What toys did you play with as a kid?

Joan the Vampire Slayer

Joan the Vampire Slayer

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With the news of the new Buffy Polly Pocket and the general "resurgence" of the early 2000s, I'm curious: what decade did you grow up in and what toys did you play with as a kid? What were your favorites? Was there a toy you desperately wanted but never got? Let's discuss!

For me, as an "elder" Millennial kid who graduated HS in 2002, I loved my Barbies, The Littlest Pet Shop, My Little Pony, Polly Pocket, and when I got older, in high school, you wouldn't find me without my Gigi Pets and Hit Clips. Interestingly, these are now among the toys that are in the most demand that I re-sell on eBay. I also played with older toys inherited from my sister.

And the toy I desperately wanted but never got was a Barbie car.
 
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I played with Bratz dolls and a burnt looking Barbie doll that had bald patches in her hair and a broken leg. I also loved Scooby doo and had the mystery machine van toy that would move on its own and the Scooby doo figurines set. I had a my little pony tales DVD that I would watch all the time along with Scooby Doo (2002) and Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004) on a loop.
 
Joan the Vampire Slayer
Joan the Vampire Slayer
I watched that My Little Pony movie too! And the Care Bears one.
Joan the Vampire Slayer said:
, I loved my Barbies, The Littlest Pet Shop, My Little Pony, Polly Pocket,

And the toy I desperately wanted but never got was a Barbie car.
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Yes, yes and yes! So many Barbies! So many outfits! I always wanted a Barbie sports car and a Barbie kitchen, but my dad in a fit of feminism I guess, got me - Barbie’s travel agency, Barbie’s pet grooming, Barbie’s post office (!? why did this exist?), Barbie’s camper van, and Barbie’s spa. Whatever the weather he wanted my Barbies to have a job and to come home to a good soak, I guess.😂

But I also loved My Little Pony, Polly Pocket and the Littlest Pet shop.

Another favorite was making paper dolls and clothes for them.
 
I had a lot of toys, but what I remember best are board games, which I loved playing with friends or my long-suffering mom. Favorites were Clue, Chutes 'n Ladders (Mom hated that one!), and Which Witch.

I grew up in the '70s and '80s, before the era of "must-have" toys that sold out at Christmas. We poured over the Sears "Wish Book" before every Christmas!

I was never that into Barbie, but I did have her yacht.
 
Joan the Vampire Slayer
Joan the Vampire Slayer
I used to play Sorry with my mom alot.
im an old geezer from the 70/80's, but in my youth i played with playmobil cowboys vs indians, had toy soldiers and aso played outside. Good times, the youth today are glued to their mobiles, its a blessing mobiles but sometimes i wish they never existed. Never got the Skeletor Castle.And the tv was my best friend on sunday morning..
 
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Joan the Vampire Slayer
Joan the Vampire Slayer
Agreed! I grew up in the 80s-90s and we definitely spent a lot of time riding our bikes around the neighborhood and hanging out at the park!
Toys? Well... oh, wait, as a child.

Lego was by far my favourite. (Not a Barbie girl. 😀) The more expensive sets were the ones I would have liked to have got, but they were, well, expensive.
 
60s and 70s
Favourites were pencils, coloured drawing pencils and markers and eventually various pens - and whatever paper i could find - often 'onion skin' paper which very thin paper used in offices and which mum used to type her writing.

Drawing was my number one activity all through childhood and into early adulthood. I ended up going to art school eventually.

Also liked spirograph - also for art. My original set looked like this
il_1588xN.4802822933_1yxq.jpg


For more "proper" toys: had Barbie Dolls. Most fun thing was learning to make clothing for them on mums sewing machine. It led eventually to me learning to make basic clothes.

I had lego for a long time. Loved it. Was much simpler in those days. If you wanted to make complex things you had to use the old basic blocks.

As a younger kid i used to like to treat long balloons with faces like dolls, laying them out with towels as blankets to put them to bed. Was always sad when they "died".
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Only thing i ever really wanted was a horse. Definitely not a toy. We ended up with old ex race horse for a while. But then we moved countries. That was the end of that dream.
 
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Joan the Vampire Slayer
Joan the Vampire Slayer
I colored and did a lot of art as a kid too.
OMG Spirograph was awesome!
I was a Sindy girl.... had about 10 dolls, the house, the car and an Action Man! Radom but they dated for a while! LOL
I used to spend my time much like the kids now to be honest.... I loved music (records), film (Blockbusters) and tv shows (mostly Airwolf, Knight Rider & The A Team). Played around on my Dads computer and played around with a bit of code back in the day..
Art was my thing as well, used to love re drawing Salvador Dali's work.
Board games were a nightmare in our house .. parents used to argue a lot so I enjoy them more now as an adult.
 
Nix said:
OMG Spirograph was awesome!
I was a Sindy girl.... had about 10 dolls, the house, the car and an Action Man! Radom but they dated for a while! LOL
I used to spend my time much like the kids now to be honest.... I loved music (records), film (Blockbusters) and tv shows (mostly Airwolf, Knight Rider & The A Team). Played around on my Dads computer and played around with a bit of code back in the day..
Art was my thing as well, used to love re drawing Salvador Dali's work.
Board games were a nightmare in our house .. parents used to argue a lot so I enjoy them more now as an adult.
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we got board games for christmas, but long before the next christmas they'd be missing bits. Me and my foster sister enjoyed them for the short term... The only one I really loved was monopoly but that was as a teenager. It wasn't as much fun with just two people in the house, (me and mum) so i didn't get to play at home much. I've gotten exposed to some cool games at my cousin's house. She has a games room... with close to 100 board games of various kinds. The whole family play and it's a lot of fun when a group of people are playing various trivia games.


Nix said:
OMG Spirograph was awesome!
I was a Sindy girl.... had about 10 dolls, the house, the car and an Action Man! Radom but they dated for a while! LOL
I used to spend my time much like the kids now to be honest.... I loved music (records), film (Blockbusters) and tv shows (mostly Airwolf, Knight Rider & The A Team). Played around on my Dads computer and played around with a bit of code back in the day..
Art was my thing as well, used to love re drawing Salvador Dali's work.
Board games were a nightmare in our house .. parents used to argue a lot so I enjoy them more now as an adult.
Click to expand...
I grew up in the 70s. I bought my first computer when in Uni (1990, AIR) so i would not have to leave the computer center at midnight to ride my bike home and so i could finish projects after work. My first phone had more everything than my first computer, and it was released in 1999.
 
My formative years were in the late 1950's and all the 1960's.
Barbie had not been invented which being a boy was probably lucky for me, I spent those early years with a Hornby 00 train set that kept growing. As I grew older I went onto the Scale-electric 1/38 scale race cars (about 23 inches or so long), but I grew out of that and into the 1/8th scale race cars that I built from scratch. The body of the car was bought completely see through so I had to paint the inside of it (the paintwork didn't get scratch every time there was a crash). The chassis I built, the electric motor could be re-wired, different types of tires for different circuits and varied suspension settings. The circuit I went to was about 20 miles away, it had an eight lane track and would have been 20 yards long and 15 yards wide, having two or three people per team was needed to put it back in the track at the end of the straights. When I grew out of that I looked at what various religions there were but none matched the way I was brought up, plus I looked into the types of witchcraft. They ultimately led to ghost hunting.

Thinking back on it I had one heck of an upbringing.
 
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ILLYRIAN said:
My formative years were in the late 1950's and all the 1960's.
Barbie had not been invented which being a boy was probably lucky for me, I spent those early years with a Hornby 00 train set that kept growing. As I grew older I went onto the Scale-electric 1/38 scale race cars (about 23 inches or so long), but I grew out of that and into the 1/8th scale race cars that I built from scratch. The body of the car was bought completely see through so I had to paint the inside of it (the paintwork didn't get scratch every time there was a crash). The chassis I built, the electric motor could be re-wired, different types of tires for different circuits and varied suspension settings. The circuit I went to was about 20 miles away, it had an eight lane track and would have been 20 yards long and 15 yards wide, having two or three people per team was needed to put it back in the track at the end of the straights. When I grew out of that I looked at what various religions there were but none matched the way I was brought up, plus I looked into the types of witchcraft. They ultimately led to ghost hunting.

Thinking back on it I had one heck of an upbringing.
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So the rich boy version of Supernatural, then?!
 
I was born in the early 80s, so most of my childhood was in the 90s. I had Legos and K'nex (does anybody else remember those?) I had various action figures—including Batman, Two-Face, and Joker (from Batman the Animated Series), Robin of Lochsley (from Prince of Thieves), Genie (from Aladdin), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (those indestructible ones you could run over with a truck), and a bargain basement version of G.I. Joe called Power Corps. I had a Tonka Truck and a bunch of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars (including some of those ones that change color with temperature.) That's all standard stuff, I imagine, along with a slinky and a few yo-yos (they kept getting tied in knots, what can I say?)

When I was younger, my dad also had me building model rockets, which I had fun with, and I was absolutely obsessed with the F-14 and F-16 fighter jets, which I had cast iron "toys" of. I thought the Blue Angel pilots, who I was lucky enough to see perform once, were the coolest thing going, as were fighter pilots in general, a perception which was only enhanced by the Batwing, Michael A. Stackpole's X-Wing: Rogue Squadron novels, and one of my favorite television series being JAG (whose protagonist, Harmon 'Harm' Rabb, was a former Navy pilot turned lawyer after he developed night blindness.)

Other than that, I played a ton of board games with my family, and often just my brother -- Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, Othello, Chinese Checkers, Mouse Trap, Monopoly, Sorry, Chutes & Ladders, Life, Operation, Memory, Connect Four, and Go to the Head of the Class (anyone remember that one?), among others. I also had Spirograph and Lite Brite.

All that aside, I just spent the majority of my time reading books and comics on the floor, drawing, writing stories, watching television and movies, and playing the Sega Genesis (Boogerman, Shaq Fu, Gunstar Heroes, Sonic 2, Spider-Man & the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge, etc.) Until my parents would tell me to go outside (because back then we weren't allowed to sit glued to a screen for our whole lives) and just make sure to be back before dark, at which point I would either go outside and find a place to sit and read in the sun, or I would ride my bicycle around town like a speed demon, going way too fast for my own safety.

I think that covers the bulk of what I got up to regularly as a kid as far as "toys" and entertainment go.
 
Joan the Vampire Slayer
Joan the Vampire Slayer
We're almost the same age :)
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