What's Up With That?

by Tom Kuzeja - February 17, 1999

What's Up With That?

Now Those Were Toys

Kids these days think they've got all the coolest toys but they have no idea what they're missing. Recently, I walked through a toy store and took a look around. What's available today? Hi-tech junk. Junk with flashing lights and lousy sounds. Garbage.

What was my favorite toy as a kid? Hot Wheels. No doubt about it. What a scam. My brothers and I had a ton of cars. That was the first thing we looked for when we hit the toy store. We'd race them in two lanes down the driveway on 30 feet of track. We'd race car after car after car and determine who had the fastest car. Those cars were made out of real metal and were pretty fast not like today's flimsy and light cars with lousy decals that peel off. When I shopped, I'd buy a car with a sleek wedge shape design and with some weight to it. None of this was for racing purposes. It was so that when I lost the races (which I almost always did), that car would hurt as I threw it at whichever brother won the day's events. Back then, those cars hurt which gave your brother an excuse to beat the tar out of you. Today, you'd be lucky to make a scratch.

Another toy I haven't seen in years: Lincoln Logs. You could make great houses and forts with this stuff. And, when your older brother decided he was going to mess up your afternoon's worth of hard work, you could take one of the biggest logs, the one with four notches in it, and whack him over the head with it. Usually that would stun him long enough for you to make a getaway. If you were smart, you'd snatch a couple of Erector Set pieces on the way out. That metal sure could make some nasty gashes in a revenge-crazed brother.

And today's electric car racing tracks are pretty tame. The transformers are pretty clean and matched well with the cars. Now in my day, those transformers were clunky and too powerful. They'd pump way too much juice through the tracks causing sparks to fly off the cars. Nothing like the smell of ozone when you fried a car engine. And boy did it hurt when your older brother held your sweaty face against the tracks as he pressed the trigger on the pistol grip accelerator!

Yeah, there wasn't a toy or game that couldn't be turned into a weapon back then. Battling Tops, Rock 'um Sock 'um Robots... toys just begging for trouble. And lawyers hadn't even gotten into the mix yet. There were no lawsuits. If you tried to sue a toy company for injuries you obtained when your brother flew his Whirlybird helicopter into your forehead repeatedly, the judge would just whack you over the head with a Lincoln Log (the four-notcher) and whip Hot Wheels cars at you as you fled the courtroom.

Ah the good old days! With every scar, a cherished memory.

Favorite Issues From The Past