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My mom's mind. It fries real easy, and I love deep fried treats. Yeah, I'm a sadist.
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I loved my lawn darts as a kid. It was so cool to throw more than one at a time and watch them fly side by side like jets in formation. Then they would all stick into the ground right next to each other. I can see why they would not want to put them on the list.
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@sir_pantsalot: I was always a huge fan of the darwinian experiment of chucking the dart straight into the air as hard as you can and then running for your life.
/grew up in a small town.
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@sir_pantsalot: Agreed. And then they went and outlawed the metal tipped \"darts of death\". I LOVED how they stuck in the ground, it made you feel like a knife thrower or something.
Seriously, playing with the round plastic lawn darts is so lame you might as well chuck bean bags! Luckily, I still have my illegal set from when I was a kid!
@Platypi: I had one land in my eye when I was young.....yes, Im one of the idiots. Both my eyes still work...musta gotten lucky
@Platypi: doubly agreed...for some reason there was never a more satisfying sounds than that thhbbt they all made when they came back to earth. pops used to throw them all up at once and yell SCATTER!! ah good times..
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@Platypi: I thought the \"outlawing\" of these was pretty dumb. You should take the same care in using them as you would a bow and arrow.
Lawn Darts don't kill/injure/maim people, People kill/injure/maim people.
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@donnie5: Protecting consumers from themselves plus there were probably lawsuits which did in the company.
I kick myself for not buying a pristine still-in-box set from a coworker back in 1996. He had actually tried to take the set to Play It Again Sports and the manager had laughed him out of the store...
@econobiker: You can't leave us hanging like this, what ever happened to the set? Is it on eBay somewhere?
Wow I can tell this article/post will put many people in a time machine. I will reminisce, quietly, in the corner here. (Feelin' warm).
![\"user-pic\"](\"http://consumerist.com/assets_c/userpics/userpic-697581-100x100.png\")
I had a dog on wheels (it was plastic though.... made by fisher price in the 80s). I thought it was AMAZING, until I got my parents to get me a real dog by refusing to potty train until they did. Suckers.
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@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: Better than me, I had to have surgery when I was 5 so grandma got me the Nintendo because she felt so bad. I hadn't even asked her for it
@theblackdog_FeelingRandom: Better than my grandma. She got me a Chinese knockoff. Of the Famicom. So it wouldn't play any American cartridges. On the plus side, fake Japanese cartridges were really cheap.
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I've got to disagree with the Dreamcast being on the list. Yes, it's a great system, and I still have mine along with copies of SC5 and JGR, but I don't think it was nearly as popular as the Playstation. Having worked in a toy store during the 1997 holiday season, I can tell you that thing was insanely hard to keep in stock.
I received most of my gaming systems for holidays, so I can't really pick which was the best, but I have more memories of playing my Genesis than any of the other ones I received as a kid.
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@LightningUsagi:
I have this argument all the time:
The Dreamcast was ahead of its time.
Sony murdered my Dreamcast.
I still mourn for poor Jet Set Radio.
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My list:
Legos
Stuffed animals
Plastic cups, plates, and bowls
Child-size tables and chairs (so you can have Lego cake with your stuffed animals)
Lincoln Logs
Free frisbees from whatever local bank (they doubled as serving platters)
That one legged skipping rolling ball thing (Google tells me it's called a Skip Ball but I like my name)
Wooden Paddle Ball
Crayola markers and a huge pad of butchers paper
Suction dart guns
One's own imagination. I had jump ropes when I was a kid, and I never used them for jumping. I would pretend I was a spy infiltrating some secret base and I'd use the rope to open doors if I suspected enemies on the other side.
![\"user-pic\"](\"http://consumerist.com/assets_c/userpics/userpic-498964-100x100.png\")
@pecan 3.14159265: My brother and my best friend at the time (he was a boy.) used a jump rope to tie me to a tree.
They said we were playing Ninja Turtles and I was April and they would come and save me.
They didn't come back.
There was ants on the tree.
I was six, and my \"best friend\" wasn't my friend after that. He decided he liked my brother better.
Fun childhood memories. LOL.
@Kimaroo - Fortified with Kittydus Purrularis: My brother used our jumpropes to trap me in whichever room I wandered into, usually the bathroom. Gotta love those older brothers.
![\"user-pic\"](\"http://consumerist.com/assets_c/userpics/userpic-4147-100x100.png\")
@hotdogsunrise: I believe it was called a \"Skip-it\".. Google the commercial theme song, it's priceless.
@pecan 3.14159265: Jump ropes, big wheel or trike or something else to ride on, radio flyer red wagon or similar, a ball. If you had a couple strong jump ropes like I did as a kid you could tie 2 big wheels together and get your friend to pull you on one. Then you and your friend could take turns doing that, amused me for hours as a kid. We would also tie the wagon to the big wheel and do the same.
@pecan 3.14159265: Legos, Barbies, Matchbox Cars and Coloring books. My siblings and I basically only had that stuff, and we found four million hours of entertainment in them.
![\"user-pic\"](\"http://consumerist.com/assets_c/userpics/userpic-1471334-100x100.png\")
@pecan 3.14159265: The one legged skipping rolling ball thing! I loved that! Seriously. I would use that thing for hours. Hours, I tell you!
![\"user-pic\"](\"http://consumerist.com/assets_c/userpics/userpic-580579-100x100.png\")
I refuse to lend this list any credence because it does not include these.
@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: My brother had that too.. I played with the foot trap the most.. I thought it was fun to open and close it.
@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: Wow you had the real set? I had an old backpack, a PVC pipe with rope, and a shoe box.
@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: Omg yes, I so remember that set.
I broke the hell out of it after like a month, but I loved that thing.
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@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: Oh my god I had one of those! I think it's still around my mom's house somewhere...
@squinko: I'm going to my mom's tonight to check around the attic and the crawl space to see if I have it. :D
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@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: Who you gonna call? . . . . ME!!!! I threw a tantrum that has become the stuff of legends in order to get that set.
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@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: OMG! I loved playing Ghostbusters when I visited a family with boys who had this exact toy set. So amazing.
@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: YOU HAD THE REAL THING!?!?! I had an old book bag with a vacuum cleaner hose sticking out of it :-(
@donnie5: I had to beg and plead for months to get it. Copious amounts of little girl tears were shed over that thing. I did all kinds of extra chores so I could buy myself the Ghostbusters jumpsuit from either Sears or JC Penney (can't remember which) and I wore it to school at least once a week.
The NES, easily. Everything else I played with for a month or two at most, the Nintendo I played for a decade.
After that, sports related stuff like a basketball or tennis racket certainly got the most use. I remember being really excited over Transformers or a remote control car, but I didn't play with them for long before I got tired of it. The best toys are the ones with lasting appeal, not just a new fun gimmick.
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@chocobo: I still have my NES, and I still play with it, from time to time. That thing's provided over 20 years of enjoyment!
floraposte: The only problem I had with Slinky was when I first got one, we were in a house with no stairs. Can't to too much else except try to get your brother to start pulling it back for you and then you let go so it nearly hits him. Yes, I was just like any other big brother.
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True to my era, I guess, I gotta go with Lego. Mostly to build spaceships, as I recall. The fancy Technical Lego with the gears and shafts and linkages came out when I was just the right age to enjoy, too. Those little bricks are the perfect fuel for a little person's imagination.
@LandruBek: And we used to make bootleg Lego weapons in the era before Lego gave up the non-violence idea and started to put little guns, cannons, and swords with the theme sets...
Hot Wheels! And the little plastic Army guys. And Silly Putty.
There's a Saturday afternoon for you.
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@boobookitteh: Silly Putty was the one toy my otherwise nonjudgmental parents forbade. I believe my mother had had some savage cleanup trauma with it.
My brother had army guys. They were good for placement in Lincoln Log forts that were then destroyed by the attack of other army guys.
I played most happily with:
Lego
Dolls (of all kidney: Raggedy Ann to Barbie to GI Joe)
Spirograph
Grocery Store toy (plastic groceries, register, conveyor belt)
I don't remember too many *toys* as in something plastic that came in a box. Mostly I played pretend by dressing up or using a few props like my magic wand, tiara, ruby slippers, and whatever came to hand.
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Legos Legos Legos, and more Legos
Once I was 12 it was my BB gun
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Wait wait wait wait.
Sega Dreamcast? Honestly? I love my Dreamcast but I would no way be putting it up with the best toys ever, especially since that was the system that kicked Sega out of the console market.
My favorite toys as a kid included K'Nex, Aliens, TMNT, He-Man, Ghostbusters, and Littlest Pet Shop. What, I had to have at least a couple girly toys. Oh also Lego Dragons.
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@korybing: I coveted the K'Nex. It was super expensive when it came out, and my best friend got one. In late middle school/early high school, she got the awesome roller coaster set. At 100 or so dollars, it was too rich for me even thinking about asking my parents for one.
@lilyHaze: One of my big Christmas presents as a kid was the K'Nex Big Ball Factory. It was 5 feet of complete awesomeness and I spent three days straight and suffered a week of sore thumbs putting the thing together. I kept it up in my room for years afterwards and decorated it with Gargoyles and Aliens (facehuggers fit nicely around K'Nex pieces, I had discovered). I also used K'Nex to build several of my Halloween costumes. I got way more use out of them than I ever got out of Legos. Loved them!
@korybing: Your childhood sounds almost exactly like mine, down to the toys even. I still have some of my original Littlest Pet Shop stuff. They look so much better than the bug-eyed, big headed crap out now.
@squinko: Oh man the Littlest Petshop stuff today is just heartbreaking to see. Does it even do all the cool stuff the old toys did? My whole reason for liking the old sets were because they did clever things with magnets and whatever. These new ones just look like Bratz versions of pets.
I was also really into My Little Ponies, but mostly because they were the perfect size for my TMNT guys to ride on into battle.
@korybing: Holy shit, are you me? I loved My Little Ponies! I don't remember ever combining them with TMNT though. That sounds awesome. I don't believe the new Littlest Pet Shop does anything cool. My favorite pets were the hamsters because they had a freaking wheel!
@squinko: Hah! We just both had great taste in toys, I guess. :) My favorite Littlest Pet Shops were the Bird Cage and the Bunny Warren. Basically anything that used magnets I was endlessly fascinated by.
I actually found the Slinky rather tedious. You watched it coil, then get caught in itself in a way from which you could never extricate it. Whee.
I liked the buildy toys like Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and Legos, but I played the crap out of my wee battery-operated organ with colored keys, and I wore down to the fake dirt my little farmscapes with miniature barns and animals. (Seriously cute baby lambs.) Probably the all-time winner, though, was a toy travel trailer. Built with the solidity of a Tonka truck, sized for dollhouse stuff (I loved the furniture, but it was the animals who lived in it, because people were boring), so probably close to 2 feet long. Amazing I never attacked my brother with it.
BTW, I still have mine.
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Best toys for young kids: Giant cardboard boxes, markers, and masking tape. You can get all of that real cheap at Uhaul and it'll keep the kids entertained for days.
@GMFish: Also, unused furniture. At my grandma's old house, no one used the dining room so I took over and made the entire room my fort. I would sleep there almost an entire summer.
@GMFish: Don't forget sticks! We had a mimosa tree outside and we would make bows and arrows out of the sticks because they were springy. I don't want to come off sounding like an old fogey, but I feel that a lot of toys today are robbing children of developing an imagination. All these fancy electronic toys are doing the imagining for them.
@GMFish: Young kids usually play with the Xmas toys for a few minutes then play with the giant boxes they come in for hours. Hopefully you have some giant boxes under the tree.
I have a bunch of TMNT toys from my childhood; the Turtle Blimp, the Pizza Shooter, the Slime Machine, some sort of mini-shooting gallery with BBs, McD's toys, action figures, etc. I'm torn between seeing how much they're woth on eBay and their nostalgic value. :(
@squinko: Some of them broke fairly easily (my Splinter, uh, splintered), so a few of them might be worth something. I don't know that I could give them up though, I'd be more likely to add them to the action figure collection in my office.
@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: I had a handful of Usagi Yo Jimbos because the ears kept breaking off.
When playing 'superfriends' whoever was Aquaman would use a slinky for communicating with fish by holding it to their forehead with one hand and saying 'doo doo doo doo doo' in a high-pitched voice and extending the other end out with their other hand.
...does my backyard count?
My family was so poor that twelve children had only one toy to share...
It was a little wooden car...
And it was broken - it only had three wheels...
And those wheels were square...
Imagine 12 children fighting over a little wooden car that only went \"chunk,tah, chunk,tah, chunk,tah\" when you tried to push it around...
But we never, ever got to play with it when our mother had to tenderize possum or raccoon meat that she was lucky enough to find on the roadside...
Afterward it was even a more special treat for us children to lick the little wooden car off...
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TRANSFORMERS!!!!!
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Fisher Price Adventure People!!!! yeah, Legos were cool, too. Otherwise the best toys were the ones I made myself.
![\"user-pic\"](\"http://consumerist.com/assets_c/userpics/userpic-120941-100x100.png\")
What about Easy-Bakes, Radio Flyers (I had a Radio Flyer horse too!), those red slide projector clicky things, pogs, Tamagotchis.... I was just saying yesterday how kids' toys today just don't measure up.
@jhuang: I loved the Creepy Crawlers Maker (basically an Easy-Bake Oven that made critters out of goop instead of baked cakes out of goop). I think they might even still make them.
@h3llc4t, breaker of office dress codes: No, Creepy Crawlers got a lot hotter than the Easy-Bake Oven did. Bare hot metal on flesh--fabulousness!
We also had Incredible Edibles, which were basically Creepy Crawlers made out of nominally edible materials. I think you can still see them on my MRIs.
@jhuang: The clicky slide thingie = Viewmaster
I just bought my neice one last year for Christmas, they still make those.
I wish I still had my tamagachi, or even just my picachu version of the same thing. So addictive.
I was the Slinky untangler in our household. Love the things. I still have my favorite doll (1973 Tender Love by Mattel). Mom still has my Tonka trucks from when they were made of metal and so much more fun than the plastic ones.
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6 words...
Mill En Ee Um - Fal Kin
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I'd have to say Barbies. Each year they released a new one, not like now when there is a doll with each outfit, and you could go to the dime store and get clothes and a little plastic bag of shoes, purses, tennis rackets, etc. I had the cardboard house with the elevator that went up when you pulled a string, a purple Corvette and a plastic pool. My sister had this pink kitchen that I was SO jealous of. We used to make clothes and other things for them.
But the best thing we did was take them out into the woods and play with them in the creek. They went swimming in a little pool with a waterfall that was only about six inches high. We had so much fun doing that I wish I could go back in time and do it again.
I still have the house and car and all the clothes (and the dolls). They are dirty from being in storage, but I can't bring myself to throw them away. :(
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I was all about the TMNT. They lived together in a glorious four foot tall pink plastic dollhouse that I wired with Christmas lights. (I wasn't trusted with the hobby knife at the time, so running wires needed adult assistance.) Throw in some Legos and Play-doh to trick it out a bit more, and I had the perfect turtle lair to defend against the evil Shredder.
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Hello! Lawn darts! Duh! And BB guns! Firecrackers! And other things that involve matches!
Well you know, it gets boring at the office, we have to amuse ourselves some how.
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When I was in school, my class was asked to write an essay on \"the greatest gift I received\" Everybody else did stuff like honesty, love, etc. My answer was my NES. And I stand by that choice.
Lionel trains, Erector sets and Radio Flyer wagons. Everything else was just fluff.
Lionel trains, and books.
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Furby.
Furby?
FURBY?!
Really? I mean, furby? Creepiest toy, lamest toy, but greatest of all time? Fuck. That.
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Lincoln Logs.
It took me four years to get them, and I barely wanted them when I did get them. After playing with them for hours on end, I must say, they were my favorite. You could use them with hot wheels cars, G.I. Joes, tonka, Marvel Comics toys, etc.
@donnie5: Do not forget the use of Lincoln logs with the green plastic army soldiers. Perfect for building forts and destroying them with mock explosions...