What was your favorite toy growing up?

One day I brought home a little colored toddler I'd found at the park and asked my mother if I could keep him. She said no and went and bought me a basketball. I made her take it back and exchange it for an Easy-Bake oven. I'd burn the food so it'd remind me of that little colored child in the park.

scat thread. i called the fbi.

He-Man & friends in Castle Grayskull

GI Joe

Legos

This, but in light blue.

we were from the poors, so it was Tinker Toys pour moi

Glam-Rocker Barbie and my little blue My Little Pony - with pink mane and tail...my 'phobe Dad hit the ceiling. I learned to butch it up pretty quick after that - yeeesh!

I learned early how to be an erector

I loved my Hot Wheels. But then again, I'm a lesbian.

they look like turds

Astrolite. I’d love to find a set again.

Obviously Barbies. But there was this other thing, I don't know what it's called. It had these plates you put together and made different fashions you could color after. I loved that thing. And paper doll fashions.

When I wasn't drawing or painting, my go-to were the multicolor wooden blocks. I specifically remember playing with them more than anything else in kindergarten. That set that they had must've had a dozen different shapes and colors. I don't even think they make them that nice anymore.

I never tried to build anything specific, but enjoyed putting them together in different color and shape combinations. And it was an activity I preferred to do alone.

I still enjoy working with that sort of thing. Only now, I do it with fabric, paper mache, and foam (among other things).

I really liked the Lincoln Logs, and I had a metal dollhouse with the plastic furniture, but the really cool toy was the girder set. I spent days playing with that.

Before starting elementary school in the early 70s, I loved Fisher-Price Little People. I had this farm set and the airplane, but I never got their two story house play set that I wanted. Instead, I had to use blocks blocs to build them one story ranch house outlines. This was back when the people were still made primarily of wood rather than the latter annoying full plastic bodies.

Lite Brite, Battleship, and Mystery Date

I had Matchbox (and Hot Wheels which they were introduced) cars. I had a good 200 of them. I loved Hot Wheels track. I'd race them all the time. I didn't play with them in instances when the paint could be damaged. I still have the majority in very good condition. I don't wish to sell them, although they could attract a lot of money.

Lego! This was back when you had to use your imagination, there were no kits with instructions - just a box of multicolored blocks you could build shit with. And weird little minifigs with interchangeable hair to populate your creations.

Etch-a Sketch, until we whacked it over the white marble table in the living room breaking the barrier. It released a silver leaded cloud that floated and unceremoniously landed on mom’s white velvet sofa turning it gray. The cleaners never got it out. Mom threw them all away and cried for a week. The white sofa was eventually replaced by two powder blue wingback chairs. Mom got us something called Spirograph.

Lego was awful. Those weird flat, green pieces would get stuck on other pieces and it was impossible to pry them apart.

And your brother would leave a lego on the floor, you'd step on it, curse, and get in trouble.

But the baby who left the lego on the floor? Well he's the baby. No one gets mad at the baby.

My older brothers destroyed my cuddly duddly. The ears were made out of some industrial amber/orange/gold substance that felt incredibly silky while the body was badly flocked fabric over beanbag forms. It was big enough to defend myself and small enough to swing.

A huge set of blocks made from cut up sanded lumber scraps my granddaddy brought home for me from the machine shop he worked for. I was four.

Yes! I loved Spirograph. I was way too careful moving the wheels around, it was stressful. And my pens kept jumping the little holes in the wheels. Still, I played with it a lot. It was the quest to make that perfect drawing.

Early ‘70s Tonka Mighty Winnebago

The Fisher Price Parking Garage

My mom got it from a thrift shop and it didn’t have the cars so I used matchbox cars. I loved this thing. It was my absolute favorite toy for a couple of years until I got my bike.

One time when I was four I wanted to have another parking garage, so I parked some of my cars in the VCR. But they got stuck, and my dad yelled at me a few hours later when he went to put a video in. It’s funny now, but we had to take the VCR to a repair shop and my dad was pissed.

R3 is that a very young Chad Allen? I had such a crush on him when he was on Our House in the mid 80’s.

Malibu Skipper

Toy planes

Lincoln Logs were the best, OP. But the real wood ones, not the cheap plastic ones you have in your pic.

The Legos space sets, particularly this one, that was available the same year when when E.T. hit the theaters. Best Christmas gift ever.

My Buddy

When I was watching the Mandalorian season 2, in one of the eps Mando kept saying, “wherever I go, he goes” about baby yoga and all I could think of was this commercial.

Lego here too. This was the mid-80's, we barely got TV reception so I spent my time in the sandbox, up trees, reading voraciously (I'd literally grab a volume of the encyclopedia and go curl up in a corner by the heat register), or playing with Legos. My parents told us kids (sheltered, young, and gullible) lies that I learned later in life were completely unique to our family. E.g., "If you don't eat the crust on your bread, you won't be able to whistle." (??!!) Specific to me was, "Go outside and play for a while. If you do Lego too much, you'll go Lego-blind." Which 4-year old me completely bought.

I did go on to become an engineer and I blame Lego.

Best toy EVAH!

2nd best toy EVAH!

3rd best toy EVAH!

Micro Machines! I still have a ton of the cards in two clear display boxes, plus a Car Wax carwash, the Gasoline Can parking garage, and the cityscape toolbox. Loved those things, & the playsets were unbelievably cool & well designed.

BIG TRAK

Kohner's Shapees!

R36 it’s depressing to see the shit version of Mousetrap that’s sold these days. It’s so cheap and not at all what it used to be.

I loved the Fisher Price stuff. I had the school, the airport, the gas station/parking garage, and the barn.

Then I segued into all the Star Wars stuff. I had all the figures and several of the spaceships and play sets.

My girl cousin had that Fashion Plates thing where you could swap the plates and make different outfits. I had the “boy” version, Mighty Men and Monster Maker. I liked playing with her version better!

shrinky dinks

the playdoh fun factory

lite brite

all the fisher price stuff i had the hospital, i remember playing with it for hours

legos i had a Shell gas station kit, i remember how proud i was when i finished it.

The Star Trek command center was crap. Nobody transported shit. There were perhaps three mechanisms and the rest was badly dressed dolls.

I had those exact same toys R15 and R16! The Fisher Price sets were so much better when most of the parts were wood instead of plastic. And the Fisher Price people were small and made of wood before they were deemed a "choking hazard" and became huge ugly plastic things.

My favorite toys were ones where I could build things. My dad gave me his erector set from when he was a kid, and I loved Tinker Toys. I had the set in the giant cylinder, like in this link. I think I had this exact Erector Set from my dad.

Also loved Lite Brite and Kenner Super Spirograph.

Tinkertoys; lots of creativity.

I was in college when Kenner's Super Powers came out.

I spent a lot of money and a lot of trips to San Diego Comic Con to complete my collection.

It's the best action figure line ever.

Faye Dunaway Paper Doll

Matchbox cars, trucks and tractors. I especially liked the tractors and would play with them in dirt making roads and such.

Best toy EVER!

I can't remember which comedian said this about being poor: "if I wasn't a boy, I wouldn't have had anything to play with."

R49 - Rodney Dangerfield.

Tonka dump trucks.

I had a lot of these toys - they were great.

We also had something called a “Creepy Crawly Maker” ... or something like that ...where you could put multicolored goop in hot lead plates and make bugs and things.

INSANELY DANGEROUS.

But my favorite toy was one of my stuffed animals: Piglet from the Winnie the Pooh stories.

He stayed with me up through sixth grade, when I decided I was too big to play with him anymore.

Merlin! Christmas 1979's electronic handheld game to *die* for.

^oops, typo. Merlin was Christmas 1978, not 1979.

[quote][R3] is that a very young Chad Allen?

I don’t know but that’s who I thought it was at first glance.

Lego

Books..

Erector set and Barbie doll

Weeble Wobbles

TinkerToys for sure, but liked the Erector sets more. Always had a soft spot for Lincoln Logs. You couldn't do all that many different things with them, but it was difficult to make a mistake. Just the thing for a budding builder or architect( of which I am neither)

Had a chemistry/science set that was in a tri-fold , upright metal box. It contained a microscope, all sorts of chemicals(which prompted me to go to the local hobby store[yes, children, there used to be such things] and buy more), test tubes, dissecting tools, etc. The manual had some really cool experiments, IIRC? Made by the Gilbert Co.

Never had Lego. I remember one Christmas(1957? '58?) being in Gimbel's department store toy section, and the blocks were being demonstrated. The clerk said they were indestructible, so I took the preferred block, put it on the floor(half off the edge of a step) and stomped on it. It shattered, the clerk almost cried and my mother whisked me out of there at warp speed.

My 8th or 9th Christmas brought me a wooden toolbox(looked like an attache case), with scaled down versions of actual tools: screwdrivers, hammers, several saws and a miter box, clamps, level, brace and bit auger. It was a very well-made item, everything had its special place in which to be secured so when the box was closed and picked up, nothing jostled around. Used that thing for many years, it was invaluable for small home repairs and such. I'm wondering if I got it in order to butch me up? Wondering??? 😂

Guess it's the same reason why an Easy Bake Oven never materialized under the Christmas tree. Always liked visiting a cousin who had one, what a treat. I think being fascinated with one led to my learning how to bake and decorate cakes starting when I was about 11 or 12 yo. My grandmother understood my passion, and told me about a store that sold the most amazing things for baking: various sizes and shapes of pans, special colored pastes just for icing, all manner of tools and gadgets necessary to do the job right. My little gay heart nearly exploded. I got a series of neighborhood jobs just to be able to afford to buy what I wanted. To this day I still delight in baking. Thanks, grandma.

We were a family of carrot farmers, couldn't afford Lincoln Logs and I begged for them. I used carrots that I would cut and use as Lincoln logs, they would last for a few days, then became gross...but I had an endless supply.

r61 What's up, Doc?

I used to obsess over a million toys...making lists and circling items in the Sears Christmas Catalogue. When I'd get the toy on Christmas, it would be all but forgotten by New Years.

I had many of the toys listed: Etch a sketch, Lincoln Logs, Spiro-Graph, Creep Crawlies, Which Witch, Strange Change, a stuffed Piglet and Merlin... I also had Incredible Edibles (Which was like Chreey Crawlies-but you ate them.) We had 'The West Family"- A hard plastic Cowboy family, with hard plastic accessories, the "Don't Spill the Beans' game, Water Works game...Panasonic "Toot A Loop" radio, and tape recorder...

I had a "Adventure boy"- a half doll type thing where your two fingers make the legs...I bought one on e-bay a few years ago.

I loved Perfection, Super-Fection and Computer Perfection. Now that I have a kid, I try to find toys that I had growing up for him. He loves my old Perfecton game! He also LOVES building things with K-nex and legos, as well.

A comedy writer.

R52, we had that thing too. Insanely dangerous. I wasn’t supposed to play with it without my older siblings. Of course I didn’t obey that rule one day, and burned the shit out of my hand.

I am not sure why I never asked for Lincoln Logs when I was a kid. My cousins had them and I loved playing with them.

Sorry, posted in the wrong thread!

[quote]We had 'The West Family"- A hard plastic Cowboy family, with hard plastic accessories

You forgot to add, "with soft vinyl clothing add-ons (vests, chaps, skirts (for Jane), etc).

These, GI Joe and Major Matt Mason were my favorite toys. I could play with dolls and not be teased for it!

I lived all the cheap Mego brand action figures, starting with the DC Comics superheroes and culminating with the Planet of the Apes astronauts and primates. Guess it was a socially acceptable way for a boy to play with dolls.

I'll tell you what my least favorite toy was...remember those orange Hot Wheels tracks? a smack across bare young buttocks can draw blood, trust me on this.

A stick

Barbie and Bratz dolls

I liked the girder and panel set too. You could build a skyscraper!

But my favorite was Block City - white building blocks you could use to build ANY house you could imagine. I would buy a House Plan book at the drugstore for 50 cents and build ALL of the houses in it - one by one.

Fun!

My bike.

My dad's joystick!

I suck it all day long till it spill white juice.

Glad to see the Fisher-Price stuff in this thread. This castle was my pride and joy. (And, as others have said, the quality of this brand steadily declined. Their current iteration of Little People is an abomination.)

Before or after puberty, OP?

Either.

My Princess Jasmine doll

I was a girl but I loved hot wheels. They were cheap. Because my family didn’t have a lot of money either. I lived in California so there was a lot of sand I could make little roads.

I loved my Block City construction set! If I can find one it will make for some relaxed, nostalgic activity during covid lockdown.

My favorite toy was a mechanical Farmer In The Dell musical tin farmhouse in which the characters rotated in and out of the house to the title tune as you turned the handle.

My huge stuffed animal collection. I wanted a real-life menagerie but had to settle for fakes. Just as well because the real thing would have been a shit ton of work. My favorites were Bernard the bear, Roscoe the raccoon, and Leo the lion. They were best friends and got until all kinds of trouble.

Runner-up, Fisher Price, and right behind that, barbies.

And not toys exactly, but we had a disturbingly large collection of medical paraphernalia due to a grandparent who I'm pretty sure had Munchausen's. We would set up a pretend hospital in our garage and then treat the neighborhood kids who would come staggering in after crashing the mercedes. Well, bigwheels, but still. That was a lot of fun.

We had giant tinker toys. Giant and plastic but man did we play with those. We made houses out of them and when we got older, we would put the wheel thingy's onto a stick and play lightsabers with them. They were awesome. My brothers and I would go toe to toe until someone got hurt and someone always got hurt because we weren't messing around with our battles.

I also dearly loved my 1978 Millennium Falcon playset that my grandmother gave me. Still have it and all my Star Wars toys.

Also, not a toy, but my dad saw a merry go round teeter totter on an episode of Little House on the Prairie one year and so he built one for us. He basically took a tree stump, shored it up with some wood, drilled a piece of pipe down into it and then put a long piece of wood onto it and built handles for it. We spent HOURS on that thing going round and round and up and down. It was really great.

Weebles, Lincoln Logs, Light Bright, a weird furry spider hand puppet called Hairy Handy which I still have, and I had this cool toy called The Monster Maker you put "Monster Goop" into a two-sided plastic mold and spun it in the machine and it made hollow busts of various monsters, unfortunately, my mom wasn't aware the Monster Goop was just plaster of Paris so she threw it away once the Goop ran out.

I had a shit ass fat cousin who always broke my toys. He popped open my Stretch Armstrong, twisted my Slinky beyond recognition, and snapped the web pull thing off my Spider-Man.

I’m glad I never had to see that fucker again after middle school.

Another vote for Spirograph and Lite Brite. I also loved Hungry Hungry Hippos.

I kind of wish I still had a Lite Brite!

Tinkertoys

We used Hot Wheel tracks and combined them with Bing Bang Boing. We’d spend hours in the finished suburban basement setting up long runs. What can I say? We didn’t have the internet and my parents would make as sit still if you wanted to watch TV in the family room.

I loved collecting L.O.L. dolls. I loved the surprise of not knowing what I’d get with the blind balls. My dad was NOT happy, LOL.

Dawn Dolls.

I looked up the toy, my heart skipped a beat when I saw the video. god I loved these

I don't know if this is considered a toy but I loved coloring books and paint-by-numbers.

A rock

This

And, especially, this

Simon was a hoot, we wore ours out.

Ballerina Barbie With her pretty pink Tutu

Lite Brite still exists... they just made the screen part flat & put white LEDs inside, while leaving the grid and pegs unchanged (AFAIK).