Toys from the 60s & 70s
Growing up in the 60s & 70s exposed me to quite a mix of toys and games. We all learned about the latest craze from the same source - TV commercials! Being the child of a minister / missionary, TV was often my only experience with many of the toys and games. We didn't have a very big budget for toys at Christmas time or on birthdays. Often the more expensive gifts came from relatives back in North Carolina. But I did get a hands-on experience with some of the toys and games through the other neighborhood kids.
Our generation got to experience some toy ideas that were so bad that they actually prompted lawmakers to create new laws to outlaw them. The infamous Jarts (lawn darts) are probably the best known toy in this category. I actually knew a family that bought a set of Jarts (and even played with them myself). What red-blooded American boy could resist playing with something that could only be described as a giant, lethally heavy dart? Other toys have probably caused more injuries over the years and yet are still available today *cough* *cough* BB guns. Granted, getting your eye shot out isn't the same as having a giant dart pierce your skull, and probably not as likely to kill you. But I'm sure many more kids have been injured by BB guns. Yet they are still available. I guess we can blame the gun lobbyists. I never owned a BB gun myself, yet had plenty of experiences "playing" with them. We discovered that when we ran out of BBs, we could shoot straight pins! We'd just drop a straight pin down the barrel, head first. Then aim and shoot. If we shot a piece of plywood, the pin usually stuck right in! You'd think it would tumble and switch ends and hit head-first. But if you think about it aerodynamically, the head of the pin probably provided enough drag to keep the pin flying point-first. I guess this is a good place for my standard disclaimer:
DON'T TRY SHOOTING STRAIGHT PINS FROM A BB GUN! YOU REALLY WILL SHOOT SOMEONE'S EYE OUT, AND IT COULD VERY EASILY BE YOUR EYE!
Some toys were just dumb. We were so much more naive back then, we'd play with anything. The old electric vibrating football game comes to mind. You line up your little plastic football players on the line of scrimmage, having carefully "programmed" your plays into key players by bending little tabs or something on the players' bases. Then you flipped a switch and an electric vibrating motor would vibrate the dickens out of the metal playing field and all the players would bounce around doing pretty much whatever they wanted. Suddenly you knew how the offensive coordinator must feel when the perfect play is botched. I remember one neighborhood kid got a magnetic Gotham City set one year. It was a big cardboard layout of Gotham City. I think it had cardboard buildings (Wayne Manor, City Hall, Bat cave, etc.). The Batmobile was a little plastic car with a magnet on the bottom. The whole city was raised off the table on legs of some kind. This allowed you to use a magnetic wand (a stick with a magnet attached to one end) to "drive" the Batmobile through the streets of Gotham City. Sounds pretty dumb today, but I thought he was the luckiest kid in the neighborhood. Batman was really big at the time. We're talking about the Adam West / Burt Ward TV series. That was about the time our family finally got our first color TV. Batman really made you appreciate a color TV, what with all the colorful costumes and POW, BOP and ZING pop-up balloons.
Then there were the all time classic toys like Hot Wheels. One year I got the Mongoose & Snake drag race set - complete with dual loop-the-loops. There was a checkered flag at the end of the track that actually indicated which car won the race. Then the coup de grace: drag chutes! The drag chute was a parachute attached to a V-shaped piece of metal. You had to stuff the chutes inside a plastic base, leaving the V-shaped piece of metal stickup up through a trap door. When the car ran over the trap door, it snagged the piece of metal and pulled the drag chute out of its little box. This all happened so quickly, it actually looked like the chute came out of the back of the car, as in the real drag races. Thinking back, maybe that is where we got the idea for our Car Trap!
Other classics include the Slinky, the Frisbee, the Hula Hoop, Big Wheels, Magic 8 Ball, and Play Doh. Some toys were inspired by the space race, such as the Major Matt Mason action figures. The action figures weren't much - the cheap rubber-over-wire-frame kind of deal, but the accessories were "out of this world!" I was never fortunate enough to own any of the figures or play sets. But I was with my dad one Saturday in a junk store in Colorado (probably in Trinidad). I found a Major Matt Mason space crawler in with the used toys and my dad actually bought it for me. The thing had two X-shaped "pod wheels" on the sides and a little roller wheel in the back that more or less drug as the thing crawled along. It ran on 2 D cell batteries, which fit into tanks behind the driver's cockpit. With a fresh set of batteries, it was unstoppable. If it ran into a wall, it would flip itself and travel back the way it came. The crawler also had a working motorized winch. The crawler was designed to sit atop the 3 story space station, where the winch could be put to use as an elevator for Major Matt and his gang. Other cool lines of toys included the Secret Sam spy toys. Seems like one of the local kids had the spy briefcase. If you pressed a certain button, a rifle barrel would spring out of one end and a gun stock would spring out of the other end. Total coolness!
Of course, I had dozens of toy guns during my childhood, including cowboy cap pistols that used the paper roll caps, and later, a snub nosed .38 that used the much louder plastic ring caps. Yup, our generation was raised on guns. Funny story: when my son was about kindergarten age, he was constantly asking for toy guns. My wife was adamant that he could not have toy guns. So we bought him something constructive - Legos. What did he do? He built some of the coolest looking rayguns, rifles, and whatnot out of Legos! Then he'd run around the house yelling, "Pie-oh! Pie-oh!" (that is how southerners pronounce the word "pow"). Now he is totally into guns as a 21 year-old. I often wondered if we would have been better off letting him play with toy guns. Maybe he would have gotten it out of his system and be done with them as an adult.
My memories are obviously from a boy's perspective. But I did grow up with two older sisters. I remember they had the ubiquitous Barbie dolls. Back in those days, girls only got one Barbie. Not one for every occasion like they have today. One of my sisters got a Troll doll play set. You remember Trolls, don't you? The little plastic dolls with neon colored Don King styled hair that were so ugly they were cute? My sister's set included a carry case that opened into a troll house. It had tree stump tables and chairs molded right into floor. I remember one stupid board game that was marketed to girls: Mystery Date. Jeeze, I even remember the jingle for it. Probably because me and some of the other boys used to pester some of the neighborhood girls who had the game while they were playing it in their yard. The game was a board with a big plastic front door. There were a bunch of pictures behind the door. Depending on how you turned the doorknob, you'd see a different date. The catch was that one of the pictures was a "Dud" - a slovenly-dressed guy who looked like a beach bum. All the other pictures were of preppy Ken doll types. I think the game was owned by my friend's sister. He had discovered that you could turn the doorknob to a certain position and get the Dud every time. Part of our taunting included turning the knob to the Dud position so the girl would get the bum date.
Speaking of board games, the big one in our family was Monopoly, another timeless classic. When we were younger, I remember playing Candyland (another game that seems to have been around forever). We later got the Game of Life. We weren't allowed to have playing cards, other than an Old Maid deck. The real playing cards could be used for Poker / gambling, and our dad didn't allow them in the house. Battleship was always a hit, but we never owned it (until I was grown and had kids of my own).
Well, this post has gone on long enough. You may have noticed the many links back to www.retroland.com. The site used to be called YesterdayLand and I spent many hours there reliving my childhood. Check them out - I bet you'll find some long lost memories there, too!
Our generation got to experience some toy ideas that were so bad that they actually prompted lawmakers to create new laws to outlaw them. The infamous Jarts (lawn darts) are probably the best known toy in this category. I actually knew a family that bought a set of Jarts (and even played with them myself). What red-blooded American boy could resist playing with something that could only be described as a giant, lethally heavy dart? Other toys have probably caused more injuries over the years and yet are still available today *cough* *cough* BB guns. Granted, getting your eye shot out isn't the same as having a giant dart pierce your skull, and probably not as likely to kill you. But I'm sure many more kids have been injured by BB guns. Yet they are still available. I guess we can blame the gun lobbyists. I never owned a BB gun myself, yet had plenty of experiences "playing" with them. We discovered that when we ran out of BBs, we could shoot straight pins! We'd just drop a straight pin down the barrel, head first. Then aim and shoot. If we shot a piece of plywood, the pin usually stuck right in! You'd think it would tumble and switch ends and hit head-first. But if you think about it aerodynamically, the head of the pin probably provided enough drag to keep the pin flying point-first. I guess this is a good place for my standard disclaimer:
DON'T TRY SHOOTING STRAIGHT PINS FROM A BB GUN! YOU REALLY WILL SHOOT SOMEONE'S EYE OUT, AND IT COULD VERY EASILY BE YOUR EYE!
Some toys were just dumb. We were so much more naive back then, we'd play with anything. The old electric vibrating football game comes to mind. You line up your little plastic football players on the line of scrimmage, having carefully "programmed" your plays into key players by bending little tabs or something on the players' bases. Then you flipped a switch and an electric vibrating motor would vibrate the dickens out of the metal playing field and all the players would bounce around doing pretty much whatever they wanted. Suddenly you knew how the offensive coordinator must feel when the perfect play is botched. I remember one neighborhood kid got a magnetic Gotham City set one year. It was a big cardboard layout of Gotham City. I think it had cardboard buildings (Wayne Manor, City Hall, Bat cave, etc.). The Batmobile was a little plastic car with a magnet on the bottom. The whole city was raised off the table on legs of some kind. This allowed you to use a magnetic wand (a stick with a magnet attached to one end) to "drive" the Batmobile through the streets of Gotham City. Sounds pretty dumb today, but I thought he was the luckiest kid in the neighborhood. Batman was really big at the time. We're talking about the Adam West / Burt Ward TV series. That was about the time our family finally got our first color TV. Batman really made you appreciate a color TV, what with all the colorful costumes and POW, BOP and ZING pop-up balloons.
Then there were the all time classic toys like Hot Wheels. One year I got the Mongoose & Snake drag race set - complete with dual loop-the-loops. There was a checkered flag at the end of the track that actually indicated which car won the race. Then the coup de grace: drag chutes! The drag chute was a parachute attached to a V-shaped piece of metal. You had to stuff the chutes inside a plastic base, leaving the V-shaped piece of metal stickup up through a trap door. When the car ran over the trap door, it snagged the piece of metal and pulled the drag chute out of its little box. This all happened so quickly, it actually looked like the chute came out of the back of the car, as in the real drag races. Thinking back, maybe that is where we got the idea for our Car Trap!
Other classics include the Slinky, the Frisbee, the Hula Hoop, Big Wheels, Magic 8 Ball, and Play Doh. Some toys were inspired by the space race, such as the Major Matt Mason action figures. The action figures weren't much - the cheap rubber-over-wire-frame kind of deal, but the accessories were "out of this world!" I was never fortunate enough to own any of the figures or play sets. But I was with my dad one Saturday in a junk store in Colorado (probably in Trinidad). I found a Major Matt Mason space crawler in with the used toys and my dad actually bought it for me. The thing had two X-shaped "pod wheels" on the sides and a little roller wheel in the back that more or less drug as the thing crawled along. It ran on 2 D cell batteries, which fit into tanks behind the driver's cockpit. With a fresh set of batteries, it was unstoppable. If it ran into a wall, it would flip itself and travel back the way it came. The crawler also had a working motorized winch. The crawler was designed to sit atop the 3 story space station, where the winch could be put to use as an elevator for Major Matt and his gang. Other cool lines of toys included the Secret Sam spy toys. Seems like one of the local kids had the spy briefcase. If you pressed a certain button, a rifle barrel would spring out of one end and a gun stock would spring out of the other end. Total coolness!
Of course, I had dozens of toy guns during my childhood, including cowboy cap pistols that used the paper roll caps, and later, a snub nosed .38 that used the much louder plastic ring caps. Yup, our generation was raised on guns. Funny story: when my son was about kindergarten age, he was constantly asking for toy guns. My wife was adamant that he could not have toy guns. So we bought him something constructive - Legos. What did he do? He built some of the coolest looking rayguns, rifles, and whatnot out of Legos! Then he'd run around the house yelling, "Pie-oh! Pie-oh!" (that is how southerners pronounce the word "pow"). Now he is totally into guns as a 21 year-old. I often wondered if we would have been better off letting him play with toy guns. Maybe he would have gotten it out of his system and be done with them as an adult.
My memories are obviously from a boy's perspective. But I did grow up with two older sisters. I remember they had the ubiquitous Barbie dolls. Back in those days, girls only got one Barbie. Not one for every occasion like they have today. One of my sisters got a Troll doll play set. You remember Trolls, don't you? The little plastic dolls with neon colored Don King styled hair that were so ugly they were cute? My sister's set included a carry case that opened into a troll house. It had tree stump tables and chairs molded right into floor. I remember one stupid board game that was marketed to girls: Mystery Date. Jeeze, I even remember the jingle for it. Probably because me and some of the other boys used to pester some of the neighborhood girls who had the game while they were playing it in their yard. The game was a board with a big plastic front door. There were a bunch of pictures behind the door. Depending on how you turned the doorknob, you'd see a different date. The catch was that one of the pictures was a "Dud" - a slovenly-dressed guy who looked like a beach bum. All the other pictures were of preppy Ken doll types. I think the game was owned by my friend's sister. He had discovered that you could turn the doorknob to a certain position and get the Dud every time. Part of our taunting included turning the knob to the Dud position so the girl would get the bum date.
Speaking of board games, the big one in our family was Monopoly, another timeless classic. When we were younger, I remember playing Candyland (another game that seems to have been around forever). We later got the Game of Life. We weren't allowed to have playing cards, other than an Old Maid deck. The real playing cards could be used for Poker / gambling, and our dad didn't allow them in the house. Battleship was always a hit, but we never owned it (until I was grown and had kids of my own).
Well, this post has gone on long enough. You may have noticed the many links back to www.retroland.com. The site used to be called YesterdayLand and I spent many hours there reliving my childhood. Check them out - I bet you'll find some long lost memories there, too!
I currently have your family's Game of Life game with me in Raleigh!! I found it when I used to spend my summers with them and Grandma let me have it.
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Yeah, but your Grandpa made us skip any of the game cards that had to do with stocks and bonds because that was gambling. Now, you don't have our old Monopoly game, do you? It is easy to spot - half of the money is "counterfeit". We lost a bunch of the bills (or spent it or something) and had to make homemade replacements.
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No, I don't even remember seeing that one. But maybe I wasn't interested in it because I owned it at home already. I do remember seeing Cootie. But I could never figure out that game...the instructions were long gone. And you guys making fake Monopoly money does not surprise me one bit. And mom wouldn't let me have playing cards either...but I had them anyway. Oh and I totally had a troll doll playset like you describe Becky owning! I still have it too. If you go through all my stuff in storage, it's like walking through an 80s toy store.
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