Top 100 Toys
Samantha Burns passes on this fun and enormously time-consuming link of TV Cream's top 100 toys. Are there toys missing from the list? Obviously! There's no GI Joe, He-Man, or Legos. Part of the problem appears to be that this site is run by British folks whose traditional toys are sewing machines and coal mining picks. It also explains why there are a bunch of Dr. Who-themed toys… the Tardis model and War of the Daleks board game just never caught on over here (for the record, I watched Dr. Who as a kid and loved it… Tom Baker will always be the Tardis-piloting time lord in my book).
In the interests of personal nostalgia and egoistic reflection, here are the toys I had among the top 100:
100: Finger Frights
I haven't a clue where I got the things, I just know I had 'em. They were probably knock-offs. They really weren't all that fun, except to annoy siblings with, and the pieces tore off easily.
97: Weebles
Had a few as a wee lad. They had an old, garage sale smell and look about them so I don't think my brother and I were the first to have them. Not much fun, but good for little kids since they're almost impossible to use to inflict injury… unless they're thrown… they did make nice projectiles.
93: Rubik's Cube
Who didn't have one of these things? Fun for five minutes until aggravation launched in across the room.
92: Transformers
Oh, baby. I loved the Transformers. The cartoon was a religious devotion. The toys were sacred relics. Remember how you had to use that red window thing to see the graph on the back of the toy boxes? I had more of these than I count. I even once had an Optimus Prime that I bought at the neighbor's garage sale. It was in pristine condition, still in the box, and had all its parts. I made the mistake of taking it out of the box and playing with it. Worse yet, I allowed my older brother to play with it and he proceeded to break it in various ways out of carelessness and passive aggressiveness. One is currently at $76 on ebay and that's with the box in bad condition. Anyway… tons of fun.
89: Walkie-talkies
Everybody had 'em and none of 'em worked worth a dang. If you were close enough for the walkie-talkies to work, you were close enough to yell.
86: Sorry!
I played this game all the time as a kid. As I recently tried playing it with my young nephews and witnessed their flagrant disregard for the rules (and/or their incomplete understanding of them), I now wonder if I ever played it correctly.
79: Viewmaster
Loved this thing. Absurdly simple, cheap, and easy to use, but still great fun. Seeing the 3D images pop out at you was just mesmerizing as a kid. My favorite slide-set was of a Star Trek cartoon. Yes, I'm serious.
74: Stay Alive
I vaguely remember this one. I don't think I ever fully understood how it was played and so I just amused myself by sliding the things around and making the balls fall.
71: Connect 4
A combination of bingo, tic-tac-toe, and checkers. You can't lose with that concept. Always fun until my brother, realizing that he was beaten, would drop all the checkers out the bottom. Spoil-sport.
70: Tonka Truck
Every boy was required to have one. I was never much of a toy car type, though, so I didn't get much out of it.
69: Twister
Is there a reason this is ranked 69? Personally, I preferred being the guy who operated the spinner and announced the next move. Who wants to be on a plastic mat with a bunch of people's stinky feet?
68: Perfection
Fun game, but I rarely got all the pieces into place in time. And they were so easy to lose.
54: Mousetrap
This was a great game. It was a blast just to set up the Rube Goldberg device and let it go.
48: Silly Putty
At one point, I went through an odd silly putty phase in which I had about five different varieties of the stuff. The glow in the dark version was pretty cool.
47: Operation
Quite possibly the easiest concept for a game, but the hardest to do.
43: Slime
Goo that you couldn't really play with and it dried up if you weren't careful. Clearly, it was marketed to boys who wanted something gross they could use for snot sight gags.
41: Simon
Ok, so maybe this is the easiest concept for a game, but the hardest to do.
35: Spirograph
This was my brother's. The pieces of the set, though few in number, eventually occupied every room in the house and always turned up in the oddest places.
24: Computer Battleship
My variety was Electronic Battleship, but it was the same game. The downside was that you had to take a while to find a fleet layout in the manual that you liked and then programmed in. The upside is that you didn't have to worry about the other guy cheating and saying you missed when you hit since the computer would tell you. There was something vaguely satisfying in the explosion sounds and the lit up image of the battleship.
11: TCR
Or at least a variation of it. I think the entire set was fully assembled and operational twice, although its pieces persisted everywhere… usually accompanied by a spirograph piece.
1: A bike
Standard red dirt bike. Served me well, but man, that one gear made hills killers.
