Friday - TOYS - get off my lawn edition

Another Friday backing up the hard drive and killing time...

Things I've recently had to explain to my kids that were once a thing and why i dearly loved them :

Weeble Wobbles
Tinker Toys
Silly Putty

Stompers! I don't know why these still aren't a thing -

I loved these Demolition Derby cars:

Ha, I forgot about those...I had some of them.

I had a weeble race track...you put them on there and maybe they wobbled to the finish line, maybe not. I also had some kind of treehouse or something for them.

Gosh, what a dumb toy.

I Had That!

I was just talking to a coworker about Hot Wheels stuff we had as kids and it turned out we both spent way too many hours being amused by the Hot Wheels Sto and Go Service Station:

Man. If you didn't have Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle you led a deprived childhood.

Here is a video somebody made of "Insane Jesus" jump. We were doing that all day long after school. Good times.

My kids and I play with Tinker Toys and Construx almost daily. Construx are still awesome.

Stow and Go Service Station...wow. I haven't thought about that thing in 30 or more years. How many cars did I send down that ramp.

My son got an Erector (well, Meccano) set for his birthday. Of course, he had that rite of passage we all had when you get one and realize that it's actually pretty fucking hard to put together, not like Lego. I think he still hasn't built one of the 50 or so models it makes and I wouldn't help him because he got super emotional about it for no reason.

It's easy to remember all of the "big" toys like Star Wars, GI Joe, Transformers, etc. but I love reminiscing about these more obscure ones.

What was the name of that line where the main figure was a green, swamp thing-looking dude made out of some kind of weird stretchy stuff that came in a gibbet? You could like tear him apart and put him back together or something and there was some slime you could dunk him in. Hoo boy, those 80s.

I still have bits and pieces of my beloved vehicle Voltron. Damn, I wish I had that whole thing. I remember being at Pennys and being given the choice between lion Voltron and vehicle Voltron and I went with the latter because everybody else had the Golion one. I was such a hipster. Now I would consider punching a nun to get either one back.

How about Max Steel's Robo Force? That one with the propeller on his head, I loved that one.

Captain Power? The only kid I knew that had it was this dirt-poor boy called Will Brown that lived in the WORST apartments I've ever seen. I risked spending the night there once to play with it. And then called my parents to come pick me up.

Of course, one of my all time favorites...SHOGUN WARRIORS....I cry whenever I see them, I loved them so much. I had all of them, had no idea that they were Brave Raydeen, Danguard Ace, Mazinger and so forth at the time. I also had a lot of the smaller die-cast vehicles and toys, all of which are worth a fortune now.

Micronauts...Baron fucking Karza. What a toy! I had the white one and the black one. Man, that thing ruled.

Pretty sad we're this deep in the thread and not talking about Micronauts yet. Or even Rom: Spaceknight.

There was Krusher--a big ass green thing that inflated itself. Not to be confused with Suckerman, who had suckers.

I remember MadBalls.

I shoplifted a zillion M.U.S.C.L.E. Men from The Fair before getting caught.

I almost killed my stepmother with a Jart, and not on purpose or anything, she's a nice person--they just really were crazy dangerous.

///waiting for some of the real old-timers to show up and tell us about how their toys were guns and pieces of wood that looked like guns and knives you could use to kill things when your gun jammed.

I was in a Woolworth with grandma once and she shoplifted an X-Wing pilot Luke for me. "Grandma, why aren't you paying for it?"

I was just thinking about Krusher...what an annoying toy. I had it, but I kind of hated it!

Madballs, I just had the skull one. The others I didn't really like. But I liked the comic book for some reason. Several issues were in the cabinet in the bathroom for years.

I Google image searched Krusher and it led to an image of a plastic Godzilla I LOVED when I was like four. Turns out it was from this thing, which I remember getting for my birthday.



But here's the thing. I didn't have "Tricephalon"! It wasn't in the box. So it was just a Godzilla playset, really. It's funny though, all these years I misremembered it as King Ghidorah...which it was probably supposed to be.

HA HA! I just read the blog post where that picture was-

A timeless classic. When I recieved this as a youngster, the battleship was missing, so they tossed in an extra Tricephalon Monster. I wasn't complaining!

This dude got my Tricephalon!

Anybody else have this one?

Crossbows & Catapults!

I had a bunch of M.U.S.C.L.E. too!

I just realized I was playing some version of Mad Max as a kid before I was ever aware of the movies. The Sto and Go was the only civilization and the rest of the basement was the wastelands. The tables and sofas were massive cliffs, and the wilds were roaming with M.U.S.C.L.E. marauders. Those pink bastards were the antithesis of all that was just.

Shit got real when Optimus showed up.