Treasure Chest of Toys
Are you familiar with the smell of cedar? What does it make you think of? Sweaters from a closet? Cigars? The hold of a ship? King Solomon’s temple? My yard? It makes me think of toys.
Growing up, we had an old cedar chest that served as our toy box. This poor thing got beat up as we hastily threw our toys back in, so eventually it wasn’t much to look at, but it always had a bit of that cedar smell, which clung to our toys slightly. Plus all we had were the old fashioned wooden toys, so there was a lot of that smell anyway. But I wish I still had my chest full of toys.
So I guess I was just lamenting over the toys I don’t have anymore, and wondered what toys you all had in your cedar chests growing up, which ones you still have, and also what you have to say about the toys that are out there today. Some of you have kids so you get to play with toys all the time. The rest of us have to draw the blinds and lock the door before we’re allowed to set up our command base and launch attacks against the forces of evil from Couch-Cushion Castle.
My best toy was probably my Legos. And we didn’t have those sets where you just put it together to look like the picture on the box. I had the basic sets and nothing but my imagination and a structural engineering degree.
Other toys that got a lot of play:
G.I. Joes
My metal Voltron (I bought another one on eBay a handful of years ago)
Matchbox cars
Transformers and their cheaper counterpart, Gobots
Stompers
Barbie’s – of course
Strawberry Shortcake
Raindbow Bright
My Little pony
Not sure if anyone remembers but they were called Golden girls…they were like half the size of barbies…not the old ladies on that tv show :-)
I’ll preface this by saying that I have an older brother and always did everything I could to play with him.. so a lot of my toys were kind of boy-ish… Amy lived right down the street though, so I did get a dose of girliness…
I had a Strawberry Shortcake toybox that had two chalkboard sliding doors/lids to it. It ruled:
GI Joes (Scarlet and Lady Jane who fought constantly over Duke’s affection)
Thundercats Cave
She-ra and her castle and horse
Voltron lions (the girl ones)
Star Trek figures (My brother used to make these sweet replications of The Bridge and we did the sound effects.. it was a pretty big production)
Shrinki-Dinks (remember those? you paint them and then hey shrink in the oven)
Smurf Color Forms
Bald Baby (the non-gendered plastic headed baby-doll with the cloth body.. still in my closet)
Barbies (but Amy had all the cool ones)
and my little casio keyboard complete with demo and bosa nova track
We had a jillion stuffed animals too- my brother and I used to put on Stuffed Animal Olympics in the family room on Saturdays.. I had such a fun childhood.. sigh….
My Little Ponies
Barbie
Strawberry Shortcake– I had the best doll that blew strawberry kisses when you squeezed her middle. Loved her. And she still smells like stawberries when you squeeze her– that was some kind of far-out 70’s chemical compound they put in there.
Big Mouth Singers– I found my old one awhile ago and it was in rough shape so I threw it out. Later I found one on ebay that sold for $102. Good work.
Shrinky-Dinks
Cabbage Patch Dolls
Anything with Smurfs
Star Wars figurines and space ships
A two foot tall plastic Godzilla. I think he’s still in there….missing a tail and one hand.
A plastic great white shark.
The Incredible Hulk
Matchbox cars with several feet of the orange track that was sometimes used as disciplinary weapons when we gave mom “static”.
All of the above received lots of playtime until we discovered the woodburner set and burned holes in all of our toys.
Ah, good call Darren. All our toys had holes in them b/c of that woodburner set. Between that, the chemistry set, pellet guns, lawn darts… and fire… it’s a wonder we made it out of childhood alive.
OH Jules!!! Star Stage!!!! You can’t forget Star Stage….we were so going to be rock stars. I guess when I accidentally died my hair hot pink that one time I was well on my way.
Younger brothers used to make great toys too. But I guess that’s not exactly what you are looking for here
Just drove home from Grandma and Grandpa’s house in good ol’ Syracuse, NY. Made me think of when we were kids, my grandma had a tub of figurines to play with, including star wars figures, He-Man (I recognize everysingle figure in the first two pages), Little People, Lincoln Logs, and Lego’s.
My dad got so mad at my brothers and I because it didn’t take long for us to realize that the small lincoln logs and lego’s were fun to throw at each other. So, to spare us from tears and boredom, my dad invented a game involving 2 of the Little People Towns folded open. we’d split in to teams of two each having our own town (and sometimes an Ewok village) and strategically set up a large number of figurines from the tub hiding them in the buildings and so forth. Each team had a handful of lincoln logs and lego’s. pretty much the point of the game was to chuck the logs and legos at the other team’s figures and whoever had the most still standing at the end won.
This was usually done in Grandma’s basement just after we took her old sofa cushions and used them to slide down the plastic covered stairs.
We had a town like that until we burned it with the woodburner set.
We had all that Little People stuff. That particular town shown above definitely had woodburner holes in it… The barn too.
All the Fisher Price stuff was great. The View-Master Viewer, the record player w/ the plastic records, that old medical kit (which failed me, tragically, on the day of little Jimmy Simmons’ fatal accident — God rest his fictional soul)…
I brought this up at lunch today and we came up with some more
My Child
Garbage Pail Kids
Wrinkles
Popples (which by the way make great dog toys) :-)
Skip It
Pound Puppies
Baby alive
Lite Brite
Easy bake oven – I had one of these and burnt food even as a child..shoulda known I would never learn to cook :-)
allright
1) star wars figurines/ g.i. joes / superhero figurines / any other similar figurine
we didn;t play war with them we played football baseball and basketball. i even remember writing numbers on them with tape and making a dice game with them as well.
2) Wrestling figurines we had a bunch of them and we had the ring and one of my favorite things was making a tournament and playing with them by bouncing them off the top ropes and whoever landed on top won. Also if there were more than one player we would have a draft and then each of us drops our own wrestler whoever lost had to use a new wrestler and the wrestler who lost was out. the winner stayed until defeat. If anyone is interested, talking about this makes me want to have a all day wrestling figurine cage match somewhere. I’ll dig the toys up out of the attic, we can have a draft it’ll be loads of fun.
3) basketballs, i probably wore out about 50 of them
Yeah, forgot about star wars…
Okay, who says figurine? Am I the only one who calls them figures??
Guys — figurine is one step away from doll.
Yeah, the best toys were the superhero/G.I. Joe/Star Wars “figurines”. We had our teams made for football and basketball. Robin and Stormtrooper were my quarterbacks. Also collected baseball cards.
We had a whole playroom filled with great toys and a room in the basement called Barbieville…
Here were some of my favorites:
Sylvanian Families
My little ponies
Little Tyke Kitchen (with food)
Pig Pong
Popples
Barbies (Especially the Heart family)
Cabbage Patch Kids (loved the burping one and the board game)
Herself the Elf books
Hugga Bunch Doll – I had Precious Hugs
Teddy Ruxpin
Smurf Tea Set
Care Bears
Flower Making Basket (grrr…I can’t find a picture but it came in this white plastic basket)
Play -Doh barber shop & Play-doh care bear set (can’t find pics for either)
Fisher Price Record Player (and all the books with records)
Little People (Loved the airport)
Lite Brite
Pound Puppies and Kitties
Pogo Balls
Glo Worms
Man, now I want to go through boxes and find all these toys.
Lisa’s family had the most amazing toy room ever! We didnt really start hanging out until high school, but every time I went through the toy room it was like going back in time.. they saved EVERYTHING.
Gosh, Lisa. I always wanted the flower making basket, in fact I remember the commercial said something about “a tisket a tasket a flower making basket”…
also loved the Snoopy Snow Cone Machine
And the Sylvinian families?? Wasn’t that also a cartoon? I have the Post office and probably 20 figur”ines” included. Loved playing with those.
Also G.I. Joe (The Baronness lost her hair (a.k.a.helmet) after an accident involving a firecracker and twine)
American Girl dolls and books
I wsa going through the basement last night and found my Barbie McDonald’s. I. This one is from the early 80’s. I didn’t even remember having this. Maybe I stole it from Julie. Remember this one jules?
http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-Barbie-Mcdonalds-restaurant-with-accessories_W0QQitemZ110141725811QQihZ001QQcategoryZ48917QQcmdZViewItem
Oh that was totally yours Amy.. the pang of jealousy came back as soon as I saw the picture. I think my mom got me something generic like… the beauty parlor or something. I did have the townhouse before the Great Basement Flood of the late 80s… but the McDonalds was all you.
This is a little bit tangential… but still on the topic of toys… remember when restaurants used to have super sweet toys with their kids meals (or at least available?) Taco Bell had the Sprites from Rainbow Brite… Hardee’s had Disney Babies…. some place had tiny Little Mermaid stuffed animals.. (we still put Christmas-time Sebastian on the top of the Christmas tree each year…) Happy meal toys today are LAME…. anyone else remember good ones?
We didn’t get a lot of happy meals. I do remember the advent of the Chicken MacNugget though, and as a kid, that was a great addition to the menu of forbidden fruit.
Not much help, I know…
the best happy meal toys were the “trasformer” type toys. like the french fries that had arms
and i also like the little cars, where you would pull the cars back then they would race. the hamburglar had the fastest car.
before the Great Basement Flood of the late 80s
Ah the great flood..I do remember..you lost ALOT of good stuff then. I think that’s when that one baby you had that’s hair started peeling off. I think it was real baby..but it got REAL weird looking…we had to dress it in hooded snow suits in the summer to cover it’s fugli-ness :-)
But yeah the townhouses…I had the one that had the elevator that you pulled the string and it went up. It was awesome until our brothers realize if you pull the string REALLY hard the elevator flew out the top of the house. We had SEVERAL traumatized barbies and their babies from that one
Good call Kevin… I think I may still have the transformer fries somewhere.. I forgot about those
who didn;t have the dukes of hazzard slot car racing set????
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lLkp5gn8Yg&mode=related&search=