JCC The 80's toy thread

Those were the Renegades.

 

My brother and I had so many toys. It was sick. Hoarding disorder sick. My dad used to joke he expected to see it all come crashing through the ceiling one day.

Most of the robot/car/gun stuff was my brother's doing; I was one of those kids who spent most of the time drawing and dreaming and laughing at the Muppets. I lived in a hazy world. Still do. For my 5th birthday I asked for a doll's house, for crying out loud. That was me. I played with girls and had a doll's house, and people would mistake me for a girl too--I remember one time on holiday, I crossed a field and was suddenly hit by a beach ball. I looked around, and saw an old grampa who said to his grandkid: "Go ask that girl if you can have your ball back." My world collapsed. Ball cancer to you, gramps. It's more than 30 years ago now, surely he must be dead by now. But it happened often, so often it was kind of traumatizing. First day in high school, some kid comes up to me and says: "Are you a boy or a girl?" What I should have said was: "You're in your teens and you still can't tell the difference? Good luck. And ball cancer to you too." But it felt like a punch in the stomach. I feared it would haunt me forever. Age 85, and I hear someone say: "Go ask that kind old lady if you can have your ball back."

Anyway, each summer my brother and I would stay at my grandparents' house, a huge, white Victorian castle surrounded by fir trees. We'd always travel to Amsterdam, and the night before we went my brother would suddenly shove a magazine or comic under my nose and then point out to me: "This is what I'm going to buy tomorrow." So I just followed along. "You're going to buy a Transformer, ah sure, well so am I then I guess, let's see which one I'll pick." That's how I ended up with 500 Transformers. Sometimes I wanted to have a Muppet doll, or a Barbie while we're at it, but my brother always overruled that: "Nah, look: if I buy Thunderhawk, you have to have Switchblade." It's funny, because he would always have the heroes. I would have the bad guys. When we played with Star Wars, I was allowed to have some heroes too, but it was restricted to the deformed freaks and weirdos. Which actually suited me fine as they were my favorites anyway: Chewbacca, Jabba the Hutt, Greedo, Lando. As an aside: have you ever noticed that Chewbacca never really does anything in the films? I mean, speaking of just tagging along, as we seem to be doing, he's just there, being a sidekick, but he's pretty useless. Still we think of him as a fierce warrior. That's because we believed in that universe.

This post is pretty long. I think I've made up for my long absences now.

 

He stole that AT-ST, you girly bastard.

 

Yeah, ok dp4m - Mercer was the guy I'm thinking of.