Were toys always this weird, or did I forget something between my kids and my grandkids?
My granddaughters have these…things. They have a unicorn head, with a horn. Then there is a long, white, plush cylinder (no legs) which ends with a little plastic reservoir. (One pink, one purple–no idea what other colors they might come in.) The plastic reservoir has bubble soap in it and when you squeeze the cylinder, bubbles come out of the unicorn’s horn. Ha, there is no way to refill the bubble reservoir, so when it’s empty, it’s empty. Double Ha, bubbles come out if you squeeze it but if you lay it down, it just leaks out. And finally…it’s white? No no no.
Weird toy number two: Bowling for pumpkins. A bowling set where the pins are an ear of corn, an eggplant, three tomatoes stacked on each other, celery (I think) and stuff like that, and the ball is a pumpkin. It is not a perfectly round pumpkin but at least it doesn’t have a stem. Really hard to get a strike with this thing. Or hit anything at all.*
Who thinks these things up? And is there money in it?
My 7 yo granddaughter loves useless toys. She has who knows how many Squishees. They’re just pieces of foam that come in all sorts of shapes and sizes - donuts, unicorns, pineapples, pizza slice, dogs, etc. You squish them and they kind of stay squished for a little bit and then return to their original shape. That’s it.
Another of her favorites a few years back was Shopkins. Tiny little pieces of colorful plastic that were in the shapes of whatever you can imagine would be in a store…with eyes. A basket of tomatoes, a couch, a stick of butter, a single shoe, an ironing board, the sky’s the limit. Then, of course, you could buy all sorts of things to go with them - checkout lanes, grocery carts, houses, swimming pools, etc. She had loads of them. When she’d leave our house, I’d find teeny, tiny pieces of those things everywhere. I think I’ve picked up the same ladle that’s the size of a fly 15 times!
I think toys have been wonderfully strange for a long time.
I’ve got an action figure from The Tick. It’s . . . Man-Eating Cow! Squeeze her and her mouth opens revealing a human foot!
There was a deep ugly phase in toys aimed at boys during the eighties. Really Rude Ralph was a disgusting, goblin like diesmbodies head. Pull his bulging eyeball and he said one of 8 phrases or made burping and farting noises.
When she was very young, my niece was frightened by my sound activated crawling zombie hand. Later, she loved it and would ask me to bring ‘the green moving hand’ when I visited.
Garbage Pail Kids were sold as mystery figures (you know what figures are in each line, but not what figure is in the box you are buying) as recently as two years ago. I contemplated buying one many times at Walgreens, but they were just too expensive.
One Christmas season saw booming sales of Milky the Marvelous Milking Cow. For some reason kids were enchanted by the commercial and begged their parents for these toys. The toy was around for a few years but it was one of the top sellers around 1980 during the Christmas toy season.
When I was a kid at one point a popular toy was called Slime, which was exactly that; a plastic bucket of colored slime. There was also Slime With Eyes that included plastic eyes, and Slime with Worms that included rubber worms.
I remember that! We had it as kids (the plain version without worms or eyes, but I remember those too). After a few days of playing and smacking the stuff upon every surface imaginable, it became a grimy, dirty goo nobody still wanted to play with, and a nightmare for our mother who INSISTED to trash it immediately.
A year or so ago, I was at a young kid (4-ish)'s birthday party. One gift was some kinda plastic monkey like thingey. As I recall, it didn’t do anything other than make noises and/or vibrate if you touched it in certain places or turned it in certain directions. When I expressed my bewilderment, someone assured me that they were all the rage among little kids, and were something the birthday girl REALLY wanted.
I had to Google this for a few minutes to confirm that I wasn’t hallucinating a toy that consisted of a small piece of tissue filled with gunpowder*:
I don’t remember for sure, but I think in my neighborhood we called them pop rocks, which is why I had such a hard time understanding a certain urban legend that came along a few years later.
Some weird toys from my childhood (60s) were these discs on a string with rings on the ends. You’d grab the rings and spin the strings which would make the inner discs spin rapidly. Might even have cool psychedelic patterns on the discs. Whoa - heavy! ISTR making cheapo imitation versions using buttons on string…
Then there was the bent piece of metal wire - a loop attached to a handle such that the 2 sides were parallel to each other, and the loop folded back on itself. By squeezing and relaxing your grip on the handle, you could make a plastic disc go back and forth on the loop.
A gyro wheel! They had them for sale at the hospital gift shop last week. I saw them while waiting for my grandson’s cochlear implant surgery. I thought about getting one for him, then realized it would be for me, and I have enough useless stuff.
They were the best thing since Lawn Darts. They lasted approximately one week at my school, after one guy broke his wrist, and another received penetrating acrylic shrapnel through his face. Fantastic!
The brand name is Whee-lo. (My grandmother was early-retired and provided childcare for the children/grandchildren of her extensive family for years before I came along, so I inherited more or less all of the popular toys from the 1960s and had all the ones from the 1970s bought for me.)
One of my nephews got a new Transformers toy while we were on vacation. I believe it was this one, the new Starscream. He asked me to help him transform it and for the life of me, even with the instructions I could not figure it out.
It’s not like I’ve never seen these things before, I had a lot of the original line of toys, but this one was not like those at all. The old ones were complex, but it was generally fairly obvious what you needed to do to transform them. The old Starscream transformed like a Robotech Veritech fighter, because it was exactly a Robotech Veritech fighter toy with different colors. This one you had to twist around, and force his arms through a hole in the wings or something like that, it was a total mess.
After 20 minutes I gave up on it. Sorry, kid. This thing is makin’ me feel old!
ISTR making cheapo imitation versions using buttons on string…
