Toys of Our Youth

Please click on the title of this post to go to the article that was the food for thought of the following post.

Since I have an about to be 4-year old Grandson, I spend time looking in toy sections for stuff to spoil him with. Hey that's a Nanu's job now isn't it? From the crap I see presented I can see why Toys R Us (the once mighty Toy Store of Doom) is bankrupt and has sold off several stores. I remember when Department stores stopped carrying toys; probably because of Toys R Us which was the Wal Mart of Toy Stores (which is funny because TRU is bankrupt because of WalMart and their disgustingly low prices). I used to love when the Penny's and Sears' Christmas Catalogs came out because the Toy section in them was my shopping list. "Mom!!! Look!! They have a Gi Joe and the Giant Gorilla play set....I NEED THAT!!!" or "Mom!!! Look at that Jungle Safari Big Game Hunter set..." (it came with a cap rifle with scope, a plastic knife in a sheath on a belt, a cap pistol and plastic holster and a plastic Safari Hunter's hat.....). Kids today don't know what toys are. Every Hot Wheels track comes in a "set" of some kind with some bizarre centerpiece that is the whole point of the "set". We just bought packs of Orange Hot Wheels track and the clamp on the table starting piece. We made our own track and gravity was our friend. Hot Wheels got a bit Hi-Tech with the invention of a battery powered car flinger thing. Remember those? It was a plastic starting gate with two sides for two cars and it had spinning rubber wheels that feed your car through at rapid speeds. Kind of like those batting machines or the way a Hop-Up works in an airsoft gun. I remember our toys were a blessing to my Mom. It kept us out of the house and out of her hair. In the now Ghetto Town I grew up in we lived in typical suburban flair. Our houses were separated by a hedgerow and the old adage "good fences make good neighbors" was never more truer than on my Street. Our backyard was fairly good sized, and took a lot to flood it (hey......I needed to make it an ocean because we were playing Shark Hunters after seeing Jaws in 1975). I think until they day the moved in 2001 my Dad was still finding buried green Army Men in the backyard. Our toys were mostly action figure type toys. Or guns. Isn't funny, I grew up with cap guns and rubber knives and we shot and stabbed each other but yet we all turned out to be responsible non-violent adults. What's the excuse for today's youth? The Green Army Men were one of my absolute favorite toys. That combined with Lincoln Logs and Legos was a fertile ground for an overly-active imagination. Of course you had to build fox holes and trenches....it wouldn't be war without those things. Also you'd have to have a mortat hit one of those trenches and bury half a dozen soldiers. Which usually led to the words, "Mom...I need some more Green Army Men." Why do you think my Dad was still finding them years later. We buried alot of those little plastic men. We also had a lot of firearms. Usually cowboy pistols. They sold alot of cowboy six shooter cap pistols back then. We would run around the neighborhood yelling "bang bang...I got you!". We had great rules too. You had to say "I got you" or it didn't count. You couldn't shoot through car windows...we had many an impasse with one kid on one side of the car ducked down looking through the window and another kid doing the same. We had variations of how one could come back to life too. One version was you counted to 20 and you were back in. The other was what we called "War Tag". Your teammate had to tag you for you to come back to life. It was a bit more challenging that way. In our backyard was a massively huge black walnut tree. It was essentially a very old tree who's walnuts were rotten and nasty. We had a network of barricades and shelves nailed up in that bad boy. It was a great fort. Kids now a days would have to have a fort bought for them.....one that required adult assembly and looked like a fort but cost hundreds of dollars. Hell, we had scrap lumber that my Dad had lying on the side of the house, a few of his hammers, and buckets of nails. Dad also built me a club house. A simple four walled structure with a window and a door. It was my Gi Joe Club House. We had an American Flag nailed up inside and Gi Joe product inserts put up as posters. We used to go between it and the tree as our forts. That club house had a real strong roof. Last time I saw it, the blackberry bushes next to it had almost thoroughly reclaimed it for nature. We also had the action figure of all action figures: Gi Joe. Not the puny little plastic dudes from the 80's, nooooooo. We had the 12 inch, scar on the cheek, WWII gear in the cardboard foot locker with painted on hair and his one hand permanently posed to grip the stock of a gun and the other posed to pull the trigger. Then he evolved into the Nam Gi Joe with "lifelike" hair which after years of use started to rub off and he developed a hairline like mine. Balding Joe.... He also developed "Kung Fu Grip" later on which meant that his hands were rubber and flexible. Unlike the little dudes where they sold a zillion versions of the same guy in different uniforms, the big Joe had clothing sets you could buy. Different Service Branch uniforms with hats, boots, guns, grenades, etc. You really needed only one Joe.....I of course had half a dozen. When the first one's came out, it was a white dude with brown hair in the OD green BDU's of the WWII soldier. Later they came out with a Black Gi Joe and you could choose a guy from the four different Service branches. The Navy dude had the blue uniform and the little sailors hat, the Airforce dude had an Orange flightsuit, etc. The coolest play set was the lunar capsule. Remember the days before the Space Shuttle? Astronauts came back to Earth in a space capsule. A vehicle shaped like the speaker Icon on most webpages. This one came with a space suit which I swear was made out of aluminum foil because it was shiny silver, the helmet, boots, breather pack with a tube that connected to a hole in the back of the capsule when you put Joe in there, and a hand held booster pack for space walks. Remember when the first Astronauts had those? It was a fairly large thing too, remember Joe was a foot tall. We used our Gi Joe's to death. Our Joe didn't need to have a separate line of Enemies made for him to fight. No....the enemy was made up. Heck he wasn't even there, just in our heads. I also remember a kid that lived across the street from me. His Mom and Dad were immigrants from Germany so he and his sister were first Generation Americans. His Dad had gotten him Gi Joe stuff from Germany. It was pretty damn scary. His Gi Joe was a Nazi basically. He had an SS uniform with swastika, etc. When he played, his guy was the enemy. Then I had the Marx toys Johnny West line. Cowboy Action figures complete with horses. Also the Gabriel Toys Lone Ranger and Tonto. I still have these sitting in a suitcase in my attic. The condition of these toys (well played with let's just say) means they aren't worth anything. They will probably go to my Grandson when he's a bit older. We also had the Meco SuperHero figures. Marvel and DC. I had Batman with the removeable mask....later versions had the mask as part of the head.....I also had a tarzan guy. The funny thing about that figure was he had a flesh colored body suit on under his loincloth. These were action figures....non-anatomically correct dolls, but because of the nature of the world back then they still had to cover him up. Although the Wonder Woman doll had that great Wonder Woman corset and a barbie sized chest. Odd that. We also had Colorforms. Basically reusable stickers made in primary colors that you were supposed to use on this little background scene that came in the box when you bought them. They also stuck great on the refrigerator and Mom's car windows on the ride home. We also had toys that shot plastic missles. Battlestar Galactica Ships, Micronauts, Shogun Warriors (who remembers those huh? I had Mazinga and Godzilla), the Spiderman web launcher (God I loved that thing. It was a dart launcher you strapped to your wrist. It had a dart (like in a dart gun) that you tied a string on and pushed the button and it shot out and stuck on the wall. I knew many a stupid kid who thought he could climb the rope attached to a suction cup tipped plastic dart. No I wasn't one of them. Of course for added fun we untied the string and just shot them at each other. Those things go remarkable range once you untied the string. Imagine that???? One thing I do remember though; we never once shot an eye out or swallowed any of the projectiles. Kids today? They'd probably end up in the hospital and with a parent suing the Toy maker. We also had improvised toys. Take a straight piece of small wood. Take a clothespin apart (the wood ones) and hammer it on to the stick. Reassemble the clothespin. Notch the end of the stick. Put rubber band under notch and stretch to clothespin. Open clothespin and insert taut rubber band. Aim at friend, open clothespin and fire rubber band at his ass. And Mom wondered why she was always running out of clothespins. Our favorite though was a Garbage can lid as a shield and our neighbors newspapers as throwing ammo. It helped that we lived in a City where they published a local "throwaway" paper and it was delivered free of charge to everyone's home. Nothing like hitting your buddy in the noggin with a wet newspaper. Those were the days!!!