No order, just what I was most excited for and buying.

The NEW 6 inch GI Joe! Only has one of the original Barbie sized Joe. So when hearing of new and smaller just as I was beginning my 1st job providing me $ to spend. I was all in for this!!!

Super Power DC figures? Yep, had to buy 'em all as fast as they came out.

Same for Marvel figures, even though they were of lesser design.

Bought both Voltron 1 and Voltron 3 large sized break into individual parts. Missed out on Shogun Warriors so THIS was my big anime fix.

McFarlane Kiss figures. Just awesome.

Special mention: tracking down used and marked down Micronauts. Star Trek Next Gen figures. Power Rangers. Those tiny pink Japanese Muscle figure packs. Battle Beast packs. Marvel Legends the original Avengers box set and New X-Men boxed set. Finding ANY Godzilla type figure!

These toys we actually had in the 60's/70's. A few of them were Dangerous by todays standards but were great. 

5.Big loo.

This toy had projectiles that you could fire and other features. It belonged to my brother. 


4. The Silver Streak
This was the vehicle that Captain Action used. It actually floated in water and we played with it in the bathroom tub.


3.The Creepy Crawlers Thing maker . You essentially plugged this mini stove into the wall and " cooked" the liquid until they became rubber items. You could never see this today. I think they released another version in the 80's that didn't used electricity. It failed. 


2. The Johnny Lightning 500 race set. You built a track and used the Johnny Lightning cars to race them around. Johnny lightning was the major competitor to matchbox back in the 70's.



1. Action Boy. This was my action figure from the Captain Action line of toys. It had costumes that it could change into like Robin, Superboy. You had to buy those other costumes separately.  

Let's see, if we are going to emphasize as a kid, I will cut it off in the early 80s or so (born in the late 60s, I was a kid in the 70s, a teen in the 80s). I really only got toys on special occasions-Christmas of course, birthday (in July so about a half a year from Christmas, which worked well for me in a way) and rarely ever any other time unless something else qualified as a special occasion. So there were lots of toys I saw in commercials or at other kids' houses that I would get really excited about, but rarely ever got because by the time it got to Christmas or my birthday, something else had taken my fancy or stuff was no longer out there on the market.

My toy favorites definitely went through phases as well, Fisher Price and Tonka trucks as a wee lad, then military focus-army men, G.I. Joe Adventure team, toy guns, etc. then super-heroes-Mego World's Greatest Super-Heroes and other Marvel/DC stuff, then sci-fi, Micronauts, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, etc. and then finally just into the 80s, video games and D&D, and once I hit that point, I really didn't buy any more toys until I became an adult collector (with the sole exception of Super Powers figures in high school which were just too cool to pass up and hit as I was really getting into DC after getting over being a Marvel Zombie).

Looking back, it's a bit difficult to remember what I was excited about before hand exactly, as it was rarely a specific toy but more often a toy line that got me excited (say Micronauts, Mego or Kenner Star Wars) and my parents would get what was affordable to them from that line as Christmas or birthday presents for me. We had friends who used the Sears catalog as a wishbook and would circle what they wanted knowing they would likely find that under the tree, but that wasn't us. I would be asked to make a list, and then my folks would take it and give an edited version to my godparents and grandfather, who would get a few things from it along with clothes and such at Christmas/b-day, but it was always filtered through the mom lens of what was ok to ask for even if I never knew that as a kid.

That all said, the five things I know I really, really wanted, and got (sorry Cei-U! I had the Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots but the aren't making the list) in roughly chronological order...

1. Around kindergarten/1st grade, I was really, really into the GI Joe Adventure team, and there was one thing from the line, I really wanted, and it was under the tree...The Gi Joe Training Center...



for some reason I remember it being a golden yellow color like one of the vehicles, not orange, but I think that's a memory error. This sucker was almost as tall as I was when it was assembled. And it came with so much cool stuff. And a few years later when Mego eclipsed GI Joe as my one true toy love, it was useable with those Mego World's Greatest Super Hero Figures as well.

2. In 3rd grade, I was over GI Joe, but still into military toys. I saw this at the house of some friends of the family, their kids had it and I wanted it. We moved at the end of September in my 3rd grade year, and my parents felt guilty about moving me away from all my school friends, so they tried to make up for it with a big Christmas that year, so this was under the tree that year-The Marx Guns of Navarone playset...



3. Of course, the following May, a certain movie was released, and I forgot all about army men and became gung ho for Star Wars and sci-fi. Kenner's Star Wars toys didn't hit until early '78. Too late for Christmas of '77, too early for that summer birthday of '78. Man, I wanted those Star Wars figures but there didn't seem to be any way I was going to get them any time soon. But one of those special occasions popped up. I was going to a small Catholic school and had done something (I can't quite remember what) that got the attention of the nun who was principal in a good way, and she took the time to call my folks to tell them all about it, so my parents said I could get a special reward (it was right around spring break of that year). I had noticed in the Bradlees sales circular that Sunday that they had Star Wars figures on sale and I asked if I could get some, so my dad took me to Bradlees and I got to pick out four-who to choose from those original 12 releases...well I picked out Luke and Vader, Chewie and a Stormtrooper. A couple of weeks later, another 4 showed up in my Easter basket-Obi Wan, R2D2, C-3PO and a Tusken Raider. The rest (except for Han for some reason) and an extra Stormtrooper plus the landspeeder were among my birthday gift that year, and more followed that Christmas (along with a bunch of other sci-fi toys). I continued to be big into Star Wars toys until 1982, when we were preparing for another move and downsizing and I was told I had to get rid of most of my toys and I ended up giving all my Star Wars stuff to a cousin before we moved.

4. So between the move I mentioned in 3rd grade, and the one in '82, we had moved in between, from Connecticut to Maine, once again leaving friends behind. We went back to CT to visit family and friends the second Christmas we were in Maine (Christmas of '81 that would have been). While there we visited the friends of the family whose kids had had the Navarone playset, and this time he introduced me to something else, a game that would inexorably change my life-Dungeons & Dragons. I made a character from the Basic Set, an elf, started in the Caves of Chaos, fell into a pit, got bit by a giant rat and died. All in about a half hour. But I was hooked. The entire 6 hour ride home back to Maine all I talked about was D&D and how cool it was. When I got home, I found some of the Bill Willingham ads for D&D in the comics I had and devoured them trying to piece together more about the game I didn't own but was frankly obsessed with. I started making dungeons on paper without any rules to go by. I made up characters based on what I remembered from my introduction to the game at that family friend's house. Then on the Friday, the last day of school before February vacation, my dad came home and handed me a bag in it was these two things...



I was literally jumping for joy. I don't think I did anything over that week of school vacation other than sleep, eat and devour those rulebooks. No TV, no comics, not even play with Star Wars figures. When I got back to school, I told my friends about it only to discover some of them were already playing and I got invited into their game...I've never looked back and D&D in some form has been a part of my life since.

5. Well, there was that move in '82 I mentioned. New school, new schoolmates (friends was too strong a term for that group of kids for that 1 year of 8th grade), none of them played D&D. None were into comics or Star Wars or anything. The only thing we had in common outside of going to the same school was video games and even that was marginal as we liked different types of games. So I had no one to play D&D with, and I was extremely frustrated. Then I started seeing TV commercials for this other game...it was kind of like D&D, but was more like a board game. I might be able to get people to play a board game, and this was so cool looking. I mean they even had Orson Welles do the freaking commercials...



I soooo wanted this game...



and, it was under the tree that Christmas (another byproduct of parental guilt over moving me I think), and I was able to get family member to play, which was even better. It was my fantasy game fix until I found a D&D group in high school, even though I continued to make characters and dungeons after school every day through 8th grade even though I had no group to play with.

And so, those are my five...though there were certainly other contenders.

-M

Bullies stole my toys and all I had to play with was this stone.

Growing up, it was my only friend.

As a huge fan of robot toys, I'm dying to know what this is.