Inspired by the "Toy Soldiers" thread I was finally able to wrestle my husband down and force him to watch the clips. Subsequently a few of the other guys here wondering what I was on about, and eventually the conversation turned to toys and the like they all had as kids.

Unfortunately I couldn't participate in the discussion in my childhood only having had one toy, a doll given to me by one of the church ladies it upon discovery by my father burned with the garbage with a few choice words thrown in. So the experience or perhaps good memories of such things is a little lost on me.......What wasn't however were the looks of VERY fond memories on these guys faces as they recounted what they had, the good and disasters of them yet all of it great memories.

Those I recall most were obviously of my husbands. By no means a spoiled child, though I'm sure feeling wanting as a child now viewing it very fondly, the few toys he did have were therefor very valued (that doesn't mean taken care of however....He and his brothers known as the only children who could destroy Tonka Trucks that elephants could stand on), yet what they meant to him clearly meant a lot.

By todays standards, many of them would be considered a hazard to say the least. Choking, burns, eyes put out let alone all the knots on foreheads and cut digits....Lead poisoning the least of their worries....However to these guys unlike those over protected children of today, that ended up being half the fun in retrospect, yet more so a learning experience to be careful be it from having the imprint of a bug permanently branded into your skin, or a father grasping you by your ankles and shaking you hard inverted to get you to spit up the toy you swallowed....Man these guys laughed their backsides off.

Anywho, he mentioned the following and more I can't recall which I spent the morning looking up, they being;
Tonka type trucks
Hotwheels
SST racers
Monkey Division military weapons (guns, bazooka's, booby traps, etc.)
Major Matt Mason
Creepy Crawlers which included (reminded while looking them up) Fighting Men, Creeple Peeple, & Fright Factory
Some Time Machine thing where you'd cook cubes that would make dinosaurs that would unfold then recrush them to cubes.
Spirograph
Slot cars (both HO gauge yet also big ones you'd take to a track in the neighborhood)
Lionel & HO trains
etc..

He then went on to mention the toys he really liked the best, most now a days considered way too dangerous in fact he recalls how some of the knives, equipment, chemicals are now illegal for folks to have (like radioactive and highly toxic).....
Steel Erector Sets
A plastic Erector Set where you'd make sky scrapers with all the girders and such
Biology set (probes, scalpels, surgical tools)
Chemistry sets to lab quality degrees he said you could buy the materials and equipment.

Naturally once a little older he said he had a "Cox" Stuka and other fly by wire/string aircraft....Kites, baseballs, basketballs and so on, finally plastic models of cars and tanks and so on (he actually still has many of these hehe).........and then it all came to an end.....

Yep..........girls.

Anywho, what toys did you love and have any fond memories to share?

K2

Mid 30's here, here some of my generations stuff:

G.I. Joe (little ones)
Transformers
GoBots (Transformers knock-off)
Voltron (vehicle and lions)
Star Wars
Hotwheels/Matchbox
Lego sets
Erector sets

I'm in my early 50's, and my parents weren't that loaded, so a lot of it came down to me and my four brother's imaginations:

Footballs
Cardboard boxes big enough to sit in
Mud

I was really fond of a toy helicopter I once had that you would put on a hand-held launching device and then pull a string or wire. Then the blades would spin and that thing would go up to 100 feet away and maybe 20 feet up in the air. Of course I broke it in short order like all boy's toys. The laws are so protective now that even a toy like that would be considered 'dangerous' these days.

Another real favorite was electric road race cars. We had both big and small scale ones at various times. A lot more fun than HotWheels because they moved via a real motor and you could have long races with them. Keeping them from flying off the tracks in the curves was a problem if you went too fast. But I suppose that's realistic because the same thing happens in real cars of you go too fast in curves.

I did have Tyco electric racing sets as well, and shocked myself now and again . Every-so-often a motor would burn-out and you fill the room with that acrid smell.

tyco vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...Rjek&feature=related

Whoops forgot a few others he mentioned...

Baking soda rockets, GI Joes (before the ones with the fuzzy heads, the military ones) Gold and Silver Knight's (like GI Joes)...

Yet him being close to 50 he did also mention the all time favs sounding a lot like AndyJWest's.

A refrigerator box was a treasure....Dirt clods which besides making little mock explosions when hitting the ground, also had sound effects if bounced off someone elses head, sticks for swords, guns, etc..

ANother thing he mentioned was he and his brothers and all their friends having Knight's armor.....Basically paper bags with holes cut in them for arms, and head, eye slits for helmets, and crayoned up with emblems.....The game being to rip the other guys armor off....Trouble is was they decided to use 2x4's for swords, 4x4 blocks or rocks tied on string for mace and chain....You get the picture, a couple minutes into it the armor shreded someone gets out of control and wham, 2x4 to the head, then it started, everyone bashing everyone else, screaming and bashing....

Boys is so dumb

K2

Hey these days it's called "Live Action Role Playing" a.k.a. "boffing"

Sadly i know a few people who have or still do this *sigh* :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB8VMNymEPA&NR=1

quote:

Originally posted by LEBillfish:
ANother thing he mentioned was he and his brothers and all their friends having Knight's armor.....Basically paper bags with holes cut in them for arms, and head, eye slits for helmets, and crayoned up with emblems.....The game being to rip the other guys armor off....Trouble is was they decided to use 2x4's for swords, 4x4 blocks or rocks tied on string for mace and chain....You get the picture, a couple minutes into it the armor shreded someone gets out of control and wham, 2x4 to the head, then it started, everyone bashing everyone else, screaming and bashing....

Boys is so dumb

K2

Johnny 7, a big assault rifle with seven different functions.

Amongst my earliest memories; a red pedal car - a train really, with a black rubber funnel, it had the words 'The Iron Duke' in gold along the sides towards the front. I spent happy summer days outside in my grandmother's garden, where a tin bath-tub sat upon a supporting structure I can't quite recall - too engrossed with the brightly coloured plastic tug boats and liners I would sail across my little oval ocean. I had a battery-powered yellow flying saucer with a clear plastic dome protecting a silver-clad astronaut behind a printed control console - it would roll across the floor in irregular patterns as the wheels beneath rotated.

Beyond toddler status, I remember a vast collection of scarlet coated British guardsmen led by a Highland bass drummer, which I would parade from the kitchen, through the hallway, across the living room to the front window of the large flat we lived in, before going to bed and leaving my poor mother to tidy them away, night after night. Lots of cowboys and Knights appeared later - I liked the Timpo ones you could rotate at the waist and swap hats or whole heads. Just reminded myself of a collection of redcoats with white wigs under their tricorne hats - all detatchable. I had a fort for them, but oddly no opposing force from a similar era - I had an appreciation of historical accuracy at a very early age. Cowboy guns and later an authentic (to my childish perception) American paratrooper's carbine which came in a cardoard box printed to represent a packing crate. Airfix Ho/oo scale soldiers - from ancient britons to astronauts, and everything conceiveable between - rarely painted them.. I must have made Airfix shareholders rich people come to think of it, along with the rest of my generation. Trying hard to remember the first kit I made - I can't say with certainty. With the exeption of the cars (they never have appealed to me - I still don't drive, never have), and the expensive large scale stuff, I must have built most of the kits on offer in the highly prized Airfix catalogue. Now and again I'd aqquire an exotic American or Japanese kit for Christmas or a birthday. Had the obligatory 1960's British boyhood collection suspended from the bedroon ceiling. A diversion from war and weaponry was provided by Subutteo table Soccer (just flick to kick) - spent hours customisting my teams and repairing 'injuries'. Oh! That reminds me of 'Owzat!' the cricket game where you rolled little hexagonal metal bars to represent cricket - would make no sense at all unless you'd seen it. The great thing with it was you could play on your own. Back to kits - I liked the 'Matchbox' two or three coloured ones, and their tanks came with a bit of battlefield to display them on. Had loads of them.

My literary interests were awakened by little square pocket books with pictures of airliners and ships, later I avidly collected the Ladybird 'Adventures from History' series - my favourite ones were Napoleon, Henry V, King John and William The Conqueror; the original ones with a page of text opposite a full page painting - they were reprinted later with a much less appealling format. Not toys per say, but books played a big part in my childhood - something I've carried with me into my adult life - as a child I read lots of comics too; I liked the American ones wth their colour adverts for two whole armies in a box and strange exotic items like 'Twinkies' and 'Sea-monkeys'.

We really did have jumpers for goalpoasts as we played football - in the very road it now takes me so long to cross as I wait for the traffic to clear. And of course, imagination - a dustbin lid for a shield and a stick for a sword and I was away. A friend of mine had an old wardobe lying on its' back at the bottom of his large garden - it was a tank to us. We went all over the world in it.



I could go on for hours - I'll let someone else have a go now.

I am not yet 40, and I think that most guys in my age group may have similar lists.
I must also allow it that different toys appealed to me in different ages.
When I was very young, I had a Weeble Tree House that I really loved playing with.
In grade school, GI Joe was all the rage.
About that time, my father really got me into RC airplanes. I had watched him since I was old enough to remember, starting on control line planes when I was about 8 or so, and then moving up to RC around 10.
My favorite RC airplane of all was a fairly easy to build "Pronto". My dad built the first one and painted it bright red with a checkered band on each of the left wings. It was so fun to fly because it was fairly aerobatic, easy to repair and not a tragic loss of time and money if it crashed.
One day, it sounded funny in flight, like a buzzing noise. When my dad landed it in the back yard, the thing disintegrated into a thousands splinters. It was a soft landing by clearly something was wrong with the airframe.
He felt so badly, that he bought me another one that I built, and painted the same as the first.
Sorry for the long story, but the RC planes were my favorite for a very long time.
Also, when I was about 6 or so, I had a Matchbox Spitfire that was my absolute favorite.
I had a really great BB gun that I enjoyed tremendously. It was the ol' Pumpmaster 760. I was out all the time carrying that thing around.

My favorite toy was a second hand Mattel 'Vac-U-Form' machine. I used to make model diorama parts with it such as extra fuel drums, wheels, etc. by taking half of the actual model part and using it as the form, could make as many duplicates of the part as I wanted if it could fit into the working area of the machine.

My brothers and I were given an erector set from probably the 1930's that was fun to play around with, and it had this electric motor assembly that was very powerful for its size.

We had some Tonka toys handed down from older relatives, but by the time they got to us they were pretty beat. We would set them up for target practice, and pretend we would be 150 yds off from a convoy when we sprung the trap. After several treatments of this, they looked like the rusted out and blown up hulks you would see in the middle east.

We had the spirograph, and that would sometimes keep us occupied during the rainy days, and we had some friends who had a LiteBrite set that could be fun by spelling out dirty words and phrases.

The same friends also had messy toys such as 'Silly Sand', and 'SpinArt' sets that our parents would never allow us to have. (knowing us, we probably would have tried to modify the SpinArt machines so you could be able to aim it at each other. )

We also had the GI Joes with the equipment given to us for christmas and birthday presents over the years. One of my brothers and I would have to have our names or initials marked or inscribed on all of our respective items to prevent any altercations between us resulting from what belonged to who. (not good from a collector's standpoint, but it did put an end to most of the fights. One good thing though, is that I learned how to take a beating from an older brother. )

We had some friends who were fairly well off, and they had a lot of the toys that BF listed above, and a whole lot more. Some of those toys ended up with us, but most were either broken or had important pieces missing. The Vac-U-Form was one of these toys, but my dad fortunately repaired it.

We also used to do the 'knights in armour' thing, except my uncle who lived nearby had horses and mules to fight on! My dad made us helmets out of 10 lb coffee cans with eye slots, and he made another Viking looking helmet from the bottom of an ashtray urn. We would use the thin picket fence slats for swords, with garbage can lids for the shields, and our 'lances' were those cheap, spindly and fragile cane tomato stakes that would pretty much explode into a million pieces on contact. Still, if you got a strong enough tomato stake, it could roll you right off the back of the horse with your chest hurting like all get out. Anyway, you could imagine how it could be the next day after getting charged up from watching 'The Warlord', 'The Vikings', 'El Cid', etc. on T.V. the night before.

We also would hitch up old rubber car tires to the horse's collars and hames, and would have 'Ben Hur' races where we would be sitting inside the tire that would lay flat on the ground. After getting dragged around in thick clouds of dust for a while, you ended up like a cross between Pigpen and Al Jolson.

We had some older cousins who lived in Houston whose family was rather well off. They had a big collection of Corgi military vehicles from the 1950's,(there were two boys, and thus they literally had two of every vehicle) as well as a big American Civil War lead soldier collection with cannons, wagons, caissons, horses, etc. By the time we were old enough to appreciate them, the cousins were already off to college, and we were allowed to play with them. I think that is where I got my appreciation for these type of toys where they were to be handled a lot more delicately with some modicum of respect for them than how you would treat other toys.

As far as literature, they also had a set of books from what I believe was the 1940's. I really hated reading, but these books were a rare exeption. I do not recall the title of the series or individual books, but they were the fictional adventures of George Washington, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Anthony Wayne, etc. when they were boys. The 'illustrations' in these books were silhouettes of the type done with books back then. I have done online searches with no success. Maybe someone here on the forum would have any info on these books?

Remember these?

http://home.att.net/~1.elliott...booktoysoldiers.html

Man I swear every commercial known to man has been uploaded to youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbD91SNiE9g

quote:

Originally posted by Sillius_Sodus:
Johnny 7, a big assault rifle with seven different functions.

The very ones, Sancho! I must have made my mother's life a misery asking why I couldn't get them in England.

Ha! i actually got a set of them as a kid, didn't quite live up to the hype .

quote:

Originally posted by Low_Flyer_MkIX:
The very ones, Sancho! I must have made my mother's life a misery asking why I couldn't get them in England.