Buzzfeed hooked up some of their employees with their favorite childhood toys to get a reaction.
Now I’m remembering my favorite toy: Horrible Hamilton!
This was actually an awesome idea: it was a giant ugly bug with a drawstring that would make it walk, and mandibles that would snap shut when they contacted something, and it came with a collection of smaller monster bugs and a set of plastic army men.
Isn’t that stupidly great? I’d set up these elaborate battles and turn the monsters loose, and of course I was cheering the giant insects on to win.
Unfortunately, those stupid pull strings were fragile, and I wore mine out, so Hamilton stopped walking and was neglected and abandoned and eventually thrown out.
You all know what to get me for Christmas now, right? Sadly, and for some mysterious reason, they were only sold for one short year before being discontinued, so they’re very rare and hard to find, and expensive when you do.
That does look fun.
My faves–
Breyer model horses. The appaloosa was my favorite.
And Creepy Crawlers–molds and little ovens, with which to make little bug and reptile figures.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepy_Crawlers
Gnip Gnop. That is all.
I still have most of my Breyer horses with me and lots of stuffed animals. I take part of my childhood whenever I move
I collected stuffed animals. My favorites were a Toys R Us Geoffrey the Giraffe, and a stuffed magenta toucan I had named Toukey. Later, I had Barbie dolls, but tended to gravitate towards the dolls like Skipper and Stacie that weren’t adults yet.
Also, Legos. All of the legos.
Meccano! And my brother’s train. (Not mine, because I was a girl.)
But now I want to turn the clock back and order that bug!
Come to think of it, the Meccano was my brother’s, too. But he never used it because I had it.
My favorite was a yellow plastic crystal radio. I’m 68 and I still listen to radio (NPR) all night, every night.
Lincoln Logs
ugh, I’m older than I know
Odd Ogg. Though it was my little sister’s and I was Too Old for That.
Their was an Alien toy the year that movie came out that might have been kin to Horrible Hamilton: on Christmas Eve I was in a toy department that was pretty much stripped to the walls, except for a freaking mountain of Alien dolls. A friend of mine did buy one, though: his cat would cross the room to avoid it.
There was……
It’s the gin.
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) #8
I (well, my brother, but they were mine, really) had Lincoln Logs, too.
But I’m only as old as I feel. :D
Meccano, (& i went on to become a structural engineer).
Yeah, no feckin’ imagination!
I had about 12,000 pieces of LEGO. The oldest ones were starting to wear at the corners.
Re-creating things like Horrible Hamilton is what I dream 3D printing will make not only possible, but simple.
As a kid I think my favourite toy was a passed down Hot Wheels Super Charger Race Set (http://vintagetoyarchive.tumblr.com/post/47656422782/mattel-1969-hot-wheels-super-charger-race-set). It was not even the whole set, I think we just had some of the track and the pusher building, but it was wonderful, and I so desperately wish I still had it but I am pretty sure it likely ended up in a yard sale some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Sigh.
Lego, with space Lego being my absolute favourite. I also had a big bucket of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars (Matchbox rule), plastic soldiers and a remote control tank (that I still have, 25 years later) which I drove over all of them.
And my Commodore 64. Oh joyous PC gaming pioneer! Oh fudgey friend! Oh Dambusters & Test Drive & Turrican! We got ours in the mid-80s and kept it until I left high school in 1993 – they hadn’t stopped making games for it then either.
Actually, this makes me reappraise my favourite toy. I think, as I grew older, our Zenith IBM PC clone, with its beautiful green monochrome monitor, became my favourite toy. We had it well past its point of obsolescence and it was still fun.
Never had a C64 but I wish I had one. The community surround Commodore computer seems to be rather amazing. Games are still being made for it by passionate people. For instance, Sam’s Journey: http://www.knights-of-bytes.com/sams-journey
There are so many classic games I never got to play, I really feel like I missed out on something great.
Lego here as well, especially the 1969 12V train set.
http://brickset.com/sets/723-1/Diesel-Locomotive
http://brickset.com/sets/721-1/Steam-locomotive
It came with blue tracks and a middle rail carrying the power it got from a 12V transformer, and the motor pack had contacts sliding on that middle rail. :)
There was also Cascade by Matchbox which I really loved. It was amazing. I just introduced it to my girlfriend and now she wants to look for one on eBay. I hope this video does not embed, as I have seen before youtube.com/watch?v=OoGYqa6e0z4
For me it was the Tandy/Radio Shack 65-in-1 kit (which was better than the later 75-in-1, 100-in-1 and 200-in-1)
http://users.telenet.be/synthedmind/kitsTandy65in1.htm
Luckily, they are still easy to find (used) on ebay, and I have two of them!
I stole my brothers’ Ninja Turtles (in between buying my own when I could afford to). Mum and Dad were never too happy with my tastes — too “boyish”, too violent, too weird, and too dark.
I think, though, that my absolute favorite childhood “toy” was a cardboard box, because it could be anything you imagined — a spaceship, a tank, a cave, a house, a car, a truck, a fighter jet…
Blurp balls. Specifically the skull that shoots out his teeth. I loved that dumb toy.
My favorite was my Spirograph. Of course, it was the only toy I had for a long time, so I’m not sure that counts. It sort of wins by default.
Um
Well
I had 93 Polly Pockets.
My favorite was the beauty shop one. But I would set them all up as a little “town” and have the Pollys walk around and do stuff. I made elaborate stories about them.
Gilbert ChemCraft Chemistry set. My Dad kept bringing me additions until I had an old wardrobe closet full of such stuff. Also built some equipment of my own, like a spark-gap eudeometer for measuring oxygen-hydrogen stoichiometry. Lucky I never blew up my bedroom.
I had a water rocket. Fill it halfway with water, pump in air, and launch it. This was a little hand-held thing, not the two-liter bottle ones you can make.
Electricity. I fashioned my first “torch” out of a light bulb and a battery my dad gave me at age 4, as well as some nails and a bit of wood. My cubby houses were never very flash but they always had interior lighting. The old camper van abandoned in the back yard was wired to the train set transformer in the spare room. Apart from the odd short scream when a derelict old valve radio bit my questing finger tip, I had a wonderful time. Discharging a high voltage capacitor with a screw driver made a good substitute for fire crackers. Now in my dotage I troll ebay for interesting LED light fixtures for a bit of retail therapy. The garden is wired with 12 volts form a solar charged battery bank. Must go and check that volt gauge again…mutter mutter….
I say it’s a todos-up between the Mattel Space 1999 Eagle playset and the electronic Starbird.
Edit: toss-up
This video is yet another example that the cake is a lie.
Similar to Meccano (which I also had) I had the Girder and Panel set. The had no connection to Matchbox and their cars and tracks, but the parts were exactly the right size to use the two together.
I honestly don’t recall any one toy that really resonates with me. I had many over the years and I enjoyed the hell out of them, but I didn’t really form “personal” relationships with them. Some of my stuffed animals, I suppose, I was very close to when I was young.
I guess building toys were my favorites, Knex, Lego, Bone-Age (making a T-rex with wings was always a blast)…if I had the money and the space my basement would probably look like Will Farrell’s in the Lego Movie. I also really liked my C64 and my Atari 2600, both of which I still have.
I also had a Horrible Hamilton. One of our family traditions was that when mom came back from the hospital with a new sibling, the rest of us got a new toy. When my youngest brother came home, Horrible Hamilton came with him. I first thought that the toy was to assuage any possible jealousy, but now I realize that it was to keep us out of our mother’s hair.
Being born in 83, my favorite childhood toys were my Transformers. My grandpa made me a 4x3x1 toybox, and the thing was full of Transformers.
One day my mom went and threw damned near all of them away. I went from having a toybox full to having a large showbox full.
Of my original collection all of two survived, both tiny 1 inch MicroMasters.
The incident basically scarred me for life, led to a total obsession with Transformers, and means that I don’t trust anybody with anything important to me, ever.
Because seriously, my own damned mother waited until garbage day, waited until I was at school, and threw away 90 percent of my favorite toys that the majority had been purchased by my grandparents.
Grandma thinks Mom was jealous of the attention I was getting from my GP’s.
I’ve probably spent close to $1000 acquiring replacements for lost pieces of my childhood.
Some day I might even manage to get the Fortress Maximus that eluded all my grandparents attempt to acquire one, though the re-release of the thing is a good $300.
I wanted a Horrible Hamilton so bad. I ended up with a cheap wind-up almost monster toy. I still want.