Coffee Break [14/11/22]

Your mid morning pick me up

14/11/22 Hannibal 30

The National Toy Hall of Fame has announced the inductees for 2022. And while I never understood the appeal of the top, I was crazy about my Lite Brite. And I secretly kind of want a Stranger Things edition.

Tell us about your favorite childhood toys, Deadsplinters.

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30 Comments

      • We had an amazing Matchbox car city in a vacant lot in our neighborhood. Most of the neighborhood kids would bring their cars and we would play from sun up to sundown – boys and girls of all ages. Weirdly, it ended one day when a few of us were playing there and we got attacked by a pack of wild dogs. One of the neighbors started shooting them(the dogs, obviously) and we were all too traumatized to go back to it.

      • Well, not literally Howard Roark, I was just trying to think of a famous fictional architect. The real-life ones are all a little crazy. Believe me. But from history, there’s Stanford White, Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Robert Moses (not an architect by training but even better/worse: billions of dollars at his disposal to hire untold numbers of architects.)

  2. Legos, but not the pre-directed model kits that seem to be the only thing available nowadays. Just the bricks, hundreds and hundreds of them in maybe two dozen different shapes, from which I unleashed my inner Howard Roark and built, in my mind’s eye, Utopian Lego communities.

    • …I feel like the character in the lego movie who’s first suggestion is always “build a spaceship?”…with the astronaut helmet with the broken but hanging off the bottom was aimed at my generation of hand-me-down lego fans with unerring accuracy

      …that chinstrap thing always broke…& it wasn’t until lego technics hoved into view that I think I really considered there were things other than spaceships it might be worth building out of the stuff?

      …mind you…my father always maintained that meccano was superior…but the set in the attic that had been his had too much rust for my mother to think I should be playing with it…while also providing a reason for it not making sense to spend money on a new one…so I never really found out

      …I suspect it was maybe better for building cranes & things out of…but…spaceships not so much?

      • I’d never heard of Meccano, had to Google it. Looks a lot like an Erector Set. We never had those. I don’t think we were a very STEM oriented family. But my brother did have this one toy I was obsessed with, and also not allowed to touch. It was a collection of little magnets in various sizes and shapes that you could build things with. I used to sneak into his room when I knew he wouldn’t be home for a long time to play with it. I can’t remember the name and haven’t seen anything similar online or in the stores. Does it ring any bells for you?

  3. I coveted the Previous Places Mansion when I was a kid. I got to play with it once when we went to my parents friend’s house for a party and their kids had one. I admit that I have bought one from eBay for me my kids. We all love it.

     

    • It looks similar to the Little People castle my daughter had as a child. She loved it. It had a royal family, a dragon, horses, and a carriage. It had a dance floor that spun around. 

  4. The bulk of my childhood toys were hand-me-downs from older cousins and second hand from garage sales. Not complaining. My cousins are boys and it was awesome to have non girly pink shit. Like this!

    Also we got their Gameboy and Sega Game Gear which included a thousand games because their dad worked in Cambodia and the street market was wild. It blew out minds to have so many cool random games on one cartridge.

     

     

    • I had a lot of hand-me-down Barbies and girly things from my sisters. But my two best friends from next door and across the street were boys so I never played with them much. I was too busy riding my bike and building forts in the woods.

  6. @Hanibal, YES–you can still get sets of “just the blocks” legos! (They’re often branded under the Lego “Classic Brick Sets” on the Lego site, or have a Yellow label that says “Classic” if you’re shopping at Target/Walmart/Sam’s Club/Costco

     

    And the “Classic” sets sometimes come in a large Lego-Block-shaped storage box, too!😉

    (The storage box lid is *not* a snap-on or locking lid, though–itjust rests on the bottom box, so it’s NOT great for storage, if the people playing with them are likely to *drop* the box when getting it out/putting it away– The blocks WILL fly EVERYWHERE!😉🤣💖)

  7. Regarding Masters of the Universe–

    If y’all haven’t seen the MotU episode of the show “The Toys That Built America,” it’s a REALLY neat story!!😃😉😁

    Basically, it gets into Television law back in the 1970’s & 80’s; the enormous mistake Mattel made–which is why Kenner got the *original* rights to Star Wars; the reasons why we late Gen-Xers & the Millenials behind us had all those 3.5″ action figures; more bumbling from Mattel (He-Man & Co were *originally* intended as Conan The Barbarian “action figures”😂🤣); and the eventual twists & turns that led to the Castle Greyskull folks (& later on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles–which are also on the same 5.5″ scale as He-Man & She-Ra) so many of us played with (or wanted to play with!) as kids.

    It was on TV within the last couple weeks–and I watched it with Dad.😉😁💝

    It was fascinating to me, because as we watched, I was dumbfounded that Mattel was too stupid to realize/ask about Conan the Barbarian being *adult-oriented* not *kid-oriented*!!!🤣🤣🤣

    And when they got into the Battlestar Galactica toys–before they talked about the recalls, i realized that I’d completely forgotten that whole line of toys!😉

    https://www.history.com/shows/the-toys-that-built-america/season-2/episode-1

  9. I had Barbies (several were the original ones from the 50’s) and My Little Ponies (the early 80’s ones), but I was usually building them barns or houses with my huge sets of wooden blocks, Legos, or Tinker Toys (wooden ones from the 60’s).

    • I’m a little old for My Little Ponys but I was into Troll dolls. I used to play with my friend across the street older sister sometimes. And she had a troll pony that I desperately coveted.

       

       

  10. Legos (classic) built anything and everything with it.  The kits they have nowadays are what I imagined I was building.  I got the Apollo 11 Saturn V via black Friday sale on Amazon recently but haven’t gotten around to building it (um, just to see how it compares to a model kit.)

    Star Wars, mostly the 1st and 2nd generation stuff but for some reason no matter how much I whined I never got a Han Solo figure.

    My parents took most of that stuff away when I was 13 because they said it was time to be a grown up.  It really kinda sucks, but that was my parents especially mom the Tiger Mom. Only good thing to come out of it was I learned how to deal with loss/trauma when the consequences weren’t as serious…. but yeah that was one of the moments where my rocky relationship with the parents began.

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