I remember those. They were very popular in my neighborhood about the same time Starsky & Hutch was on the air. In my memory, the pellet guns somewhat resembled one used by one or the other of them.
Those toy flintlock rifles with the barrels made of sheet metal make really good bottle rocket launchers once you remove the plugs that they put in the muzzles to keep inventive kids (like us) from doing things like that. 
Another good method with bottle rockets is to put a loose handful into one of those cardboard fireworks tubes, then light one and put it in with the rest. The exhaust blast from the first one lights the rest, and you get a nice salvo that way…
-MMM-
Ah, yes, the Zebra II. One of my faves as a lad, and based on the Whitney Wolverine. Just got a Whitney recently; works great for a 50 year old .22 plinker… 
-MMM-
Was his name Tommy?
Great Thread! A lot of memories. I just thought of a couple more.
Prop Shots, a small airplane with a huge propeller on a handheld launcher with a ripcord. You would pull the ripcord and the mechanism attached to the prop would rev it up and launch the plane at considerable speed. The spinning prop was very dangerous if you hit something. I would shoot it into our weeping willow tree and watch it slice off bits of the long leaves. I remember being pissed off at a kid and shot it at him, he screamed in pain and fell to the ground.
The red and white water rocket. A hollow rocket would pump full of air and water to high pressure then launch. It could really reach high altitudes and cause damage it you hit something.
I’ve been following the thread, but I can’t remember if anybody has mentioned the Evel Knievel action figures and their wind-up vehicles.
The vehicles got wound up on a flywheel contraption that you would crank like a jack in the box. The only problem is, to get any real torque on it, you had to pretty much sacrifice your knuckles to every downstroke. I’m sure the roads in my neighborhood still have usable samples of my DNA embedded in them.
I had that Evel Knievel motorcycle, in addition to the crank handle having little ground clearance, the crank was hard to grip and fairly flimsy too. Luckily I didn’t have any asphalt around, mine was mostly used on gravel. You could really get some RPMs on the thing, and of course the faster you cranked the cooler Evel’s ride was.
Here’s another shot of the crank, mine was white rather than red though: http://www.plaidstallions.com/evel/evel3.jpg
Yeah those rockets really went fast and far. I’d say they could go up to 100 feet in the air. Luckily the nose was rounded, but I remember the fins were fairly dangerous.
Here’s some pics, the ones I had were like the right-most one: http://www.timewarptoys.com/wrocketlot.jpg
Do they still make the little gas-powered airplanes that you “flew” at the end of a “control line” (i.e. string)? I think the company was Cox. Those babies had all kinds of opportunities to injure yourself. The engines got screaming-3rd-degree-burns hot. It wasn’t too hard to get a finger in the prop during the starting process. Best of all, an errant breeze during “aerobatics” could send the plane into a high-speed dive directly at the pilot! I had a Stuka, IIRC.
In the same time period, I had a gas-powered chopper trike from the same company. No controls, you just started it an let it go. The irregularities in the lawn made it motor about unpredictably…including out into the street where a passing dump truck could run it down like a roving pet.
Control-Z, That was mine as well, the exact model, wow!
Mine eventually ended up on top of my neighbor’s third story roof where it sat like a monument for weeks until the wind blew it off. I never got it back much to my mother’s delight.
As for Cox planes I had the P-40, very difficult to start and you could almost loose a finger.
Oh, the Superball reminded me of this. . . thing we used to have. It was a tube filled with. . . rubber of some kind. And a coffee stirrer. You put a blob of the rubber on the end of the straw and blew and it made a multi-colored balloon-type piece of crap.
My aunt, who had no excuse because she was 4 years older than me (still is, btw) would pop the ballon-thingy and chew the ball of chemical nastiness. Not me-- that stuff smelled like a Du Pont lab, why would I chew on a ball of chemical fumes?
My aunt was not the only one who chewed that crap like bubble gum.
I found one at Toys R Us last summer. It only went up about forty feet. Fang still thought it was tre cool.
The newer ones don’t seem to work as well as the ones I had as a kid. I attribute it to two things.
- The pumps now are all plastic. The older ones that had some metal parts could withstand hard pumping that’ll snap the new ones.
- The older ones had a soft, natural rubber washer to make the seal between rocket and pump. The newer ones don’t seal as well and lose too much of the pressure the shoddy pumps let you build up.
I don’t think there was a brand name associated to them, but when I was about 10 or so, the local hardware store sold wooden bows that definately helped us play cowboys and indians much more realistically. They were kid-sized, but still a weapon by any standard. The more you used them, the easier it was to pull the string all the way back, and after a lot of carnage, they’d eventually break or wear out; but while they were good, they were most certainly dangerous. We lived close to a marshy area bordered by railroad tracks and a patch of woods, and I clearly remember shooting an arrow at a slight angle up into the air and watching it go a long, long way. Where were the parents, you might ask? Having cocktails in the back yard I believe. Somehow no one was killed.
Super Elastic Bubble Plastic! That’s it. There had to be a bunch of poison in it.
And it never would come off Grandpa’s car!
Shoddy workmanship, or safety design?
No one has mentioned Estes model rockets. I only discovered them as an adult, but with an altitude of 1,000 feet, if you were to aim them at something across the street…
I had some of this stuff! I think mine was the “generic” version, which was probably even MORE toxic. Ah, good times!
Yeah, I remember that one…if you lost direction by one degree left or right along the trajectory upon which you launched yourself at the top of the hill, you usually ended up with a spike that was holding the bottom end into the ground in your face, side or thigh. I still have the scar.