The way we played with figures - Star Wars etc

[proteus]

odd thread maybe- but thats what im here for

anyway how did you play with your toys? this sort of thing fascinates me time for some nostalgia- what kind of stories did you make up- how did you get everyone from different lines into one big universe- how did you get around the scale problems - or didnt you notice

i love the imagination we used to have as kids something you dont see so much as an adult and with todays x box obsessed kids.and i dont care what anyone says the 70s were THE years to be a kid- never ever befor or since have so many fantstic films and shows come out and never have there been so many cool toys and Tom Baker played dr who - what more could you want?

well,,i remember being 9 , and everyone at school was star wars crazy, but also the micronauts were out, and also battlestar galactica- which wasnt even on tv here at the time ( just released in cinemas edited into a movie) my only knowledge of battlestar came from the marvel comic reprinet in a half size uk battlestar galactica pocket book comic) i remember all my toys were just one big team - and they recruited from all over the universe hence why luke skywalker was hanging around with starbuck, i also tended to make lil paper acessories for some of them because i didnt have weapons for them all- i think at one point they even all sported natty red belts with their initials on.force commander was the supreme leader , he succeeded commander adama.
it seemed perfectly fine to have tiny tuffies in second world war gear fighting alongside star wars rebels.in fact i once used a german ww2 soldier tiny tuffie as the bruce banner for a comic action heroes hulk - even tho hulk was SMALLER llol!

its funny in the 70s figures were either 3 3/4 inches, 8 inches or 12 inches but there was the odd exception like denys fishers doctor who

[3 3/4"collector]

well most of the lines i liked and played with were 3 3/4" so scale wasnt really a problem anyway. but me and my couple main friends were weird, we were sor of obsessed with all those teen films on cable back in the early mid 80s. so we had a sort of generic punk rock highschool thing we played. all our joes and star wars etc.. all had their own names and characters we developed, their were punk and preppy and street gangs etc.. it was sort of a mixture of the warriors and escape from new york mixed with a little pretty in pink and just one of the guys as well as berry gordys last dragon. its really far too much to try to explain.

we also played an all encompassing AD&D game in the backyard with all the figures. using a elf city thing i built from a bunch of big loose rocks and old tree limbs.

and lastly i would arrange all my figures scattered around on a big board face to face like they were in one on one combat. and i would use a rubber band to shoot paper wads at them until only one was still standing to decide whether the good guys or bad guys won the battle.

[Ebessan]

^ 3 3/4 Collector, I love the "catapult" idea you wrote there. I remember being a kid I had this dump truck toy. I'd sometimes put a small Fisher Price guy (pirate, etc.) in the front, then drop a heavy bag on the end and watch them fly.

I was always facinated with toys since I was little. Some of my first collections involved toys like TMNT, Batman: TAS, Small Soldiers and a lot of misc. short-lasting '90s toy series. When I was very young I remember one of my sister's friends giving me like a dozen 3 3/4" GI Joes. During school break (I went to a K through 12 school) for a few weeks I destroyed/lost all those Joes by having battles in dirt, sand, around rocks, etc. I always loved it in commercials when they had incredible setups for toys, like an entire toy jungle just for a commercial. Always wanted stuff like that to be for sale, but alas.

Up until I was like 10 or 12 my friends and I would have "army" type battles with huge collections of toys. I've always loved creatures/mutants more than human figures, so mostly my army would be just gross-out villains. We'd use my parents' living room counches as bases and do stupid shit like pretend the blue on the carpet was a river someone had to cross. Just small episodic things like that.

I also growing up did a lot of voices for random figures. Watching shows like Kablam was inspiring in this. I had like specific heroes and villains all gathered from separate toylines, and I'd do a full episode in my room just yelling with toys like an idiot.

Now I only collect, but it's still as nerdy a fascination as ever for me.

[Ebessan]

Another thing I remember doing was we had "drafts" with action figures. If a friend or 2 came over with a backpack of toys we'd dump all the figures we had and went in order and picked 1 figure each. That was always fun.

[bowheadwhale]

You should have seen me with my pal in 1984 and 1985. When we played "Masters of the Universe", He-Man and Skeletor were... friends. Yes, friends! And they fought gainst natural phenomenons: moving through Giant Grass (uncut lawn, actually), building bases in snow, finding their way in the forest... and they were involved with such critters like Other World characters¸, AAA dinosaurs, Imperial monsters rubber lizards... so, yes, we had lots of imagination and no, we didn't bother with the "original cartoon" storybase.

[rihia2k]

Ha. Oh, memories. Too much to cover right now. (I'm at the library). But yeah, this is all so familiar. My mother's washing piles were mountains for my Joes. Different coloured carpets / rugs were lava, rivers, forests for Joes / MOTUs (if it was too late to play outside). I used to really enjoy making flying foxes outta' string and seeing who would survive the ride. I would create storylines and systems for my games, no matter how silly, I'd always be involving imagination. I recall some kids would pick up two figures at random and just smash them together over and over, always thought that was weird.

[comics2figures]

My dad made me foam mountains for MASK, and i always mixed up action force and star wars due to the red skull tie fighter like vehicle, and my snake eyes and storm shadow where jedi's fun time when everything was possible.

[mrjayberry]

One of my favorite times of year was the couple of weeks before Christmas, the tree and all those wrapped boxes made for an awesome fortress for some factions to storm.

I also used to pretend that a pillow was a ring and my G.I. Joes were wrestlers and have them Royal Rumble it out for hours at a time. I would have been overjoyed with a well articulated WWF line when I was a kid.

[planetaryte]

My brother and I grew up during the eighties and played with all the major lines as well as some pretty obscure ones from Woolworths and Family Dollar. We did the draft thing too after dumping our box of action figures out. Next we would build forts out of Legos, set up our figures inside our forts, then take turns throwing blocks at each other's armies. It was kind of like that Crossbows and Catapults game. The person who knocked down all their opponents men first won.

You have to understand we had tons of figures. These wars would last for hours on end. We could spend a good half a day building forts and lobbing blocks at each other.

[brcthrift]

I played with my toys a lot of different ways. Sometimes I would only play with a particular line, like GI Joe. Other times it was a scale, like Joe, Star Wars, and Bionic Six. Other times I mixed everything together and each line/ scale was a different tribe. Like LJN wrestlers would be giants, and MOTU and Thundercats would be the normal sized guys for this world. # and 3/4 in figs would be a smaller race. And then there would be factions within each race, and all sorts of alliances. It was like 19th century Europe.

[proteus]

my friend had a pool table in his bedroom- it was a moolithic base or all sorts of epic mbattles- beneath it lay the field strewn with casualties.

[afsupplies]

I didn't really mix my figures up. I'd play Star Wars or I'd play Action Force or Action Man. Used to love my MAC men mountain base and I had a blue carpet in my room so that was the ocean and the bed clothes made mountains and caves and the chest of drawers was always scalable some how. I think my 3 3/4" figures could proportionally jump about 100 feet to climb stuff!

[rihia2k]

Jun 27, 2011 7:36:53 GMT -6 @afsupplies said:

I didn't really mix my figures up. I'd play Star Wars or I'd play Action Force or Action Man. Used to love my MAC men mountain base and I had a blue carpet in my room so that was the ocean and the bed clothes made mountains and caves and the chest of drawers was always scalable some how. I think my 3 3/4" figures could proportionally jump about 100 feet to climb stuff!

Yeah, I hear that. My Joes were also of the elite climbing division.
Epic 3 3/4'' turn-based parkour marathons around the bedroom were a staple

[reviewthis]

Jun 12, 2011 11:37:35 GMT -6 mrjayberry said:

One of my favorite times of year was the couple of weeks before Christmas, the tree and all those wrapped boxes made for an awesome fortress for some factions to storm.

.

i used to do that with the tree and gifts too.
when i would go to my grandmothers house i would play in her and my grandfathers walk in closet, my Joes would hide in shoes, use my grandfathers shirts as cliffs. they had shag carpet, that would become tall grass. i could spend hours with just a few figures and come away with so much joy.
god i miss that

[mdc113]

Funny topic, i used to mix and match everything i had in one big universe like ya said. I grew up in the late 80s early 90s so i was having robocop shoot and destroy street sharks. Star wars figures fighting Jurassic park T rex's it was all a blast. I was really into the toys that had cartoons with them. Toxic crusader and bucky o hare, and of course TMNT EVERYWHERE. Great times.

I actually remember wanting toys for Sonic the Hedgehog SOOOOOOOOOO bad, and at the time there was nothing around like this. So i remember drawing them on paper (i was always a pretty good artist) and then taking scissors and cutting them out of paper and using them as action figures with my other toys lol

I also remember wanting a toy of Jabba the Hutt CRAZY bad. However i knew nothing about the original one from the 80s (didnt even know they made one), and there was no internet. And my only outlet for getting toys was when my parents would take me to kay bee or wal mart etc. so i remember going to school and making a Kiln clay jabbba the hutt. Painted em up green, and used him with all my star wars stuff.

[aden2008]

I just remember playing with mine out in the dirt or in our gravel driveway..MOTU and Star Wars mostly

[else3573]

MOTU in my friends bedroom on the floor, he had Greyskull and Eternia and Snake mountain, we'd have em all set up at once. Transformers at school during recess. GI Joe outiside at my friends house, making bases and roads and stuff like that, and GI Joe at another friends house in his room because he had almost every GI Joe figure/vehicle, including the USS Flagg, which was freakin AMAZING.

[proteus]

My friend from school and i were very alike- he had a big room in his house and we used it as a battlefield- he had many figures including some odd foreign figures and a lot of broken guys and parts- it looked like some ancient sci fi battlefield.

i remember we made up stories- some of the figures we used as themselves- or who they were supposed to be- others we re named and used as original characters, his favorite was Captain Zargon a large 12 inch uk only gi joe space pirate black bodied with a sort of bionic skull face zargon was re named and became the main villain it our story, him and the knight of darkness from star team - also re named fought an epic battle - we used them as giants along with 3 3/4 star wars figures, action jacks (knock off mac men) and fisher price adventure people.

the fate of an entire planet was in the balance from the fight between the two giants.whilst in the background we played movie soundtracks or Holsts the planet suite.

great days.

heres to you Charles wherever you are.

[waywardmonk]

My friend and I played with our star wars figures for years. We often made up personalities and stories for characters that didn't really have any like Walrusman (known as "Smiley") and Hammerhead who liked to stick his head around corners. Main characters in different outfits often became brothers and sisters of that character. We played with the Death Star playset and vehicles a lot, but we also made our own playsets and vehicles out of legos which became more fun than the official stuff. We played the heck out of those toys. I had lost a good half of the weapons the figures came with. My original jawa lost his vinyl cape (gasp), the lightsaber tips were chewed off and a lot of paint got rubbed off. By the time I was a teenager a few figures got burned and covered in red marker for blood. Good times.

[defzombie]

Me and my buddy played in the backyard ALOT with gijoes and plastic army men. Large epic battles sometimes, and sometimes spending the whole time setting up our bases..good times

[homeschoolman]

I played so hard with toys as a kid, one of my most memorable adventures was sending egon into the clouds connected to 3 different rockets and finding him an hour later a couple of blocks away. also when I was really little I had a bunch of cobras rigged to puny crackers where their back packs went and sent them down a hill in one of their vehicles. they exploded way before they even got going.

[figuremod73]

Mostly I played with my MOTU figures and knockoffs. I would use posterboard from the dollar store to recreate the backgrounds as best I could from the cartoon. Heman and Blackstar would usually team up against all types of enemies, including what ever rubber monsters I had lying around. Mini figures were "sprites" and various other races, including spies for Skelly. Rocklords worked along side Stonedar and Rokkon.

I think I was much more creative back then.

[dogpoopwalker]

As a kid, and as an adult, I only liked monster toys. I had the sorceress from he man as the obligatory princess to save, and like one other generic human guy who would get eaten.

yeah, I was the kid mentioned above that just threw around and mashed by toys together. Especially MUSCLE men. I would stick two guys together and then throw them at the ground in a designated area and whoever flew out was the loser. The winner would go on to "fight" the next guy until there was only one left, who would be the champion. Weren't they designed for just that? Not TMNT, the foot clan guys heads always popped off when you tried that.

Then when I got older I was Sid from Toy Story. That's not psychotic, it's customization!

[spockoda]

Feb 15, 2014 12:38:40 GMT -6 figuremod73 said:

Mostly I played with my MOTU figures and knockoffs. I would use posterboard from the dollar store to recreate the backgrounds as best I could from the cartoon. Heman and Blackstar would usually team up against all types of enemies, including what ever rubber monsters I had lying around. Mini figures were "sprites" and various other races, including spies for Skelly. Rocklords worked along side Stonedar and Rokkon.

I think I was much more creative back then.

I feel I was too. To make Thor, for example, I would put Crystar's helmet on the vintage farmboy Luke Skywalker and then I snatched a tomahawk from a model kit to be Thor's hammer. Back in the late 70s and early 80s there weren't masny 3 3/4" superhero figures around so necessity became the mother of invention with a kid's imagination.

[jwswrestlingmem]

I can already feel a long winded post coming from me here...:-)

I was very stringent. No mixing lines. GI Joe could not mix with Star Wars.

My wrestling fed was tightly booked. Smash would not be around when Repo Man was (for non-wrestling fans, they were two characters portrayed by the same man). Wrestling did actually allow me to suspend my "scale" rule, as when I discovered the Remco AWA line (about ten years after they were released), I mixed them with the Hasbro and Galoob lines just so that I could have Larry Zbyszko and Stan Hansen in my fed.

With GI Joe I always enjoyed doing little mini-story lines. Of course a lot of action, but I can remember doing a lot of one-on-one interactions with figures.

With Star Wars, my kid mind couldn't fathom creating new backstories for the main characters since the real story was so good. Therefore, except for the off chance when I did recreate the movies, I used the background figures much more. Stories on the alien planets, locals, and especially Jabba's Palace with the awesome 1983 Jabba set, were where I had my most fun. And of course, you could always bring in the main Rebels and Imperials for cameos.

Even though I had both DC and Marvel figures, I've never been much of a comic fan. In fact, my only real remaining fandom of the comic world is what started me with those characters to begin with--Adam West's Batman. When I would play with my DC figures, it was always based upon the show, and people like Superman and Wonder Woman would "guest" like The Green Hornet did on the show. In fact, now that real 1966 lines are out, I finally feel that I can eBay my Super Powers.

Great topic!

-J\/\/

[vintage]

I can remember at school we would always play Star Wars in the playground, we'd play with the figure line by setting up a Tatooine scene in the long jump sand pit, creating a deathstar scene using the climbing frames, we'd have an Ewok village scene going on under the huge conker tree in the field, conkers as boulders & the such, it was great!
& when we played as ourselves being the characters ( like a grand group version of 'IT' or 'Stuck In The Mud') you had to keep the figure of your character in your hand until you were out.

good times, great memories, great subject! cheers!

[Thor Laserpunch]

Great memories.

I think I did every conceivable thing you could do with action figures. If I had a Tonka truck, I'd bust out the plastic windows so it could be a driveable vehicle. I had some trucks and stuff that were Nylint or Buddy L or something that actually could fit figures inside too. And some cars that sort of got into the property-spanning universe I created like a cheapo remote control Porsche I had with a removable hard top. Yep, I mixed worlds just like most of you guys have where you might be a big shot in Star Wars but you might only be a computer jockey or random tank driver in my world. Captain Power and Lord Dread at one point were my go-to leaders. I tried to keep things in proper scale like 3.75" mostly, but a Transformer could just be a robot minion in another universe or maybe a robot overlord, a Secret Wars figure could just be a really tall character, or an MOTU guy could just be some roided-up freak monster... but it would make no sense to have my Galoob Inspector Gadget mix-in with He-Mans, it had to have an internal logic for it to fly with me. Sometimes I would break a toy and would work the breakage into the character, for instance Shockwave with no head became an ED-209 stand-in. Or a broken Dragonfly was just part of some random wreckage that might have been in a behind enemy lines scenario or whatever I needed it to be. A HISS tank with no wheels, canopy, or cannon was just a hovering APC.

I made a lot of things with black electrical tape like make nunchuks with the tape wrapped around the ends of a piece of string, or make belts/holsters/bandoliers, body armor/vests, etc. I was especially obsessed with grappling hooks and string in general, and I had a String Racer--that was like the best thing ever because it had these balls that could be used as cages and you could fit figures in there and snatch 'em up and rescue 'em. But yeah, grappling hooks made from whatever debris I found in our junk drawer were part of everybody's kit. And little medkit supplies like tiny band-aids boxes and aspirin bottles from dollar store/rack toy doctor playsets I jammed in little emergency boxes for wounded warriors to find if they could make it to them in time. Jet sleds, sky cycles, little land vehicles, blocky rocket packs, and ultimate doom weapons were often crafted from Legos for specific uses and generally using tons of "special" pieces (i.e., radar dishes, rocket boosters, antennae/rods, translucent studs, robot tentacles, etc., etc.).

I made outposts and command centers out of boxes or Lincoln Logs when playing inside the house or used the furniture as part of the terrain. I also had this train set in the basement that was originally a Christmas centerpiece, Disneyland, it was sorta like MASK scaled although it became a battlefield for everybody of every size. It was a steam engine and my dad had screwed it to a big board of green spray-painted plywood and set the thing up on saw horses. The basement in general was very magical with lots of beams and asbestos covered pipes to stage fights on and industrial junk and old tools to be used as play fodder. Anyhoo, there was a little town in the center of the track made of laminated printed cardboard panels held together with plastic rivets and plastic architectural trim. You KNOW that town got beat to hell till it was basically a pile of pieces. Outside the house, there was a big rock out front for some dramatic cliff battles or the front steps were made of stone and I'd use that extensively, particularly chunks of cracked mortar I'd dig out with a pocket knife to make little hidey holes for weapons caches or places to tuck figures away where they were dormant until a trap was sprung or whatever and they popped out and attacked unsuspecting victims. In the back yard we had pebbles and me and often my similarly minded buddies would shape the gravel into hills and mountains and make "secret" forts and hangars out of bricks, rocks, boards, and pieces of slate tiles we found back there and they'd be camouflaged because the gravel would mask the interior. I remember one specific time where me and my buddy were playing in the entrance to a path through the woods by the playground at a local apartment complex in a big muddy puddle and some older kids came and stomped all our stuff. That was pretty mortifying.

I had a good amount of other social outcast friends and acquaintances that weren't into sports and when we'd play figures, we'd sort of just have big, loosely choreographed battles with crashing vehicles and endless martial arts knockdown final battles like the movies where guns would be tirelessly flying-kicked just in the nick of time from the hands of whatever guy was about to gain the advantage and take the final kill shot over and over again until at some point somebody took a dive into a pool of acid or something. And, of course, curt one-liners when you got a good hit in on somebody or killed them in one-on-one combat: "Eat dick, fangface!" or that sort of juvenile stuff we thought added a level of maturity and gravitas I guess. I traded a lot with my friends also, sometimes temporary mutual loans and sometimes permanent no backsies deals. I wound up with a lotta junk but I liked or needed it all for some reason.

When I was alone, my adventures were a lot more elaborate and contained alternate dimensions, time travel, teleportation, whatever flavor of the week sci-fi thing I was into. There was also as much questing and puzzle solving as there was fighting. But there was plenty of fighting also, often where the small group of underdog good guys would basically wipe out an army of bad guys infiltrating a base or something and then usually my favorite guy would have to take on a boss by himself. Then continue to the next level. Sometimes a crew would get separated and have entirely different adventures.

Later on when I was about 9, I dug these two wooden playhouses my pops had made for my older sister out of the attic and was using them for a variety of purposes, like urban locations where shady dealings went down and Joes would come in and bust up a drug deal or a black market weapons shipment (this is all in line with the kind of crap action movies my parents let me rent, remember that as I continue). After a hard day's work, the Joes and their buddies would use the same dollhouses as a bar or brothel with my sister's oversized 70s girl dolls being pros (I realize this contradicts my previous internal logic statement about scale, but a dearth of female figures that could conceivably be floozies caused this to be a necessity). Also, mini vending machine beer cans and soda bottles were staple dietary items for all my troopers. Stuff from my sister's printer's box also ended up as props, like beer mugs and a gumball machine that was used to brain people during drunken barfights.

Among the other disturbing things I did was "retire" figures that were no longer interesting to me or perhaps never were. Some actually got little burial plots over our actual mini pet cemetery in the backyard, complete with their own little popsicle stick crosses. Others were tortured mercilessly in the cryo-freeze chamber. I'd freeze them in water in a little tupperware container than return several hours later to smash them to bits. Nuking them in the microwave was another mainstay. Sometimes partially melted figures looked cooler than they originally did and they'd become unfortunate test subjects, mutants, or acid bath victims. Another thing I liked to do was customize figures into battle damage versions. I remember Airborne specifically had a head where I shaved the little nubs on the balljoint down so his head could pop off easily and I gored his eye out with a little scratch awl and dabbed some ink from a red pen in there. He had a helmet so he could be normal and then lose his helmet when he was shot in the eye or he could just be decapitated entirely. Poor bastard died a thousand deaths. I also liked to take apart figures so they'd pop apart easily and then put red or pink balloons in them for guts, that sort of thing. Look, I haven't killed any actual people yet so obviously this was all totally healthy.

My dad had a garage that was a residential business and had all sorts of fun things like drill presses and sanders and grinding wheels, not to mention the parts washer. When he ran errands I had my way with all of them as a mass torture chamber/gauntlet of Batman '66 style ridiculous death contraption set-pieces or some other form of perilous battleground. He ran a lot of errands and he'd have me sit out there anyway in case any customers came by and to answer the phone so that place was like my favorite cuz otherwise I'd have been bored to death because all he had for entertainment out there was a chintzy GE radio/tape deck. I also nicked little bits and bobs from his parts bins to be fashioned into weapons and custom design elements. And my mom collected dolls and antique toys for most of my life, so when she was at work some of her stuff would be borrowed without authorization as props and whatnot. She had a couple really detailed little diecast western revolvers with spinning cylinders and faux mother of pearl handles that were great and also some tiny folding pocket knives that were way oversized for most of my guys but got used as exotic weaponry anyway. Plus her little doll accessories sometimes added that lived-in world realism I so desperately craved.

Writing all this, I realize two things: that I have been a total sociopath since forever, and that my family suffered a lot of this without putting up much of a fight. Wow, that was a fun trip down memory lane.

[Thor Laserpunch]

Mar 9, 2014 9:22:58 GMT -6 spockoda said:

Feb 15, 2014 12:38:40 GMT -6 figuremod73 said:

Mostly I played with my MOTU figures and knockoffs. I would use posterboard from the dollar store to recreate the backgrounds as best I could from the cartoon. Heman and Blackstar would usually team up against all types of enemies, including what ever rubber monsters I had lying around. Mini figures were "sprites" and various other races, including spies for Skelly. Rocklords worked along side Stonedar and Rokkon.

I think I was much more creative back then.

I feel I was too. To make Thor, for example, I would put Crystar's helmet on the vintage farmboy Luke Skywalker and then I snatched a tomahawk from a model kit to be Thor's hammer. Back in the late 70s and early 80s there weren't masny 3 3/4" superhero figures around so necessity became the mother of invention with a kid's imagination.

My Battle Beasts and whatnot were also mini-critters that would swarm on the larger figures.

Spockoda, your Thor story kinda reminds me of my childhood friend, Jeff. He and I came up with a lotta Machiavellian or Shakespearean epic adventures with deep socio-political themes and whatnot. Anyways, he customized a lot of his own stuff, or more appropriately mangled them. I remember he was obsessed with Short Circuit 2 and fashioned a Johnny 5 out of cardboard and used a little square pencil sharpener as his shoulder cannon. He also customized Lex Luthor into the bad guy from that movie, Oscar, with clothes made out of construction paper. He liked to roleplay re-enact the ending chase scene with me as Johnny 5 and him as Oscar, particularly this part where Johnny 5 swings on his grappling cable doing a Tarzan yell and I'd scoop him up by jumping off the stoop of his dad's apartment building and grab him from behind just like Oscar got scooped up in the movie. I later found out he was gay so I felt a little used when I learned that. That's not the part that makes you remind me of him, just a fun tertiary fact.

Later on, he was obsessed with the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy flick and colored in his Ecto-1 with a magic marker for use as a gangster car with his Playmates toys. God, that literally gutted me that he defaced that thing. He really was an indiscriminate toy mangler. He got away with it though time and again because he was the classic kid with divorced parents that tried to buy his attention, so he was spoiled with toys. I remember he was one of the first people I knew that collected vintage Star Wars when we were in high school and there was a couple comic book shops dabbling in old toys we frequented, and he'd still as an almost-adult buy like $25-40 figures (which is expensive to some people NOW, that was a freakin' half a week's pay at whatever menial job you could get in high school!) and he'd put his own sketchy touch-ups on them with magic marker and glue and whatnot.

[spockoda]

Hey Thor Laserpunch- I did the same thing with a Tonka dump truck, or should I say I TRIED to bust out the windows to put action figures in but I couldn't get it done. Those toys were built to last! I remember in the back yard with that dump truck, pretending I was a farmer harvesting dandelions! I would be on my hands and knees pushing the truck along, pulling the yellow flowery heads off the dandelions and throwing them in the back of truck. One day while I was doing my "farming" I was playing with the G.I. Joe villain Zartan and his green sled thing and as I recall Zartan's face turned a different color in direct sunlight and my Dad saw this and said he wondered if whatever made his face do that was safe and I remember saying something about the company wouldn't put him out for kids if it wasn't safe .

[Thor Laserpunch]

spockoda Shoulda listened to dad--our insides are probably all swimming in cancer and frizzly nerve endings from years of playing with petroleum-based lead-painted plastics.

Those old toy trucks are no joke though. Ya need a freaking jackhammer to blast 'em apart.