kids I could not figure out how to get the horns into his head and lost them.
My best friend still has his Godzilla. Boy, those were some epic battles.
I Need Help On This One-
A 12" alien/superhero figure with translucent purple limbs. His torso is clear. Push the button on his side and a wheel inside his chest spins and sparks. His head is pink/purple skin with purple eyes and pointed ears. The figure came with a black mask of some sort.
