Weird Question of the Day
What was your favoritist Christmas toy from when you were a kid?
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I remember one day just before Christmas (or maybe it was my birthday, which is only a few days from Christmas) my father brought me down to JC Penny’s at the nearby strip mall because my mother was sending him down there to pick up a catalog order (this was in the days before UPS and all that). I figured it was something totally lame and boring, but I got to get out of the house, so I went along without protest.
When we got to the pickup counter, the woman behind the desk took the claim slip and went to the back to get the delivery. When she returned, she handed the box over the counter: it was the Star Wars snow-speeder from The Empire Strikes Back, and it was for me.
that Nerf Vulcan I got last year comes in handy still….but if you’re talking about from my earlier days, easy; Nintendo Entertainment System. Everything in the world became more awesome after that Christmas.
I mostly remember the Star Wars speeder bike and the large metal Voltron kit. METAL!
I got the Micronauts Battlecruiser and wore that thing out. That and one of the weird Micronauts city-base things kept me going for ages. And I still remember it, which says something.
I got a robot that walked when you put the “key” in his head — it then looked like an antenna. While he walked pictures of “the moon” flashed by on the view screen on his chest. I loved that little guy.
The best Christmas was getting the Barbie motor home, Malibu Barbie and the Fonzie doll.
Fonzie had his hands in the thumbs up Ahhhhh pose. He and Barbie had so many adventures together in that motor home.
Hmm. I was a freak for TMNT stuff. When I was a kid though, we were poor as shit. Really don’t have any amazing memories on xmas morning. Oh, and then there was Nintendo, that was a start of something entirely different.
Probably the NES that my two sisters and I all chipped in to buy ourselves for Christmas. I also bought myself a copy of Excitebike
Unfortunately the girls bought Tetris so we had to play that for a while before I got to play Excitebike.
NES for me too, got Zelda and Baseball. What a great morning!
It was always LEGO’s, TMNT toys, or GI Joes for me. I’ve still got quite the collection for my kids someday, stored in my parent’s attic. Ahhh the memories…
I still get a small LEGO set from my mom every Christmas. The little individual ones… and I still build them right away haha
Jeremy, that Voltron was the Godaikin release of Golion: I had it too, but my favorite was Gardian: I can’t find a decent vid of Gardian to show. Imagine an eighteen inch tall robot that had two smaller robots that could nest inside of it, each with rocket punches, missiles, swords and shields.
My favorite toy though is the one that got away, I should have asked for this. In the 1980s a lot of retailers imported Japanese Diecast toys: it’s how J got his voltron, and how I saw this at Toy’s R us and regretted not asking for it:
A large-scale replica of Scott Bernard and his Robotech Cyclone, fully articulated and transformable. Sigh.
My Pet Monster.
Anything out of Lego…
What Skro said. Christmas went downhill very fast the year I realized I was not getting any more legos.
Hmmm…
The present that I remember the most was a Baby Brite (little sister of Rainbow Brite) doll.
A couple of weeks earlier, my church was putting on a kid’s Christmas musical. It took place in a toy shop and featured toys that came to life to teach the shop owner the true meaning of Christmas. All of us kids got to be the toys, and most of us got to pick what kind of toy we wanted to be. I insisted that I HAD to be Baby Brite, despite my parent’s warnings that the costuming for that wasn’t very practical.
Lo and behold, the night of the play the director produced a spot-on, PERFECT Baby Brite costume, complete with hot pink satin bloomers, poofy neon sleeves, a pink yarn wig, and a pink star drawn on my cheek. So not only did I get the doll, I got to actually BE the doll, which was huge at that age.
Sometimes I wish that I had a video of that old play… I’m sure we were a hilarious montage of crazy 80′s toys.
These five chinese knock-off toys that were of transforming animal robots.
Twas most awesome.
Two words………. Millenium Falcon!
As a young boy, I was an emotional mess. My parents had recently divorced and I was a severe introvert with few friends. Despite the broken status, it was still a very loving, caring family environment. Part of that was my father taking me out of school early once a week to speak with a children’s counselor. As part of this ritual, we would stop off at a Pizza Hut where I would order a personal pan pizza with pepperoni (every time) and then afterwards my dad and I would pump quarters into the Super Mario Bros. arcade game near the doors for a good long while. That ritual was probably more helpful than any counseling could have been to my troubled youthful self.
Shortly after this counseling period ended (and the trips to Pizza Hut) Christmas rolled around. As a pastor and single father of three children, spare money was not something my dad was familiar with. My sisters and I would often dream of those big-ticket presents but knew better than to ask for what we couldn’t have. We got the $10 toys, not the $100 Lego castles and Barbie dream houses.
But come Christmas morning, we found my dad was knealing in front of the TV, hooking up controllers to a Nintendo. It was a present for the entire family, of course; no big item like that could be for just one of us. He hadn’t bought any extra games with it or anything. Just what was packaged with it. Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros.
I got the feeling that he had bought it for him and I. It was a connection we had recently shared and I remember thinking how amazing it was that he had brought the game into the house where we could play it without time contraints or the need to pump quarters into it. And he made it clear that he wanted to play too. Whether it is true or not, I still feel my first gaming console was bought because my father saw the need to connect with his son and foster a common interest. Even if it isn’t true, that was the result.
Later Christmasses brought more games, like Zelda and Tetris and my sisters and I would hold Tetris Tournaments together for years. My youngest sister still holds our family record, a fact that I probably remember better than her.