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Mine was the piles of sawdust in grandpa's woodshop, and the battered old Tonka trucks. That man got me to move entire piles of sawdust without my realizing I was even doing any work.
And it was so much fun!
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Flipper. He was my stuffed, well, Flipper. I lost him when I was twenty-three, and sobbed for two days.
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At the risk of sounding repetative, Lego was also a staple feature of my childhood. However, the swing in the backyard and playmobil also played a big role.
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My favorite toy when I was a child was a red plastic demolition derby car. It could be assembled and reassembled out of several parts. You put it together, wound it up, and aimed it at the wall. It raced toward the wall, hit the wall, and came apart. Then you put it back together and did it all again.
I also liked Silly Putty a lot, and my Tinkertoys. And I don't know if you can really call it a toy, but my cousins and I had a full-size, three or four room play house complete with real (but non-functioning) appliances. It was in an unused, cleaned out chicken coop at my grandma's house. I liked that play house an awful lot, too.
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Fisher Price Little People. I startet playing with them when I was 3.5 and didn't stop until my mom no longer thought it was healthy for me to spend all day in my room imagining up stories and lives for them. I'd use chess boards as foundations for homes and empty cassette tape cases were the walls, since I only had one real Fisher Price Little People home. The Frosty the Snowman I made in kindergarten served as their fridge and ring boxes were beds with headboards. Hallways were highways for the one car, schoolbus, motorcycle, and firetruck I had and sometimes served as a runway for the 4 seat jet. A bookcase was an apartment complex and my mom's jewelry box was the town hall. Every Little People(Person?) I owned had a first, middle and last name and belonged to a family that had a history.
Those were long, but very fun days. Posts: 378 | Registered: Aug 2004
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<Relieved this isn't an onanism thread. So far.>
I had a set of motorized Tinker Toys. Those, the Legos, the Lincoln Logs, and the big wooden blocks kinda shared first place, as they were more often than not used in conjunction with one another. But if I had to choose one of them, it'd probably be the Tinker Toys. Legos might have won had I been younger, but the interesting and unusual legos in those days were the shingles -- special sets didn't really exist yet. At least not in my house.
However, my favorite was a little red and yellow Pennzoil big rig.
I did have a stuffed lamb that I liked. I passed that on to my youngest sister. Now my sister has gotten a little old for it. It used to play a melody when you wound up the key in the back. Now it just sits there in silence with only one eye.
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Legos, definitely. I also read a lot of books, built forts out of cushions and blankets, and occasionally played outside.
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I loved the Fisher Price little people too. And my backyard sandbox, I would spend all day out there making stuff. And my tinker toys, those were good. I really did like barbie dolls, too.
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When I was about nine, and living in England, my friend Christine had the entire collection of Sylvanians. I was addicted. I'd go to her house all the time and play with them. I knew all their names, and their various relationships with each other. We'd play for HOURS.
I can't remember what came earlier.
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Matilda, who is so important she gets to be in my photo album.
Emma loves her, but not, as yet, as much as I still do, I think.
She let me hold Matilda while I cried the day I miscarried. Matilda has been with me since before I can remember, and has been there for every major-- and minor-- life event.
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Hot wheels! Start on the dining room table, down, through the loop-the-loop, off the jump at the end and crash into the wall at the end of the living room.
Legos, of course. And I loved the fisher-price people, too-- the old wood ones, of course, not those new-fangled plastic ones.
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Ohh! I forgot about the "Little People" and the lincoln log sets. Those were for rainy day, next to the fireplace, inside times. Uhleeuh - mine had stories, too. And names. And families. And my sister hated playing with me because I told all the stories "in my head", rather than saying them aloud.
To this day, she's the oral narrator of the family, while I'm the one that puts it down on paper.
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I went through a phase were I built and decorated dollhouses. Sylvanians were always the families that lived in them.
My favorite toys varied from age to age, but I guess I'm going to have to be the first person to post something really girly and say that I really, really loved my Strawberry Shortcake dolls.
And I also have to say that I do not approve of the current Strawberry Shortcake dolls, as they are dressed FAR too fashionably. Strawberry Shortcake and her pals are supposed to wear frilly dresses, striped stockings, and possibly aprons (or, ethnic dress, if they happen to be one of the ones from another country, like Crepe Suzette, Almond Tea, Cafe Ole, or Mint Tulip). Ok. I'll stop now.
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quote:My favorite toy when I was a child was a red plastic demolition derby car. It could be assembled and reassembled out of several parts. You put it together, wound it up, and aimed it at the wall. It raced toward the wall, hit the wall, and came apart. Then you put it back together and did it all again.
Oh, I remember those! What were they called? Something 'em Smash 'em Somethingorother?
My favorite toy was a constantly growing action figure base that I made out of styrofoam packing blocks. As a reward my mom would take me to cruise down alleys looking for interestingly shaped pieces of styrofoam to add to my base. I'd paint them, create little control panels, incorporate discarded electronic doo-dads that I took out of broken things, etc. It was pretty elaborate, with control centers, sub control centers, living quarters, launch bays, anti-aircraft towers...pretty much anything that I could think of that I could find an adequate piece of styrofoam for. Eventually it covered almost the entire floor of my room two to three stories high (when assembled).
[Edit--the name I was thinkin of was Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, which are of course a completely different toy. Now my inability to remember the car's name will bug me for a day or two.]
When you're the only girl among all boys, I think you either go tomboy or girly-girl. I went girly-girl - I carried my baby girl with me everywhere.
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Awww. I went tomboy - I didn't have a favourite toy. My favourite thing was being outside and messing around with my friends. Oh but I did love my bike - Does that count?
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quote: When I was about nine, and living in England, my friend Christine had the entire collection of Sylvanians.
Raia, I remember Sylvanians! My friends had lots, although I only ever had a few. I'd forgotten about them, thanks for reminding me . I guess they were much bigger in England than they were in North America- they were definately the cool thing for girls to have for a long time!
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Tinker Toys. I loved Tinker Toys. I also liked Legos and Lincoln Logs, but I don't think we had as many of them. I recall playing with Lincoln Logs at a friend's house.
The Fisher Price Little People hospital. I recall that.
Coloring. We kept our stash of crayons in a plastic pumpkin from Halloween. And we had this stencil thing that could produce textures. That was fun. Oh, and Spiral-graph, or whatever it was called. Lite Brite, too.
When I got a bit older--Barbies. Definitely. But not how my friends played. They'd spend hours doing their hair and dressing them up, and the Skippers were about 8 and talked like they were 5. Bleh. Sure, my sister and I spent a fair amount of time doing hair and changing their clothes, but then we'd have wild adventures, filled with haunted houses and secret passages. Most of it was in our imaginations, but that's what made it fun.
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I loved playing with my Barbies. My step-sister and I would set up books as walls and make houses for them. I pretended that three of them were triplets named Mary, Kate, and Ashley. I was a big Full House fan. Posts: 486 | Registered: Feb 2005
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I used to play with my brother's GI Joes, while he played with my Barbies. I would play house with the GI Joes, and he would have the Barbies fighting each other.
I also liked playing with my Popples ( the one that looks like this). I liked turning him from a ball to a stuffed animal and back, but I wasn't strong enough to do it myself, so I had to keep asking my parents to change it every few minutes.
When I was playing with my brothers we would mostly play with the little kitcken, doll house, tinker toys, legos, and lincoln logs.
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My wife says her brother would sneak in and put chocolate chips in the Fisher Price chairs when she wasn't looking.
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I'm going to have to go with the legos crowd. Though I spent much more time reading books or messing around outside. My most wanted possession would have been a pocket knife. It just seemed so cool whenever one of my friends had one. My parents didn't think I was old enough to handle it until I was 14 though, and by that time I was too cool to have favorite anythings.
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My cousin had a Hydrodynamic Girder and Panel Set back in the 60's that was awfully fun. Whenever we visited his house I'd pester him to set it up.
I found one on e-bay a couple of years ago and paid 100 bucks for it, but the old plastic parts are so brittle that I'm afraid to play with it. I set it up once for my nephews, and we got water all over the place.
I just found some cool news: this guy has teamed up with a company in Canada to start selling new girder and panel sets. Hope they do a hydrodynamic set.
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quote: And my sister hated playing with me because I told all the stories "in my head", rather than saying them aloud
That is exactly how I told the stories too!
skillery:
quote: My wife says her brother would sneak in and put chocolate chips in the Fisher Price chairs when she wasn't looking.
A nice snack but very messy if she were like me. I wouldn't have noticed them and they'd just get stuck inside my Little People. Luckily for me, my brothers knew better than to mess around with mine; those are the only toys I'd raise hell over as a kid.
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Noemon, I don't know if this is going to make you feel old or not (I have no idea how old you are) but my mother's favourite childhood toy was her spirograph. We still have it, although I can never find pens that are narrow enough to work in it .
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I loved everything Fisher Price, but this was back in the late 70's, early 80's. All their stuff has changed drastically since then.
My favorite was the F-P parking garage, with the three parking levels, elevator, long spiral ramp and gas pumps.
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I liked the castle. With the trapdoor, and the secret room behind the dragon's lair? Awesome!
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I had the Playmobil Indian village, which was totally inaccurate. It had tipis and totem poles and horses and the indians were a strange blend of the Sioux and the Neverland tribe. Europeans were so funny.
I was stocking the Playmobil section when I worked at the toy store, telling my coworker about that funny innacurate village, and then turned to pick up a box - it was the exact same village, complete with totem pole. Apparently, Europeans still are funny.
I also loved my giant Raggedy Ann, and all her smaller sisters.
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I had (okay, fine, still have) this Cookie Monster stuffed... thing... that at one point was bigger than I. I used to dress him up in my clothes (and they did not fit well...) and care for him because he was "sick" whenever I was too. We'd snuggle under my Blankie (which I also still have) and when we felt better, I'd hit my sister with Cookie, because his eyes were hard plastic that really hurt when it hit you.
But neither Cookie nor my sister ever EVER got to touch my Legos.
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I had the Playmobile Indian and Pioneer sets, they weren't my favorite toys but I had them.
I think my favorite toy was actually the outside, and being able to play in our woods and back stairway (an outdoor cement stairway that provided lots of ideas as a child, including jumping accross it, walking the support poll, and sledding down it with our without snow). But my dolls were included, they went with me wherever.
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I'll add my vote to the Lego, Spirograph, and Lite Brite people's. Heh, one of my most vivid early memories is of my first (and so far only) electrical shock, when my finger brushed the metal part of the plug when plugging in my Lite Brite. I also had a pretty cool Capsela set; over the years most of the pieces got lost, but I loved building various vehicles to pilot around the bathtub or terrorize the cats with.
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I must admit, I squandered mine. It would be worth thousands of dollars today. They still make them, but you only get a few pieces for so much money. You need a great big set in order to do any real work.
And the original GI Joe was far superior to the newer ones. Joe could be anyone, and frequently was. I made him a revolutionary war costume back in 1976.
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