I fell in love with a Cabbage Patch doll, but my parents wouldn’t get it for me. (Purple eyes, one dimple, cute face…sigh)
I have a few Beanies, and started the minor fad in my high school of dropping a well abused one on the back dash of my well abused car as a car spirit. (Mine was a unicorn. I drove over it in a rainstorm, picked it up off the street and flung it into my back seat.) I like the cats, and most recently bought the rat/mouse (white rodent something) and re-named him Russel. (My beanies get named like the rest of my stuffed animals. By me.)
My family also had a coven of Furbies for a while. Anna’s was the most well socialized. We still use Furbish as a family language at times. (“You do it!” is our favorite for a sort of go get 'em message.)
Yes, them damn little plasticene figurines. One hundred and ten of 'em, all told. Finally gave 'em to my sister’s nephews to play with [sub]and I still miss 'em sometimes[/sub].
That and Rubik’s Cube. I bought all the Ideal puzzles and a couple of knockoffs too, like Pyraminx.
Gee, no one has mentioned Pogs… I know they were huge here a few years back - was it just a local fad? My kid collected a few, and I think they’ve all been trashed by now.
For myself, I owned some wooden jewelry - late 60’s/early 70’s?? I still have a necklace with polished wooden disks on it. I had some “love beads” also, but they broke eons ago. Oh yeah, and I had some Ben Franklin sunglasses… groovy, man.
Oh, how could I have forgotten??? This gives me the perfect opportunity to mention that in 1958, I won a tricycle in a hula hoop contest at a local department store - Hecht’s on Harford Road in Baltimore. I was 4 years old and I could take that hoop from my hand (held over my head) down to my ankles and back again. Naturally, that was long before I had tits to get in the way. As it happened, I already had a trike, so my Mom talked the store into giving us the equivalent value in other toys. I got a Sweet Sue bride doll, and my little sister and brother each got some trifle. My hula hoop was yellow with 2 red stripes around the circumference… Ah, memories…
I have a Furby. My dogs go absolutely nuts when it starts talking, so most of the time it stays hidden in a drawer (I used to put it on top of the fridge, but then one of the dogs tried to climb the front of it to get to that little furry talking thing and we ended up with fridge magnets and papers everywhere).
I also have one of those little stuffed toys that you slap on the bottom and it says stuff (I can’t recall what those are really named). Mine is Ratbert from the Dilbert cartoon strip. I really like him a lot.
Ooooh—I just remembered! I had a real string of love beads, sold to me by an Actual Hippie, at the Be-In at Central Park in the spring of '67! They were dyed purple and made from some kind of seed pods.
I was SOOOOOO groovy . . . FairyChatMom has made my '60s brain cells kick in . . .
Between my younger sister and I, we have over 35 Cabbage Patch Kids. (I still can’t resist going into toy stores and looking at them. I’ve gotten a few for Christmas the past few years, and I’m 25.)
It’s not like they’re collector’s items, per se. None of them are in boxes, I don’t think a single one has on their original outfit, and they’re all well-loved.
(on a side note, and a minor hijack, my sister once got a really great talking Cabbage Patch Kid… it had realistic mouth motions, and red non-yarn hair, with a beautiful green dress. She was afraid of it, though, after seeing the Chucky moves. It was a shame. The thing sat in a closet. I should go rescue it.)
I also loved Crystal Pepsi, much more than I’ve ever liked regular Pepsi. It didn’t have as heavy a feel to it, or so I told myself.
For some reason, I used to be really in to seamonkeys. I had a tank full of them, probably like fifteen already, but i was addicted to pouring in the powder with the eggs so I could hatch some more. In like a few months though, half the population had seriously just disappeared. After that, the remaining dumb bastard seamonkeys just stopped eating the food powder and soon where exterminated themselves. I was pretty upset and I remember my mom taking me to Toys ‘R’ Us a few days after the tank had been left lifeless and buying me some Ninja Turtle action figures. Oh yeah, does anyone else remember Pogs?? I was completly addicted to those things and owned like hundreds of them. I think the game started in Hawaii a long time ago with milk caps or something like that.
Anyone remember the My Buddy dolls? I begged my mom to get me one. I promised I would take him everywhere and that I would take care of it. Boy, that lasted for all of a week.
Dear god, so did I. I was totally suckered by the ads on the back of the comic books - you know, that showed the male seamonkeys with little ties and briefcases, and the females wearing a little blond bouffant hairdo with a bow? I also seem to recall that one of them had an itsy bitsy cigarette. I was just young enough that I believed every single word. I can’t even begin to tell you how disappointed I was in the actual crappy seamonkeys.
The current product fad at Chez Del is Code Red, the red Mountain Dew pop. We like things that taste like chemicals.
As a kid/teen, I think we had about six million Slurpee cups, the kind that were white plastic, and the theme would change every once in a while (Superfriends! Collect all 12 cups! Scooby Doo! Collect all 8 cups! Olympics! Collect all 26 cups!)
I also loved Breyer Horses, which were models of horses that didn’t move in any way, but you could buy oodles of horsey accessories for them, and make them stables out of shoe boxes. I used to take Man O’ War to bed with me, despite the fact that he was made out of hard pointy plastic.
Oddly enough, the one fad I remember the most was spending hours making chains out of folded gum wrappers. I first thought that it wasn’t really a product, until I realized (duh!) that we were spending all our money on gum mostly to get more wrappers to add to our chains.
*I was into POGS, too. Our elementary school ended up banning them. There was once a garage sale across the street from my house that sold POGS and comic books and I bought a ton of POGS. The only one I have left now is a Lion King’s slammer.
*I also had sea monkeys. For a seventh grade demostration speach I brought them to class and showed everyone how they reacted to light.
*Have Troll dolls been mentioned? Those things come back every twenty years, almost like clockwork. I remember going to Troll shops and the proprieter would seriously tell me, “They’ll be worth so much.” Bosh, flimshaw!
Anyone remember those little charm bracelets from the 80s? They were little plastic chains for bracelets or necklaces and they had little charms on them. Little baby bottles, or skateboards, or whatever. I never had one, but when I was four I was at my day care person’s house (she had the day care at her house kind of thing) and someone got one for her birthday and I remember being jealous.
I forgot one… STICKERS! Man oh man were my friends and I obsessed with stickers. Half a dozen books filled with stickers - still have 'em! Smelly ones, gel stickers, puffy stickers, glow-in-the-dark, googley eyes… you name it we had it.
I had some Pogs…but I didn’t get them until after the fad had crashed and burned. It was one of those “free inside!” type deals, I think. What was the point of those, anyway? Nobody I knew ever played the game those were used for.
I also had a Tamagotchi. I really didn’t even want it, but one just showed up in my stocking on Christmas. The thing was kinda cute, really. I wish I still had it, but its battery died.
Trolls. I had one with pink hair and a cute little jewel in its tummy. I even had a penciltopper troll with orange hair. I kept them in my Sanrio pencilbox. (The pencilboxes were huge here, but I don’t know if that was just local)
jessica