Oh. My. Gosh. I haven’t heard of those in years, or even seen them. I also had them, and they were a lot of fun. You could build a house out of Lego, but you’d never fit inside, like you could in the house you could build with Flintstone Building Boulders.
I also liked my Rock-em-Sock-em Robots. Many of the toys I once owned were lost or discarded along the way, but somehow or other, through many moves, I’ve managed to hang onto my boxing robots, and they still work.
When I was about nine years old, a new kid moved onto our street, and he had the most amazing HO-scale slot car setup. Not just an oval track on the basement floor, his was about six feet long by three feet wide, on two levels connected by ramps, and with landscaping made out of plaster. Naturally, even though his was the only track in the neighbourhood, we other kids all had to have our own cars, and we raced them daily, after school.
Yes those things were built tough, they actually took a licking and kept ticking! I recall that we would not just sit it on the table and fight, but actually stand up and face each other off while shifting our shoulders and feet back and forth to the action. The ropes were long gone but they still worked when mom sold them at a garage sale while I was off to college.
I loved the building toys - tinker toys, lincoln logs, lego - but my parents were seriously sexist, so my brother got those, and I got dolls. To be fair, this would have been the early to mid 60s, so that’s the way things were. But we all pretty much shared all the toys, altho my brother chose GI Joe over Barbie.
Apart from that, I did play a lot with Barbie and the original cardboard dreamhouse. Plus my mom made extra money by sewing all sorts of Barbie outfits, so mine was well-dressed, and there was a toy store near us that had an 8¢ rack where you could get accessories like shoes and “appliances” - much of my allowance was spent there.
OK, I know I have asked this question before, and got an answer, but I’ve forgotten again.
My brother and I had toy that wasn’t a Thingmaker, but that’s the name that always pops into my head.* Instead of molds to make stuff with goop, it came with these square chunks of plastic, and you threw one on the heating element (which was under a plastic dome with a door IIRC) and when the plastic heated up it would unfold into a little plastic monster figure. Then you could heat it up again and press it back into it’s square shape.
* My brother may have had a Thingmaker too, hence my confusion.
I find myself wondering what I would have said at different points in childhood, and don’t really know.
But when I look back and think what was good fun and not kind of stupid or disappointing or too hard, my mind goes to Screwball Scramble. (Get a ball bearing successfully over an obstacle course.)
When I was 4 apparently I had a Peter Pan doll (what we would call now an action figure I guess though bigger) I carried everywhere. It got me through my eye operation though I barely remember it. After that it was molded cowboys and sets. I don’t know what there were made of; it wasn’t plastic. They were something pressed onto wires so were slightly movable.
By age 8 I got into dice or spinner controlled baseball games. This lead to APBA baseball. Which I played for years.
I think you might be talking about a Vac-U-Form. You heat the plastic up and it got soft and droopy then you manually pumped the air out to shape the plastic to the form. I had one, it was cool. Not that much stuff you could make though.
Thingmakers were cool. Actually they were hot. But I never got burned. The coolest one (and the hardest) was the cockroach. You had to carefully pour the plastigoop in the antenna part of the form and when it got done, pry them out with the pin tool.
Other faves- Tinkertoys (the old wooden ones), Superballs, erector set, girder and panel set, viewmaster.
Oh- and I had a Smack-a-roo set too. Good for a few days but boring after that. Skittlebowl was great but quite difficult.
Marbles in various colors and sizes.
A Meccano set
A red toy plane that would go around in circles
My dream was to own the potato spud gun, X-ray Glasses, the bicycle radio, the silent dog whistle and the Polaris submarine in that order.
Yes, everyone writes fondly of TInkertoys, but I had what must have been some other kid’s old Tinkertoys and some kid’s old Erector set, and I screwed around with them aimlessly and didn’t get anywhere.
I may have been too young, and by the time I was the “right” age, I never thought about them anymore maybe because they were “for younger children” in my mind.
I had a building kit that you could use to build bridges, and, again, probably too young, because I kind of remember looking at the instructions and thinking that was far too much work.
Although sometimes I think you need to live where you can have friends to show off to, and then that can motivate you.
I had this one but never got into the more difficult builds. Mainly kept building and rebuilding the viaduct or the box truss; I do remember trying the drawbridge once.
Love that. Me and several friends from the neighborhood all had sets. We used to get them altogether at one house and use books, chairs, whatever to make these long killer routes.
Bow-chicka-wow-wow…