quote:

Originally posted by roybaty:
I wanted one of these so bad, but never got one .



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6V-tuOf3dE

Dood, I went nuts every time the commercial came on for one of these! I never got one either...

They were awfully expensive back then, though...

Just about everything Billfish & Andy said.. I recall .. but I didn't have a lot of it.... and yeah.. a refrigerator box was GOLD. Especially if you were lucky enough to find one in the winter.. preferably after a big snowstorm... and along with the backing soda rockets.. there was a baking soda submarine.. and a diver that had a balloon in it, the balsa planes that you put together.. there were the gliders.. and the ones with the red prop and the rubber band, that had the red clip where you had to put the wings on to...... I also had an official James Bond 007 attache case.. the one with the secret gun that shot out the side.. and a 1/32 scale racing set.... My older cousins Cox P-40... and my P-51.. it wasn't gas powered or anything.. but when I got that 1:18 scale P-51 of Roscoe Brown.. It really brought back memories when I had it in my hand.. I even had to go "EEEeeerrrrnnnnnhnhnnhhhhhhrhrhhrhhrhhhhhhhhh" around the room with it...

I also had a battery operated 707 that had flashing lights and would taxi around the floor...

I loved models... all kinds.. I had the cars.. the ships.. the Rat Fink models... the Nautilus.. the one that opened on the side, and eventually succumbed to a firecracker in a missle launch tube. .. and showed all the compartments... The Enterprise carrier.... The monsters .... Superman, Batman, Cap, Hulk & Spidey the Visible Man & the Visible Woman, the Lost in Space Robot and the Jupiter 2.. Of course all the space ships... Enterprise.. the Klingon BoP.. the ship from Space 1999.. the one from The Invaders & Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, both the Seaview and the yellow subersible flying minisub.... and of course the planes... Balsa... WWI.. WWII ... The Spirit of St. Louis..

I grew up in the Bronx.. and we made a lot of our own toys.. A piece of 2x4, an old skate.. some nails and a wooden milk crate.. and you had a scooter.. If you could get hold of paint you were set. A baby stroller was a prize find.. especially during go kart season.. again.. the 2x4.. some nails the milk crate.. this time made as a seat.. and a piece of rope... and a hill.... Ooohhhhh yeahhhhhh.. BIG FUN. Homemade slingshots... 75 cents got you a peashooter and a 16 oz bag of beans... A sock with chalk on it and and you became Picasso...

Then of course we had Johnny on the Pony, Ringolevio,Skellies (Loadies), Redlight Greenligt, Hot Peas & Butter, Stickball,Red Rover, Punch Ball, Curbball, Slugs, pitching pennies, flipping cards, tossing caps, water ballons, water guns, and ... I cannot leave out the Johnny pump..

This thread is a very good one... Thanks K..

Oh man, I remember going after refrigerator boxes behind an appliance store a bout a mile from the house and dragging them back home.
And we would collect pepsi bottles or soda bottles and take them to the liquor store for change and then go to a drugstore to buy balsa wood rubber powered planes.

Anyone have a Texaco fire helmet? Or a Dino the dinosaur (from the gas station)?

K2

Sinclair the dinosaur from BP Petrolium? We had a green brontosaurus but I'm not sure if it was that one. It was my brothers and I think it was a bank.


BC. I had a ton of those Guillow's balsa planes. Had the jet ones too that just glided. For balance it had the metal clip on the nose.

How about parachutes. A 3 ounce army man was attached to the plastic parachute. You'd spend time trying to figure out how to fold it just right so you'd get the best height from it AND have it open at the apex.

Strange that no one has said LEGO's yet. One of the best things to ever come out of Denmark.

I can't imagine life without being able to go to the toy shop every week or two and spending my pocket money on whatever I liked.
Happy days.

I had lots of Action Man stuff, including almost every uniform:
Guardsman
deep sea diver,
skuba diver,
cricket player,
footballer,
German officer,
German infantry,
Armoured car,
powered inflatable boat,
para-trooper.

I had other similar action figures too - Knight with horse, Cowboy with horse, secret agent.

Airfix kits of course, and these too:

http://www.hobbybunker.com/cat...=mfg&ID=65&mscID=441

And Scalextric.

quote:

Airfix kits of course...

Well yes, made them by the dozens.

A few years later I was working in the Airfix drawing office, so I got to design a few too. My first job...

quote:

Originally posted by Jediteo:
Strange that no one has said LEGO's yet. One of the best things to ever come out of Denmark.

LOL.. I got into Legos as an adult.. when my now 28 year old daughter was a kid. and it really took off when my now 19 year old was a kid.. I had my own set.. LMAO..

late nineties early double o's
mostly Lego im in the country of Lego itself denmark.
also Micromachines, (small scale tanks, soldiers airplanes etc etc. )
and lastly wooden guns my dad made and my imagination.

AndyJWest - you designed Airfix kits?!

For me, the things that come to mind best are the games we used to play at school during Morning Tea, Lunch and Afternoon Tea - yes, that's really what we called our break times. I grew up in the 1980's (33 y.o. now) in Pleasant Point, a town of about 800 people in NZ .

One of the best was what we called "barbadoor", a corruption of the name "Bar-the-door" which is what my parents grew up playing. It's the same as "Bullrush" if that helps. I still think it would make an excellent TV sport.

Next was "Chasing", which is what we imaginatively called "Tag". I especially remember "Tag-on-ther-lines" in which you had to stick to the lines and cracks in the playground concrete. All the rules were fun, too. Our school had the following terms:
-The Chaser was 'In"
-If you were in and tagged someone they couldn't tag you straight back because you were 'butcher's" until another person went in. That rule was variable and would be called at the start of the session.
-If you were puffed from running around you could sometimes cross your index and middle finger and say 'Pegs", which meant you were unable to be tagged. I later found out that the word was a bastardized version of "Pax". Kids in schools 2km would in fact used that word, but our little town had somehow lost the original form.

Another epic, especially of days when the grass was too wet to play cricket on, was "Four Square".

Using the divisions in the slabs of concrete that formed part of our playground, we would arrange ourselves into four. Those were the early days. As we got older it stretched out to about 8 or 12 but then we ran out of kids big enough to join in. There were only 38 kids in my school, which went from age 5 through to 12.
The rules.
The head square was the King. he could set the the rules for each round but basically the rules as we played them were;

A player can use one or two hands to propel the ball into another player's square. That player must clear the ball after one bounce.
The art was in using combinations of brute strength, clever angles, and my favourite, minute touches, to defeat the other players.
Once the ball had bounced twice in your square or you were otherwise unable to return the ball, you lost you position and had to go back to the last square and try to work your way back up.

Some of the rules and moves that I can recall are:
Big Jumboes - the King smashes the ball as hard as they can vertically into someone's square to start and anyone is allowed to go up for it in the aims of trying to outleap everyone else and tip it into a rival's square. An entire game could actually consist of nothing but Big Jumboes, if so ruled by the King.

Carrying - This was a penalty for excessively long time with ball in hand, usually while trying to drag a ball into a suitable position to Big Jumbo an enemy, or when trying to hurl a vicious, raking angled shot into the outermost corner of an oppenent's square.

Telephone - If the King said No telephones at the start of the round, then it was forbidden to hit the ball straight back to the player who passed it to you.

That's all that come to mind for now but I can just see it now. standing out there on the playground, squabbling and plotting and giving each other **** for mistakes and transgressions, and having a really good time.

Legos were number 7 in my list on the first page . I always ended up making spacecraft of sorts with roomy interiors, doors, hatches, seats, the works, I always had to crash them for some reason .

quote:

Originally posted by roybaty:
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

quote:

Originally posted by Jediteo:
Strange that no one has said LEGO's yet. One of the best things to ever come out of Denmark.

quote:

AndyJWest - you designed Airfix kits?!

Yup, my first job after leaving school. Started off as the office junior - general gopher, dyeline printer operator (cough, cough - ammonia fumes), official collector of midmorning snacks from the canteen. They taught me enough drafting techniques to do the basics, then when they saw I had the patience to be any use, they let me do proper drafting jobs. Mostly simple injection-moulding tool design at first, which was mainly copying existing drawings with a few minor changes.

After a year or so they asked me to knock up a few drawings showing how I'd break down a real aircraft design into mouldable parts (a Boeing 727 or something, just a trial run), and then gave me a project of my own - 1/72nd scale Fw 190-A8 if my memory serves me right. There were good three-view drawings about (or at least good enough for the standards we aspired to), and plenty of photos, so it wasn't that complex a task - managed to wrangle a visit to the Imperial War Museum to check a few details though.

A lot of the work wasn't so much designing the kits themselves, but the tooling used to produce them. And then after an agonising wait (well it was for me with the Fw 190), the first test shots of the kit would become available - out with the glue - put one together for the bosses to look at, then write a report on anything that needed fixing. Instruction leaflets were done by outside graphics designers, but they had to be checked too.

A lot of the kits I worked on were cooperative efforts between draftsmen, but there were two or three that were all my own work. By the late 1970s Airfix was in serious financial difficulties, and I left just before the receivers were called in (I think, can't remember the exact sequence of events). An interesting job, and Airfix seemed to attract oddballs, so I felt right at home there, too.

quote:

Originally posted by AndyJWest:

quote:

AndyJWest - you designed Airfix kits?!

Yup, my first job after leaving school. Started off as the office junior - general gopher, dyeline printer operator (cough, cough - ammonia fumes), official collector of midmorning snacks from the canteen. They taught me enough drafting techniques to do the basics, then when they saw I had the patience to be any use, they let me do proper drafting jobs. Mostly simple injection-moulding tool design at first, which was mainly copying existing drawings with a few minor changes.

After a year or so they asked me to knock up a few drawings showing how I'd break down a real aircraft design into mouldable parts (a Boeing 727 or something, just a trial run), and then gave me a project of my own - 1/72nd scale Fw 190-A8 if my memory serves me right. There were good three-view drawings about (or at least good enough for the standards we aspired to), and plenty of photos, so it wasn't that complex a task - managed to wrangle a visit to the Imperial War Museum to check a few details though.

A lot of the work wasn't so much designing the kits themselves, but the tooling used to produce them. And then after an agonising wait (well it was for me with the Fw 190), the first test shots of the kit would become available - out with the glue - put one together for the bosses to look at, then write a report on anything that needed fixing. Instruction leaflets were done by outside graphics designers, but they had to be checked too.

A lot of the kits I worked on were cooperative efforts between draftsmen, but there were two or three that were all my own work. By the late 1970s Airfix was in serious financial difficulties, and I left just before the receivers were called in (I think, can't remember the exact sequence of events). An interesting job, and Airfix seemed to attract oddballs, so I felt right at home there, too.

Now that is a cool first job!

Much better then mine, which was cleaning at a butcher's shop.

Oh, and regarding Legos, I don't know how I missed that one. I had several of the original kits, particularly the space stuff, and at one point had a huge box full of the bricks. I would make all kinds of stuff out of them, sometimes forts for my GI Joes.

Tonka Front end loader with backhoe
Tonka dump truck (made from steel)
Hot Wheels
Lincoln Logs
My red BMX

and something I still mess with at times, Construx, #1