December 25, 2004

The 100 top toys
posted by dng 20 years ago
  • )))!!!
  • I recognize the Rubik cube and the Mastermind and Connect-4 games. Everything else was before my time. *feels ridiculously young*
  • Aaah! I saw the site a few days a go and was engulfed in a sense of nostalgia.. the starbird.. I had one.. I was actually pretty spoiled I realise now..
  • ) Very good link. At first I was thinking "aw, damn, another one of those stupid lists with overpriced gold-plated cellphones and Aido dogs" then saw it was a info-packed retro trip.
  • it was a info-packed retro trip Not only that, but with a British flavour. Groovy stuff.
  • My god, this is great. I'm like the perfect age for this - most of these toys are from my EARLY childhood and I had completely forgotten about them until today. Thank you submitter! It's a rememberance of Christmases long past.
  • Very, very cool -- lived in England from '76-'79, aged 9-12, so I distinctly recall some of the Brit-only toys. But I think Rubik's cube should have been ranked much higher.
  • I had a starbird too. And the black enemy ship that was exactly the same sans fuselage. They were pretty good. I always lusted after a Big Trak tho' never got one. Glad to find out they weren't that good anyway. A couple of these other things I remember. God, I'm sooo ooooold.
  • Had me a Big Trak. That thing rocked. For about 3 days...then we were off again on our Big Wheels.
  • I have #20, Escape From Colditz -- awesome game.
  • I have #20, Escape From Colditz -- awesome game.
  • That was fantastic. It was like reading my grade school yearbook.
  • Lumping Stop Thief in with that other unknown (to me) was a travesty. Stop Thief was a great game, unlike anything else before or since, and managed to entertain both children and adults in our family with equal glee. I have no idea what the author is talking about with the "too realistic" bit. I too had a Big Trak, and even the Transporter. I dropped it two days after Christmas and it never functioned again. Thus explaining why my life is such a wreck now, having never recovered from this.
  • I had a shocking number of these -- the America-side ones, anyway. If I didn't have them, my quite well-to-do best friend Cory a few blocks away had them. Every Christmas, I'd unwrap my toys, gloat briefly, then head over to Cory's house to play with his inevitably superior loot. I didn't realize at the time just how well off Cory's folks were.... The writeup for #54, "Mouse Trap," misses the Rube Goldberg connection. I'm going to write Cory today. Thanks for the flashback, dng.
  • Yes, this is a very pommy-centric site. As I spent most of the latter half of my childhood in the UK, I got exposure to most of this via tv adverts, friends (I rember playing the electronic detective & being very impressed with it at a friends house), & village fete jumble sales where you could usually pick up one of those milton bradley board games missing half their pieces. Rubik's Cube came out faily late in this pantheon, I always hated it. Having no patience at all I simply disassembled it and reassembled it in the right order. The 'tonytronic' 3-d game was actually a bit tron-like, and rather a good game that got a lot of use. I still have another early electronic game that isn't listed here, the Battlestar Galactica handheld game, which was, by current standards, prehistoric in simplicity; yet it still gives me a buzz to hear the sound effects. I turn it on every now & again, I wonder how many games made today will function perfectly in 25 years? The Fucking Stylophone. Jesus, Rolf Harris, you ass. Slime was a classic, I loved that stuff. After a while it crystalised. There was a phase at my high school where everyone had to go & get one of those lcd game/clocks, there was this sort of 1-upmanship over who had the best one, god knows what criteria we used to judge, they were all the same. Ah, I forgot I also had a tasco telescope! It was virtually fucking useless. I had binoculars that were better. Christ what a load of old crap. I think the things I got most use out of were legos. I used to build enormously complex space stations which could be opened to reveal decks and the little men at consoles. It all went downhill for lego when they started releasing all the special packs like knights & etc, as far as I was concerned. A couple of years later I discovered girls then it was all over. Wank wank wank.
  • Quicksilver Maze eh?
  • Where's the Slinky!? Did I miss it? Or Lite Brite?
  • Smoking monkey. Yass, yass.
  • No Slinky, no Lite Brite, nothing Nerf, no Legos whatsoever! Oh they will pay.
  • Where is Dark Tower? We had the Starbird, Big Trak w/ trailer. Most of the other cool ones too. Damn we were spoiled.
  • wot no Lego?????? (or did I miss it?) They were absolutely right about bike being no 1 though ...
  • Between me and my brothers and my sister we had: Fuzzy Felt, Weebles, Rubik's Cube, Zoids, Transformers, Mastermind, Guess Who?, Buckaroo!, Viewmaster, Connect 4, Tonka truck, Twister, Perfection, Downfall, Kerplunk, Mousetrap, A radio controlled car, Operation, Haunted House, Etchasketch, Cluedo, Spirograph, Tiny Tears, Screwball Scramble, Computer Battleship, My Little Pony, Subbuteo, Top Trumps, Action Man, A computer (a Dragon 32, to be precise), and a bike. Man, we were spoilt kids...
  • loved this post, dng... the sibs and i had no less than twelve of these toys, and managed to spend quality time with at least five more through the neighborhood. we need to complile a fully American (US) version, though, to validate the Lite-Brite protest above... and Hungry Hungry Hippos... Ants in the Pants (featuring the plastic yellow pants with suspenders)...
  • ah, the original pants were apparently blue! http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5903792019&category=30