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."

Comments

The missed the most important thing

[Quasar1999]

I've wanted one every year since I was 12... a girlfriend... I'm still waiting...

Re:The missed the most important thing

[sga.busboy]

A girlfriend I have, I just wish I her last name wasn't .jpg

What about Lawn Darts?

[AtariAmarok]

What about Lawn Darts? They bring the exciting element of severe head trauma risk to the fun of summar yard play!

Re:What about Lawn Darts?

[TrollBridge]

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.

Re:What about Lawn Darts?

[artemis67]

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.

Toys today!

[teiresias]

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.

Re:Toys today!

[Fallingcow]

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.

Great...

[armer]

Now to rehash old wounds, a list of all the toys I ever wanted and never got. Merry Christmas!!...

Re:zero

[LiquidCoooled]

Dear Santa,

Since we have been good admins all year long, could you please send us:

1 New Web Server.
A nice fat internet connection.

Sincerely,

tv.cream.org admins.

My $6,000,000 Man Action Figure...

[Sideshow Coward]

used to have his way with all of my sister's Barbies. Who could resist with his bionic leg, magnifying eye, red jump suit, and his oh-so-fuzzy head?

50-in-1 Electronics Lab! Yeah!!

[Artful Codger]

I was born about 20 years too early for the Internet, so while waiting for Al Gore to actually get it done, I was an electronics geek in public & high school (early 70's)

One year a prescient uncle gave me one of those kits, and I absolutely devoured it over the next several months. Highlights were the various radio circuits, audio amplifiers where you pressed that pink crystal earphone into service as a microphone, and the pinnacle - an AM transmitter.

Thanks in part to that thing, I went straight into electronics after high school and had a great 20 year career in broadcast electronics before jumping into programming several years ago.

Thanks for the link. Those were good memories.

bittersweet memories

[catdevnull]

I remember back in '73, I got a GI Joe--the 12" action figure from the Viet Nam War era! He had rough beard and pre-camouflage utility uniform. VERY cool and manly. But then, my dad exploited my colorblindness by giving me a pink banana seat high-riser girl's bike he bought from a police auction for $5. Cheap bastard.

I think that was "tough love." But, on the bright side, I get to pick his retirement home.

5 months in the 70's

[frovingslosh]

I was alive for maybe 5 months in the 70's

Me too, and I was born in the 50's.