Posted on: July 1st, 2009 Lord, It’s Hard to Be a Toys R Us Kid…

I know it isn’t comics or movies but I’d like to throw you a curve ball with this post.  I love toys.  No, look at me…I’m serious.  I loved them in my youth and I carry on that affection to this day.  The ones that shoot, the ones that blink, that float, that cry, that stick to the carpet, that could put an eye out, etc.  It’s been hard in the past years since the major toy stores have slowly gone the way of the buffalo.  Sure, Wal-Mart and Target have some available but the selection is painfully limited and there is no room for expansion when new products come in.  But, what products?  If there’s anything that I’ve noticed in my searches for new action figures, it’s that toys kind of suck nowadays.  They’re all on a very extreme spectrum; it’s either a toy for the dumbest of all kids or for the ones that kind of make you go “Ohhh Honey, that can’t be fun for you…”

So I did a quick search on the best toys out there.  I did this by using my impressive computing skills when I entered in “Best Toys” into the ol’ Google search.  You know what came up?  Crappy Crap.  Clothespins! The Game.  Not kidding, it’s an actual thing.  You sort pictures of laundry.  THAT’S A CHORE! It’s not fun and anyone that says different has OCD. Make a Pie is a fraction-learning toy.  Let’s teach ‘em how to do pie-charts!  That way they’ll be more efficient on Microsoft Excel later in life.  I saw a handheld PDA to teach kids how to text.  I cried.

Do toys have to teach you something now?  Their worth comes only from the knowledge that they offer the child?  Not my toys, Friend-o.  Mine were bestowed upon me so that I would A. Step away from the television or B. Step away from my mother or C. Quit annoying my brother.  Their only benefit was time consumption.  And most worked flawlessly.

-Remember the Lite Brite?  It was like functional art. You tediously slave over spelling out curse words with the multicolored pegs and you still have a lamp. Brilliant.

-Silly Putty.  Put it on a newspaper and you can see the newsprint!  Make farting noises!  Get it in your hair and get screamed at by your mother!  Throw it at your sibling once it’s become gross and discolored with bits of carpet fuzz and strands of your hair!

-NERF anything.  Smelly foam on a plastic dart.  When you’re not allowed to have a BB gun, you had to make allowances for poor trajectory of the late-eighties models.  It improved your stealth.  Yours, not mine.  I threw rocks.

-Super Soakers.  It’s very possible that I’ve built this one up in my mind.  My brother and I each had one but he often decided to dual-wield those suckers.  I got stuck with the cheaper no-pumping-involved water gun.  It only had four quality shots in it because it leaked…nevermind, the Super Soaker is just the ultimate in water weaponry-no two ways around it.

Obviously, there were gems like Transformers (the REAL kind, not the Bumblebee is a Camaro kind), He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, the She-Ra sets, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles (my personal favorite), Barbie and Jem dolls, Hot Wheels and The Real American Hero-G.I. Joe (the REAL kind, not the overly-CGI’d, kid from “Third Rock” as Cobra Commander kind). Now, a lot of these have been reproduced.  Most have been made worse.  But there were some that should have never been in the first place.

-The Slinky is not cool.  It’s not.  The metal one was the only one that worked but kids were dying from it so they switched to plastic.  I snapped mine in half. Lame.

-The Pogo Ball.  Might have been cool for some kids.  Not the uncoordinated ones without balance.  Plus, it looked like a planet.  That’s dumb.

-Simon.  I don’t need a toy to tell me I have terrible short-term memory.  You and your silly buttons were just the pre-cursor to the Bop!It-a MUCH cooler toy than you will ever hope to be, Simon.

-Troll dolls.  I had quite the collection, but I’m not sure why.  They’re boring; you couldn’t even do anything with their hair.  They’re just short, creepy, naked guys with body jewelry.  Now the only purpose they serve is to decorate the cubicle of the woman who’s a little too into her cats.

-Spirograph.  Mine never came out right and I lost all those little gear pieces.  It was fun for a while but then later in life, I accomplished similar works on a TI-83 and it lost its luster.

I’d like to think my tastes have matured.  I now buy additional variant-issued action figures and pay ungodly amounts of money for out-of-production Star Wars-themed Lego sets.   I buy online now and save up to buy marshmallow guns.  I try to find the best novelties on the market like my very classy Mr. Potato Head collection.  It’s hard being a collector when everything on the shelves is somehow linked to High School Musical or the WWE (the FAKE-FAKE kind, not the REAL-FAKE Jake “the Snake” Roberts and “Rowdy” Rod Piper kind).  Is there any hope today of finding a new and original toy among the educational and mundane? The future looks grim but we will carry on.  In the meantime we’ll go digging through the boxes left in our Mom and Dad’s basement and try to remember better times. Any additions to this nostalgic rant?