oh, yeah!
and my brother had a thing that you poured liquid plastic into little molds and made creepy-crawly bugs and eyeballs and other cool stuff that turned out rubbery-stretchy. i forget what it was called.
anybody remember those?

Lee

i found it!

Creepy Crawlers by Mattel:


some even glowed in the dark!!!

So here's a... SPECIAL childhood toy memory.



This is the Phantom Striker - flagship of the evil Lord Dredd from the toyline "Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future". The theme of Captain Power was that all the toys had strobing lights inside them as well as features that were activated by light sensors, i.e. battle damage. So you could have them "shoot" each other with their lights and they'd buzz or jerk or turn completely off. Some of them also came with mirrored targets that you could shoot in order to activate this light sensor feature if you didn't have any other toys (or friends) to play with.

So when I was about 9 I got the Phantom Striker and I pretended it was flying through space blasting Captain Power and all the other toys, I pretended by holding it at arms length and spinning and spinning around in a circle while constantly pulling the trigger and setting off the strobe. It strobe-blasted all of my furniture in my room and all the goodguys and all of my other toys and Darth Vader and whatever. It was just a really cool feature for a toy to have for a kid.

I did this for about, oh, two minutes. Which is a long time to be spinning around firing a strobe light.

And then I stopped hitting the strobe and looked around and I WAS COMPLETELY BLIND. For serious. My entire field of vision was covered with blue after-glow, like what you usually get in just a little spot after someone takes a flash picture. The whole world was a blue curtain and I could only faintly see blue-tinted outlines of things.

<Christmas Story> "Oh no - I'd shot my eye out!" </Christmas Story>

Naturally I was terrified, both of being blind and of the possibility that I would actually have to tell my parents that I'd gone blind in such a stupid fashion. So I shut off all my lights and lay down with my eyes closed for a few hours. When I opened them it was a bit better. By the next day I could see normally again.

It was still a cool toy.


And speaking of cool toys....

My parents semi-willingly sacrificed their living room floor so I could have this:



For y'all who pre-date the '80s, that's the G.I.Joe aircraft carrier USS Flagg and it was 7 feet long with a working megaphone. It made for a particularly happy Hanukkah


Matt

Lee,
I had a Creepy Crawlers set when I was a kid. I had great fun making toys to scare other neighborhood kids ( especially the girls) I had forgotten how much fun I had as a kid.

DavO

hehe nice

I had a firetruck which could actually spray out some water
and played a lot with Lego too!

I have a creepy crawlers in a box ready to get rid of it. Anybody want it?

Puffer

Since we're talking about melting plastic....

Can you even begin to imagine the carcinogens we inhaled as children? Not to mention it was before catalytic converters, etc. It's a wonder we're still alive!

Not only that (and I DO worry about that), but the little stove is a fire hazard

Puffer

last night i bought my younger self a gift - a toy.

i was cruising the aisles of a toy department hunting for props for a play - and got stopped by a display of little die-cast metal cars. flashback to the Matchbox and Dinky cars of my childhood. then i saw it - the familiar lines of my favorite car from the slot-car set that i posted about earlier.

this one is a 57 Corvette. i don't know what year my old one was but this looks just like it. except that one was red - my favorite color. and this one is turquoise - my other favorite color. and it is a little bigger. close enough.

i felt so excited when i got it out of the box and held it in my hand. kept looking at it and touching it the rest of the evening. it is in front of me now. i feel like i really connected something from the past with me in the present - and it feels good.

lee