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Top 100 Toys From The '70s or Thereabouts

doctorfaustus writes "Found this on Daily Rotation -- it details, with pictures, many of the toys we all wanted from our parents at Christmas a few years ago.... Everything from '160 Exciting Science Projects' to 'Stretch Armstrong,' along with the promises made in the toy's advertising and how often those promises were broken... The story has a British orientation, but I didn't see a single toy I didn't remember from my American youth.... They're all here: Simon, Slime, Magic Rocks, Sonic Ear... Even the Sinclair."

10 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Toys today! by teiresias · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I might just be nostalgic but does it seem that the toys from back then were more tactile and creative? The toys were good in their own right but to make them great you needed a good portion of your imagination to truly make them fly.

    [grandparent voice]Today's toys are all movie tie ins and spin offs. The story has been told before the action figure or game has been brought home. The imagination is gone.[/grandparent voice]

    Still a nice trip down memory lane.

    --
    -Teiresias
    1. Re:Toys today! by Fallingcow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is my complaint about LEGO these days.

      Used to be, you'd have Space or Castle sets, these days you have Star Wars and Harry Potter. What the hell is the point of buying these kind of LEGOs? Get the normal action figures if you just want to re-enact or extend an existing story. To me, LEGOs are better suited to creating from-scratch story lines.

      The roles of characters are so well defined with the movie tie-in sets, while the older sets were free of anything but a slight suggestion of the relations between characters or factions.

    2. Re:Toys today! by Rorschach1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They were built better, too. I went through a number of modern plastic aircraft with my son, but the only one that survived - and that he really enjoyed playing with - was an ancient (Tonka?) Turboprop plane I'd had at his age. It was a bit faded and had lost some prop blades, but for a > 20 year old toy it held up pretty well. His new AH-64 Apache with lights and sounds, on the other hand, broke in half within a week.

      I went looking for a similarly well-built toy plane, but never found a modern equivalent. I finally hit eBay and found an identical plane, still in its 1978 packaging. He's still got it, and it's still in good shape. Hasn't even lost a prop blade yet.

      The rest of his toy aircraft, however, are now so many brittle plastic shards at the bottom of his toybox.

      And don't get me started on the metal toys we used to have. I once saw an original Voltron fall from a 7-foot wall and land on concrete with hardly a scratch...

    3. Re:Toys today! by stcanard · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Personally I don't even like the space and castle legos

      I buy my son the basic blocks only. With a space set he can build space ships. With a castle set he can build castles. With generic blocks he can build spaceships, castles, cars, and a whole bunch of things I would never have thought of.

  2. Re:What about Lawn Darts? by artemis67 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I honestly believe "Lawn Jarts" (as our family's set was called) was a Darwinist conspiracy by the government and toy industry to cull the herd a bit.

    Fortunately my brother and I made the cut. Society is probably better off without those who didn't. Now we have these confounded safety commissions that prevent us from shedding our weak links.

    ...except that in one of the high-profile lawsuits against lawndarts, it was the next-door neighbor's daughter who was killed, not the kids throwing the darts. One boy threw it up in the air, and it went over the fence and pierced the little girl's skull. She died in her father's arms.

  3. Re:What about Lawn Darts? by jandrese · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Lawn Darts were the first game where I wore a helmet even though the directions didn't mention helmets at all. The reccomended underhanded throwing style combined with the design of the dart itself ment that (at least with kids) it was quite easy to throw one straight up in the air and have it land at some random place around you.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
  4. Re:Oh the sorrow. by hal2814 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You (and me and countless others) taking them apart is what made them valuable for everybody who didn't. That's why 70's - 80's action figures still in the box are worth something. What kid kept their action figure in the box (or kept up with accessories for that matter)?

  5. Re:Mirrordot has a full mirror by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Full my ass. That's one page.

    Try Coral

  6. Legos Legos Legos Legos Legos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    who the hell calls them LEGO?

    everyone calls them legos -- certainly every kids does. I can still remember reading some 'parental guidlines' that instructed parents to encourage their children to call them 'lego blocks' and avoid "legos" at all costs. utter marketdroid b.s. It's been, what, 30+ years and the Lego corp still hasn't gotten it through their thick blockheaded skulls?
    legos legos legos legos legos legos legos

  7. Re:What about Lawn Darts? by Fishstick · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People over 35 should be,dead. Here's why ...........
    According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 40's, 50's, 60's, or even maybe the early 70's probably
    shouldn't have survived.
    Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint.
    We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, ... ! and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.
    (Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.)
    As children, we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or air bags.
    Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.
    We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
    Horrors!
    We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.
    We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.
    We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
    We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the! street lights came on.
    No one was able to reach us all day.
    NO CELL PHONES!!!!!
    U n t h i n k a b l e !
    We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64! , X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms.
    We had friends!
    We went outside and found them.We played dodge ball, and sometimes, the ball would really hurt.We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
    They were accidents.
    No one was to blame but us.
    Remember accidents?
    We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it.We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms, and although we were told it would happen,we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever.
    We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them. Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
    Some students weren't as smart as others, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade.
    Horrors!
    Tests were not adjusted for any reason. Our actions were our own.
    Consequences were expected. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law.
    Imagine that!
    This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever.
    The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
    We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

    --

    There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
    Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.