November 18, 2004

• GI Joe? Army Men should be in there way before GI Joe.
• Agree that plasticine was far superior, up to and including the not unpleasant smell Plaxticine had. However, it was rather oily and messy, and limited in colour, which is why I expect business came up with Play-Doh. Lincoln logs were made of 5/8ths or half-inch dowels cut into fixed lengths, and notched near their ends so they could be stacked with two intersecting walls avbutting and the logs lying smoothly. I seem to recall there were some slat pieces which could be used for roofs, too. The logs were astained a dark brown, the lsats blue-greenish. They were food for building log cabins. I think Mechano/Erector sets were superior in versatility to Lincoln Logs. There were also assorted block sets which were better than Lincoln Logs for budding builders.
• It seems to me that the toys have been included based on their relative ubiquitousness in American childhood more than any particular merit. I'll wager there isn't a kid in America who hasn't owned Play-Doh at some time, but Plasticene was one of those "snooty kid" toys that most never had. I do agree that a train set needs to be in there. There are several others I can think of: the Easy-Bake Oven, Hot Wheels, a "Flexible Flyer" sled, and so on.
• and, on the other end of the spectrum, the 10 worst toys of 2004. reminds me of Happy Fun Ball from SNL. heh.
• Draughts (checkers) is in there, but not chess? Chess is the granddaddy of board games. I'd have thought it would be the first board game to be included in a thing like this.
• Dreadnought, we're talking American kids and their toys. American kids don't play chess. American kids beat up kids who play chess.
• Hear hear beeswacky. I used to play with my Dad's old Meccano set when I visited my Grandparents. In some ways it was even more fun than Lego. Meccano emulates real life mechanics more closely than any other toy I've seen. The skills I gained from learning to use nuts and bolts to fasten things togther have paid off in spades since childhood. Thanks Plegmund for the post and bringing back some long forgotten memories.
• Transformers. I cried when Optimus Prime died in the movie.
• IT'S CALLED LEGO
• Trivia: Lincoln Logs were invented by John Lloyd Wright, son of Frank.
• Lego is the bomb-diggety. We're building robots out of Lego for my AI class. Which used to seem like a cool project, but now that we're in the end-of-semester crunch, it mostly just pisses me off.
• Rosebud.
• When I was a child, I hated plastercine. It was way too hard for my hands to shape. I loved playdoh - my mom made it fresh for us on the stove and coloured it with food colouring. And we had the barbershop set, and the one that made cool shapes...
• Lincoln Logs are truly one of the best toys ever, primarily because they make good catapults. Take one long log, then put one of the itty bitty logs under it as a pivot point (fulcrum? I always forget the parts' names). Put a small bit of ammunition on one end of the long log. Then, bring down your fist of fury down on the other end of the long log, and see who you can hit in the head!!! ...I was a violent child...
• Interesting to hear that plasticine (your spelling may vary) was a 'snooty kid' thing. That must have been later on: I think I was actually too old for Play-Doh by the time it came along (I imagine the same goes for bees). It used to annoy me that plasticine came in a nice set with lots of different colours, but your older sister would always mix it all up so that you ended up with muddy brown. I never had quite enough of it (perhaps because several ounces had been trodden into the carpet). When I was a bit older, I went in for the car design competition run by Vauxhall (=General Motors) and found that they had a special deal with Harbutt's whereby you could buy five or ten pounds of plasticine for making mock-ups, which completely blew my mind (possibly why I never finished my car).
• - That's not a different North Am spelling, that's jb happily just guessing away without looking up thread to see the correct :) But Plegmund - isn't playdoh something which has always been made in homes, and then was marketted? Because my mom had a recipe she could cook on the stove - I don't remember what went into it. It was a bit softer than the bought stuff, more doughy, less plasticy, but as I said, when I was little, I liked the way the softness let me shape it more easily. I think that as an adult with much stronger hands, I would prefer plasticine.
• I could be wrong, jb, but my recollection is that the commercial version came first, and that the home-brew kind came along later. I don't remember hearing of the home-made kind until, oh, the late seventies I suppose, but it could have been different in your part of the world. You're right about plasticine being hard until you had kneaded it and "warmed it up" for a while, though until you mentioned it I had forgotten. I grudgingly concede that the elder sister was quite useful in that respect (if only she could have done one colour at a time)...
• Scooters! And roller skates! I wasn't a really athletic child, but I did love both of those. And, a bunch of years later, I loved my daughter's Hoppity Horse. Maybe even better than she did. Do they still make those?
• Seeing this followup sometime later - no, I wouldn't know if the homebrew is older than the late seventies, as I was born in the late seventies :) It's an interesting thought, though, the mass-produced item inspiring a homemade one. I wouldn't think it is that rare, but I can't think of that many examples.
• JB: Ah yes, home cooked playdoh--i used to make it for my kids in the late seventies--I probably have the recipe your mom used somewhere around here. "OK now, it's hot, leave it alone, dear." "Be careful, it's hot, it has to cool dear." "I said wait, it's H-O-T. Hot." "Dammit, I told you keep your mitts outta that!" Happened every time. They used to like it when it was warm. Great toys: Swing sets you could tip over, that came with a metal slide that would get hotter than Hades and gash you good--lots o'scars. When you swung with a bunch of kids on the playground, you had to chant the songs you perfected at home on the little set: In 1944, Your father went to war, He went to France, They shot off his pants, And that was the end of the war. We had a teather ball with the pole cemented into a car tire. Various sized balls for un-organized games. Stick horses (or just brooms or sticks) jump ropes, JACKS!, sleds, ice skates--skating for hours on the pond, those round sled-thingies (except we used garbage can lids), balloon tire Huffy and Schwinn bikes, red Radio Flyer wagons, red scooters--it was interesting that my kids didn't do scooters, but the grandkids have this silver whoop-doo thing and think scooters were invented just recently. On ours, only the front wheel turned, the whole thing didn't articulate. Roller skates--skate till you can feel the vibrations when you take 'em off. Keep the skate key around your neck on a grubby piece of string day and night. There were never enough plastic guns to go around, so we used clothes pins stuck together. Squirt guns! Buckets and toy shovels for the rich kids, the rest of us stole tablespoons and plastic cups from our mom and got beat for it. Little plastic green soldiers and brown cowboys, (I call all the orange indians and horses!) that we lost by the hundreds in the dirt. Oh gosh, remember the great Tonka toys: my 3 brothers got all the neat stuff--the big yellow dump trucks, the cat, the front end loader, the road grader, an oil tanker, a semi truck. If we'd had a paver, we could've lowered highway taxes. Indoor stuff: Coloring books and Crayola brand Crayons. Etch-a-sketch. Spirograph and Old Maid cards. Checkers and chess. Metal doll house ('nother great scar-maker) with plastic furniture and hokey plastic dolls. We had a couple sets of alphabet blocks and Lincoln Logs, but with 5 kids, there weren't enough, and dad was too tight to pay for colored wooden blocks. Which was ok by us, as he gave us all the cool scraps from home building projects. We had TONS of blocks, and could always beg nails and sandpaper to make boats and more GUNS. We were a blood thirsty lot. Erector sets. My dad built a crystal radio with the boys--wasn't my thing, but fun to listen to. We could always take all the blankets off the bed to make forts and tents. Periodically, my dad would bring home refrigator and stove boxes (I think he had dreams of UPS-ing us off.) Oatmeal boxes and string for telephones and drums. There was a period I played with paper dolls, but it was more fun to cut up the Sears catalog. I never had a Barbie (bleah) but when I was younger I had baby dolls that would wet--Betsy Wetsie, I think they were called. We'd play house together, but it seemed to always end with somebody popping off the rubber dolly head and everybody laughing immoderately at the peeing. She was just the right size to take by the heels and wap the boys with. We had a ping-pong table in the basement, but I don't much remember playing--the most vivid memory is of playing camping and setting a trash can on fire underneath that table. oops! Lesseee, popular "fad" stuff that was ok, but short lived: Sea Monkeys (they dried up) Ant Farm (they got loose) Magic rocks (got scummy) Silly putty (stuck to the rug) Candyland, Cootie, Potato Head (lost parts)Tinker Toys (busted easy) Matchbox cars (dad stepped on and swore) Ah, good times.
• Path: is a Hoppity Horse like a Wonder Horse?(riding horse on springs in a frame) Of course we had a Wonder Horse--I went through two sets of heavy springs. Too bad the parents never hooked me up to generate power. And we had the damn train set. Every Christmas, dad would set it up under the tree until it got to be so big he had to put it on the ping-pong table in the basement. But it was DAD's toy, and we knew it.
• GramMa, I'm so looking forward to my second childhood after that. My all-time favorite toy was the Meccanno set. All metal parts with real brass nuts and bolts and little spanners to put it all together, none of that plastic stuff. And a little steam engine that could be used to set your Meccanno creations in motion. Skateboards in our day were were roller-skate wheels nailed to the underside of an old chunk of wood. Harrumph.and we had to walk 5 miles to school and back, uphill both ways. Near our house was a footpath on a fairly steep slope. It emerged from the trees on one side of the road then continued on the other side. When it snowed, we would build a snow ramp at the bottom where the path met the road then hurtle down as fast as possible on our toboggan to see how far across the road we could fly. Nobody was ever killed but we did startle a few drivers.
• BlueHorse: the Hoppity Horse came after the ones with springs - early '60s. It was like a great big basketball with a sort of horse's head and a handle to hold on to. They have something similar now, except it doesn't have the head. Not as neat-o, and it doesn't look as though the balance is the same. If I could find an adult-sized Hoppity Horse, I'd be hopping off to down town. The Wonder Horse always put kids to sleep, in my experience. After a few minutes of rocking, you'd have to watch them carefully so you could catch 'em before they fell off. Of course, they weren't endurance riders. But, you didn't have a Light-Bright? Talk about parts that could get lost! But they didn't just disappear - they hid in the carpet to stab barefoot walkers, like me.