Toys on Tuesday
What kinds of toys you had as a kid I feel is a memory that never gets booted out of the attic. Economic Disconnect's attic theorem is thus:
Everyone's mind is like an attic. There is only so much room. For new memories to become permanent, other things MUST be moved out to make room. Everyone's attic varies in size.
By the rule I can no longer do calculus nor most organic chemistry, but I can quote "Point Break" in it's entirety. What's more important?
Anyways, here are some great and some terrible toys you may or may not have had as a kid.
The Best of the Best
These toys were the big enchilada when I was a kid.
1.) Transformers
No other toy could push a young kid of age 8 or so into making his dad bring to work on weekends on the railroad to make money to buy them. Yes I did, oh yes I did!
The best ones were of course Optimus Prime and Megatron:
Great idea, slick packaging, and a kick butt cartoon all made this line wildly desired by all young boys.
2.) Photon
What does every kid that plays war want? A way to be sure the idiots you are playing with don't keep cheating and saying you missed them! Before paintball, there was photon!:
Basically a gun that emitted a light wave which could be read on a detector and say if a hit had been scored. These things worked like total crap, but at the time it was heaven on earth. Second place goes to Laser Tag, but those were just way too expensive.
3.) Pogo Ball
A sure way to roll an ankle, but also a good time! These little contraptions were small pogo-stick like thingies that you could jump all over the place with:
Classic commercial:
Again, they really did not bounce very high, but at the time that was kept quiet in the haze of bouncing euphoria.
4.) Nintendo NES
The father of all games, the Nintendo OG-riginal NES:
Now my house only had one TV that did not have the hookup for this (it was an OLD zenith) and they were way to expensive anyway, so I never had one. All my friends did though! How many hours were spent playing titles like Punchout, Mario Bros., and Legend of Zelda? Some may say Atari paved the way, and I guess that is true but this console ushered in the gaming age the way I see it.
The Bad Stuff
From time to time you would get a toy from a relative or something your Mom thought you would like, but the toy was not anything you wanted.
1.) Go-Bots
When told you like transformers, sometimes a careless gift buyer would go out and buy a Go-Bot. These toys were crap. They barely transformed, and lets face it, the cartoon was for babies. When stuck with one of these things you sought out the one kid in school that thought these were cool and traded him for something else:
The toys were made by Tonka and they should have stuck to miniature trucks.
2.) Crystal Growing Kit
This was the most dreaded of the toys if you already tried it. I was no scientist as a kid, but even I could tell it was just salt, not real crystals! Maybe one of the most disappointing moments of child hood. They should have made a "grow gold" kit instead:
A lie told to children yet we knew.
3.) Stretch Toys
This toy looked cool on TV but when you had one you quickly found out that:
-stretching a doll gets old fast
-the only other thing to do is cut it open to see the toxic gel stuff leak out
That's it and that's all. Here is an example:
BORING!
4.) Light Brite
I guess my list of bad toys really is a list of being let down or disappointed. Light Brite looked awesome. It looked fun!:
First tip off that things were going bad? It was a box with a light bulb in it. really, that's all it was. I remember thinking that it should have been a little more high tech than that. Still, that was not the major issue. What was?
Well you had to be some kind of abstract thinker or an future artist to make anything that even remotely looked like something. Most of the time my creations were just blobs of various colors that maybe looked like something if you squinted and looked at the right angle. Close second was Etch-a-Sketch but at least you could write swear words on that easily enough.
These lists are not meant to all encompassing, just what I had in mind. Add your own in the comments section.
Have a good night.
