Top 10 Xmas toys from my childhood #10
This is a series of posts I did several years ago about the top 10 christmas toys from my childhood. I hope you enjoy them and they bring back memories of toys you received when you were a kid. Here’s #10.
Vertibird (1974)
Now this is a classic. You may be able to find cheap, miniature knockoffs of this toy, but none will ever replace the original. This toy cost around $12 25 years ago. An original boxed in mint condition can fetch $500 on ebay these days.
You might remember the tv commercial where you had to stop the fictional bank robber from leaving town. You would send vertibird into action and drop a roadblock on the cardboard cutout of a road. Then you could swing in and hook onto the car and carry him away. This was nearly impossible to do in reality. I wonder how many takes it actually took to hook the getaway car?
Two things that did not work together in the 70′s – a vertibird and shag carpet. Always a tangled mess.
CaptainsCast 025 – Toy of the year 1970-1979
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Things finally slow down for us and that means time for a new podcast. Ben and I discuss his teams’ results from their Lego Robotics Competition. We then cover the big topic of this episode – Top toy of the year 1970-1979.
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Snoopy vs. the Red Baron Board Game
I’ll finish out the week with one last reference to Snoopy and the Peanuts gang. One of the board games I had as a child was the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. In it you launched marbles down a ramp through a replica of the Red Baron’s airplane. These marbles would fly off the end of the ramp towards Snoopy’s doghouse. The object of the game was to open up the doghouse by lifting it on its hinge, and catching as many marbles as you could. Your opposition would then take their turn at it. The one with the most marbles was the winner. Not very much to it at all, but it was one of the few instances where you could have a toy of Snoopy as the great World War I flying ace. I haven’t seen this actual game for years until 2004. I was working in Washington DC for a week, and had some time off to head over the the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. While touring the museum I came across an exhibit based on the Red Baron. In the display case was none other than a complete, original copy of the board game I grew up with in the 70′s.
Peanuts Gym
Hi all. The Retroist over at www.retroist.com
posted yesterday about the Snoopy Sno Cone Maker. It got me thinking about other Snoopy toys that I grew up with in the 70′s. One particularly came to mind. Jump in the wayback machine and head back to 1971. That’s the year the Peanuts Gym came out. I always called it the Snoopy Swing Set, but apparently that’s not the official name. The gym consisted of a slide, standard swing, face to face swing, and a motorcycle-style swing with a plastic propeller on it depicting Snoopy’s flying ace biplane. Also, at the top of the swing was a plastic board with a hole cut into it depicting Charlie Brown and his ball glove. You could throw a ball through it for target practice. I was never good at that.
What, if any, kind of themed swing set did you grow up with?
***An addendum to this post***
Just wanted to update this post a bit. In keeping with the theme of the captainscast website, I decided to span the generation gap between father and son. I talked to my son Ben regarding the Peanuts gym and what I grew up with for a swing set. I am pretty proud of this aluminum structure. His reaction to it was lukewarm at best. He comes from the newer generation that has been raised with Little Tikes plastic super-fortresses, or the even more impressive wood-built playsets with rock-climbing walls, rope swings, and motorized gun turrets. Just kidding about the gun-turrets.
