Legos. I used to build Lego spaceships and drop them on the ground. The fewer pieces fell off, the better I was doing.

I also liked those little pink musclemen, or whatever they were. Mostly because there were a million varieties of them and you could make little villages in your dresser.

Evil Knievel action figure!

Legos and Lincoln Logs.

Huh. I just made the connection to my fascination with building homes in The Sims.

legos. my brother and i used to build these giant lego blocks (one each). then we'd smash them into each other. the person whose block was still intact at the end was the winner.

and it was a grand shame if there were no pieces left over at the end to build a finger guard...

i loved my stuffed toys too. me and my brother loved playing with ours (my sister less so, strangely). we'd build little toy towns with tables and boxes and stuff.

Oh, yeah, Lincoln Logs. I liked those two, although they produced lodgings that were too large for most of my toys to live in.

According to my baby book, my favorite toy was a "large plastic fork." What I did with said contraption, I do not recall.

Matchbox cars when I was very little. I had dozens of them, plus playsets and the garage with the battery-operated elevator.

Later it was dolls...er, ahem, action figures like GI Joe and all of those Mego figures (Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, etc.) which are now SOOOO collectible.

Are books toys? I really enjoyed both the reading kinds and those enrichment workbooks. Yeah, I was a big giant dork from way back.

hrrmmm come to think of it, I was kind of doofusy because I really liked paper dolls as well.

If I had to chose one toy, it would have to be Lego. For obvious reasons.

I think my favorite thing to do with Lego of all was making aerial tramways out of carefully tied off pairs of monofilament fishing line and using minifig wheel pieces with the rubber tires peeled off. These wheel pieces become the aerial tram line carriages, which you attach to whatever model you've built. Try it, it works.

Though, in retrospect I have no idea why we didn't simply use a single monofilament line and a pair of inline hooks or something, rather than painstakingly configuring pairs of lines. Getting both of the lines to the right tension, angles and distance apart over any distance over a few feet was a huge pain in the ass, and we used to string them up all over the back yard. A classic case of over-engineering, perhaps. Though the tire-less wheel pieces were probably a lot faster and more stable then a single inline setup.

Later we evolved to simple robotics and mechanical toys (Long before lego mindstorms), and even later in early high school some friends and I used to make lego rocket cars powered by Estes model rocket engines. Yeah, that doesn't work out too well, functionally, but it's fun to watch. But probably just about the worst things you can do to your Lego pieces - fire and extreme amounts of kinetic energy, oh boy.

More:

Any decent RC car, but in particular my aluminum body pan RC-10. I saved up and worked my ass off for that thing for god knows how long, and spent who knows how much keeping it running and fine tuning it. Lots of fun, though.

Cheaper and more simple: Those awesome water and air rockets you could get for a few bucks. It was always fun trying to figure out the right mixture of water and air pressure for maximum height.

More dangerous: Estes rockets in general. Not only were the rockets dangerous, but attempting to recover them from downrange could be dangerous, depending on which neighbor's house they landed in. I always found it odd that we couldn't go buy cheap bottle rockets or firecrackers in my state, but under the guise of science we could build genuine missles powered by decidedly larger pyrotechnic devices. More often then not we were building and launching them without supervision. One favored rocket experience: Stringing up fishing line about 200 meters long between two trees with a plastic SR-71 drone model hung off it on a launch-guide-tube (Read: fancy piece of plastic straw) with an rocket motor stuffed in it. The fishing line guide worked fine. But the plastic model embedded the front half of itself about half a foot into the tree it was aimed at, and the rest of it simply vaporized.

More serene: Whitewings or other free-flight model aircraft, like solid wood balsa gliders. There's nothing quite like hand-shaping your own airfoils out of light balsa slabs, setting the dihedrals, gluing it together, balancing it and then flying it. Outside of crashes, getting them run over by cars and whatnot, my brother, my dad and I have lost multiple planes of both the Whitewings paper variety and the solid balsa variety to thermals off of grass fields and blacktops. It just means you built the plane right, since it rode the thermal in a lazy spiral to the top and just vanished into the sky.

Much cheaper: Paper airplanes with copier paper, tape, scissors, and paperclips or staples as balancing weights. We used to do indoor flying contests in my Dad's warehouse as kids, trying out all kinds of weird designs, airfoils and configurations. Longest hangtime wins, and indoor in mostly still air you can do some pretty amazing things with plain paper. We had multi-minute indoor flights on occasion.

Additional toys: Bike, skateboard, skimboard and/or bodyboard. Microscope. Tools. Art supplies. Electronics kits. Things to catch bugs with. (Do bugs count as toys?) Wristrocket.

I had a few Robotech, Transformers and GI Joe toys, but in retrospect it just seems like those were more about being imaginative social play enablers than anything. IE, you had to have them to fit in and roleplay with other kids. But we might as well have been playing and pretending with bricks. I can't imagine a cartoon about bricks selling very many toys, though.

I'm not going to count books as toys, even though I certainly love/loved them, even though I've been an avid reader pretty much as long as I've been alive. They're media, and don't really fit in the toy catagory to me. It's more of a pre-scripted activity. IE, video games are toys, movies are media.

I too loved Lego, but the toy that jumped to mind when I read the first couple of posts was something that I think came from fisher price. It was a guy and a parachute, but not quite those tiny ones with string and plastic. These ones were maybe 4-5' tall, with rubber-sh strings to a more formidable plastic/rubbery chute. You would kind wrap it all up and chuck it in the air, whereupon it would unfold, etc. Man I loved those things.

Lego was great (a 3'x2'x2' box) full of the blocky stuff, not the custom pieces from kits. And I did love the Fisher Price castle as a little kid. And the garage.

But my absolute faves were the girder and panel building set, and a set of brown-red bricks that I had with two sets of army men (that probably didn't belong together). Alas, I cannot identify the bricks. My brother's race car set was cool, too -- one from the 60's that I haven't seen in a long time. Do kids have those anymore?

Going through some old boxes in my parents' house, I also found an old wired plastic walking robot that made me cry to see again. I'd forgotten all about it, and it's astonishing how much emotion it provoked. I felt like some Freudian cliché.

m not going to count books as toys, even though I certainly love/loved them, even though I've been an avid reader pretty much as long as I've been alive. They're media, and don't really fit in the toy catagory to me. It's more of a pre-scripted activity. IE, video games are toys, movies are media.

I don't know that that's quite a fair representation, loq. Video games are scripted like a Choose Your Own Adventure. There are options, but they are still limited. And with books, it wasn't just what was in them. They required imagination to really live--more imagination than a video game--and that investment of imagination kept the books alive past their endings. I mean, about a third of the time spent "reading" for me was also spent imagining things beyond the scope of the book's plot (okay, often me coming in later and being totally awesome friends with everyone and us embarking on adventures and whatnot, but other stuff, too).

The more I think about this question, the more I realize I wasn't a toy kid. If I wasn't reading, I was playing with friends, which entailed either me making up stories and situations for us to act out or playing outdoor games: red rover, hide & seek, all varieties of tag and ball games, and jump rope. So I suppose my favorite toys outside of books were balls (esp. the foursquare/kickball ones) and jump ropes. That was mostly when I was at daycare, though, because where else do you have twenty kids to organize into awesome games? (This is one reason why I think being in daycare was awesome, though some people equate it with child abuse.)

Going through some old boxes in my parents' house, I also found an old wired plastic walking robot that made me cry to see again.

I was in the mall a number of years ago and saw a kiosk selling the following baby toy: it's a plastic geometrical solid, I forget how many faces, probably no more than 8, one half blue, one half red, the whole thing about the size of a volleyball. Each face has a unique cut-out shape in it (star, square, etc.) and the thing comes with bright yellow plastic shapes that fit through these outlines. You push the correct piece through the outline and it goes into the interior of the shape, which is fitted with handles at either end that let you pull it open and get out the shapes. Boring, trivial, basic shape recognition toy for the very young, right? Seeing it caused a huge welling of emotion in me, to the point where I teared up a bit. But I've never been able to connect a strong memory to my own copy of the toy (I know we had one, but that's it). No idea why my reaction was so strong.

Tinker Toys, magnets and Lincoln Logs.

The Sunshine Family. They were a multi-generational family of hippies who drove around in a van and owned a craft shop.

PinkStainlessTail--That's a Shape Sorter and I'm pretty sure the one you're describing is from Tupperware.

Also, The Honey Hill Bunch. They were a multi-cultural group of kids who rode a St. Bernard and owned a treehouse.

Interestingly enough, I don't see any dolls here. I hated dolls, and tried to flush the first one that my mother gave me down the toilet.

(action figures don't count as dolls)

I had inaction figures. They just sat around on the couches in my sisters dollhouse watching the tiny TV and dinking miniature beers.

That's a Shape Sorter and I'm pretty sure the one you're describing is from Tupperware.

Yes! Specifically, a shape-o.

Wait, how are action figures not dolls?

Well, when I say dolls I mean more the girly versions that you pretend are your baby or whatever. Ick.

Yeah, I still don't see the difference between a girl pretending it's her baby and a boy using it to pretend he's a soldier. Lame gender roles all round, no?

Me. I had a Busy Bee.

Toy I spent the most time with: Tinkertoys. Sadly, Legos didn't hit big until I was too old to play with toys.

nah dame, I wasn't trying to make a global gender comment. I just wasn't expressing myself very well. For me, when I was a kid, dolls were gross. And for me, when someone tried to tell me that I had dolls, because I had C3PO and R2D2, I freaked out.

I should have written "action figures didn't count as dolls" because I was trying to convey how my 6 year old mind worked.

Yeah, I still don't see the difference between a girl pretending it's her baby and a boy using it to pretend he's a soldier. Lame gender roles all round, no?

Sure, but the boy playing with the soldier doll is more analogous to a girl playing with a Barbie or other "fashion" doll, because in both instances the play is about being in the role represented by the doll. I'm not sure what the boy's equivalent of playing mother to a baby doll is, where the child is taking a role in relation to the toy. Carrying a toy gun maybe?

gaspode: I understand now.
PST: You are correct.

Dolls and a teaset.

I consider books toys as well, and I used them much the same way dame did, inserting myself into the story. My mom being a schoolteacher, we always had old storybooks from school around the house, 70's urban-oriented ethnically diverse ones. I'm sure that had an impact on my outlook as an adult. I got a subscription to National Geographic World for christmas when I was 6, and I devoured the "Kids Did It!" section about kids who did neat stuff. I also subscribed to Discover magazine in 6th grade, which cemented my rep as a weirdo. 6th through 8th grade was my awkward years where I got teased an bullied alot. By high school I had found my place a little better. Earlier than that I was a spazzy kid (this old blog entry of mine gives more detail), but still popular, since all young boys are spazzy. have you ever met a suave 8 year old? Would you trust one if you did?

I also loved ball games and outdoor stuff like tag and hide & seek, and my second grade kickball team was the best (I kicked cleanup!). I wasn't the most co-ordinated kid in the universe but I made it up in enthusiasm.

Video games are scripted like a Choose Your Own Adventure. There are options, but they are still limited. And with books, it wasn't just what was in them. They required imagination to really live--more imagination than a video game--and that investment of imagination kept the books alive past their endings.

You're welcome to call them or count them as toys. I was merely indicating for the purposes of my response that I wouldn't be doing so, and that even as a child I wouldn't have classified them as toys.

Trust me, I'm down with books - and agree with everything you say about them. But they aren't toys to me, they're practically a religion. Then and now I'm one of the most imaginative fuckers you'll ever meet, online or off. Sometimes I read an entire novel in a matter of a couple of hours. Sometimes it'll take me weeks because I'll get lost in a catatonic fugue of spiraling, bifurcating threads of imagination triggered by every other page - eyes glazing over, external focus hopelessly lost, inwardly focused into nether worlds without physical parallel nor representation - not even in books.

Even as an adult my life is incomplete without the wonderful escape of imagination.

Personally, it's nigh impossible for me to fall asleep without a good book. I don't travel without at least one well chosen book, even if I've literally read it a hundred times. I read and read until my brain quiets down. Eventually as I begin to drowse something will trigger this imaginative fugue - and then moments later it's off to dreamland. And without that delicate slipping-free-of-gravity moment I'm hopelessly fidgity and sleepless. Often I'll even attempt to choose or plan which specific phrase or paragraph triggers the amorphous slip beneath the ripples of consciousness, providing a seed to build into dreams.

Likewise, I don't know if your representation of video games is quite fair. Not all video games are simply scripted decision trees, or choose your own adventures, with decided outcomes. I would argue that historically most of them actually aren't, though these sorts of games are certainly much more common in recent times.

Take Tetris for example. For the life of me I can't figure out how we could make a playable, physical model of Tetris. It is at once a spatial puzzle and a sort of time and context sensitive action game.

Sure, we could model Tetris on paper or with special blocks that one would pre-assemble into tetraminos, dissembling aggregates of them line by line from the bottom of a physical tetris "well", but would it have play value?

The video games I would consider as toys are generally Tetris-like, or ones with consistently variable outcomes, or ones that are games of skill and coordination.

And what of games like Zork? Sure, it's text. Sure, there's a decision tree. But there's logic puzzles to be solved, and things to think about, and then there's real literary fiction that requires an imaginative interpretation. How many geeks and nerds startled in sheer terror at the mere words "It's dark. Suddenly you feel as though you will be eaten by a Grue"?

Good toys aren't only about what you could imagine for yourself, they're also about the unimaginable. What is it that makes a superball so inherently delightful and playful? It's not that you know whether or not it's going to bounce - for surely it will bounce - but where will it bounce, and how? Yamazaki held the red sphere before the old man's eyes. "Look, Skinner. See what it became?" "Superball," Skinner said. "Skinner-san?" "You go and fucking bounce it, Scooter." He closed his eyes. "Bounce it high..." -Virtual Light

Good video games are like that. Complex models, either of real-world physics or entirely imagined rules of physics, with decidedly undecideable outcomes. "What happens if I do this? What comes next? How can we push the boundaries of this system? What's a rare event?"

To me toys - good toys, at least - fall into a specific set of qualities and functions. Toys are in a very real sense tools. They can be tools for triggering imagination, or they can be tools that model and represent the world around us. They can be tools that help reveal the physical world around us, or they can be tools to reveal imagined worlds yet to be. They can reveal and realise roles and functions, they can map society, they can map conflict or harmony.

And though literature (and other scripted imagination-streams) can fulfill many of these qualities, to me books fall into a different category, and the differences (to me) between books and toys are quite definite, if subtle and nuanced.

Books are most often solitary and internalized. Toys are physical, social, and externalized. Toys are activities and physical manifestations and manipulations of ones external environment. Books are manipulations of ones internal environment.

And on an my imagined scale or hierarchy of personal enjoyment, books are much farther up the ladder in terms of enduring enjoyment and influence. So, I'm not dismissing books at all, but they just don't fit into my definition of "toy".

In the same sense, I don't consider my own imagination to be a toy, even as vastly entertaining as it may be. It would make as much sense to me as calling breathing a toy, for imagination is as just essential to me.

While toys are nice, they aren't absolutely essential to imagination. They're just tools to get help get me there.

Mattel Thingmaker. With Spirograph a close second.

These wooden blocks that i still have.

Lego here too. And sticks. I remember doing a lot of building huts/whittling/fighting etc with sticks. Those things are so versatile!

Oh yeah and no buzzy bee. I did have a Big Ted and a Little Ted though...

Me too, nomis! Yay!

Here is a house ... here is a door ... windows 1, 2, 3, 4...

:)

I had a buzzy bee, in Canada. And now my daughter has a buzzy bee, and so does my neice. And they are the favorite toy of all of us.

Building blocks of the plain wooden kind. Lego. Hotwheels. Frisbees. Walkie talkies. Etch-A-Sketch. The Invisible Man. Pick nose and eat it. Hope mom's not watching. poot.

I cherished my pocketknife.

We played active games, or word games. Not many toys.

I played with Dawn dolls and with troll dolls and with Barbies. I had three Barbies: a hideously deformed malibu Barbie who had her feet chewed off by the dog and her face melted off by nail polish remover (nail polish remover on a barbie face is quite the amazing science experiment) and her hair cut off by moi, the stylist, and two Skippers, one with long hair, one with chopped off hair. I made up endless lengthy stories involving the two brave Skippers (whose names were Monika and Jill, btw) and the token adult, who was either their hideously deformed but kind aunt or an evil monstrous sorceress. I made my own bizarre Barbie clothes by cutting arm holes in bits of cloth and I built houses for them out of hardcover books (you stand the books up with a front or back cover open, if you're lucky there is an illustration there which gives the room a mural) and sometimes I built them castles outside, although usually I used my troll dolls for outside, and more involved lengthy multi-plotted stories in the stumps of trees. I was a weird kid.

Three bears- one vinyl, two handmade teddies, a 'golly' that is bright red, a knitted horse (called 'Horse'), a knitted rabbit (called, er, 'Rabbit'), A handmade clown ('Clown'), A big Turtle (uh-huh, 'Turtle'). Then Meccano, 'kid's version' and then the real one (they all work together BTW, Space Lego, Star Wars figures ( I froze Boba Fett in a jar of Ribena in the freezer, take THAT bounty hunter!), my big Tonka 18-wheeler (you could ride it, it was cool), my sister's Barbies. No shit, I really got into them. I mean, I had a van for Evel Kneivel but she had a whole house man. I got right into making furniture for the house, basically stuff that I wanted, a nice stereo (with little records n'all) comfy chairs. I'm still the same, furnishing my house with rectangular record players and records.

I still have most of my toys and books.

This is a good thread, thanks.

/therapy

I loved my Barbies. But mom wouldn't let me have a Ken. She thought I'd do "inappropriate" things with them. Sans Ken, Barbie had to get it on with whatever stuffed animal was available. Way to encourage bestiality,mom (or at the very least, furryism).

To further this, my first 'toy' was a bracelet that my mum made out of string and old buttons and I used to chew it. I can still remember doing this. I gave this to a friend's baby girl the other day and she was as fascinated as I was with it. I also had this thing that used to roll around and make noise, when my sister was born I refused to part with it and she got her own one with a giraffe on the top. It was smaller, mine was better. I always liked this little dude but my favourite to this day is Rabbit, who was a superhero and all sorts of other cool stuff.

Also selfnoise, I had heaps of the little pink musclemen as well. I actually got one the other day in some fast food promotion. Flashback.

For the life of me I can't figure out how we could make a playable, physical model of Tetris.

Did anyone else play "video" style games on paper? Draw spaceships and asteroids and whatnot, and you could "move" or "shoot" by flicking the pencil forward with your finger on the tip of the eraser, pressing down? A fun, very odd past time. I guess it was a low-tech Gameboy. (I'll confess to never understanding the attraction to those things, however)

Good video games are like that. Complex models, either of real-world physics or entirely imagined rules of physics, with decidedly undecideable outcomes. "What happens if I do this? What comes next? How can we push the boundaries of this system? What's a rare event?"

Maybe just my bias, but I think this is what made old video games so special. They're like throwing a stick in the pond instead of a full-on moulded battleship replica. There's far more to be done with your imagination, and warping uses for it is half the fun. There was a whole subculture (very "sub") attached to getting your Atari 2600 games to run with the cartridge half-in. Freaky, not-quite-right new worlds to explore.

And for those of you who might appreciate this particular toy... (there are several online, but I really like this one)

two words: HOT WHEELS

also, I had a buzzy bee.

Way to encourage bestiality,mom

Scooter? That you?

I had a few dolls but they weren't favourites. One was a kinda rag doll that my mum made for me. It had an awake face and an asleep face and a kick-ass wardrobe. The dog got hold of it and it was toast. I also had a Barbie or two; Mum wouldn't buy them, but other family members did. I also did the beastiality thing with them (had tons of stuffed animals). Barbie's tastes were, shall we say, eclectic.

Moo?

Actually, do panda bears make a sound?

My mom wouldn't allow Ken in the house either - she said he was too tacky. Barbie was tacky, but Ken was TTFW (too tacky for words) and absolutely not permitted. Barbie liked GI Joe better anyway, back in the day when GI Joe was the same size as her.