I was reading through this article on the infamously large Hyve playset (from the Coleco Sectaurs line, known for being one of the largest 'bases' ever produced) http://x-entertainment.com/articles/0957/ and it got me thinking, what was one thing as a kid you craved so much it entered your dreams, something you dreamt every Christmas of ripping the wrapping off and discovering? I don't just mean the latest, coolest action figure, we're talking grails here. Things that, in all likelihood were totally overpriced and we would never see [thanks to sensible parents], but that left an indelible mark on our childhood. As a kid growing up in Germany, for myself this was essentially limited to what appeared in the Sears Wishbook catalogue, since I was (I guess?) fortunate not to have been exposed to endless hours of kickass toy commericals, and the Canex/Four Seasons stores on the military bases had very limited selection. For the most part, I just longed for great things that it turns out they never even produced (like a Rancor/Jabba's palace playset, or Cobra underwater base) or I just didn't know that they did. If you are really greedy you can list a couple things , but it is really about the stories and the unfullfilled longing.
1- Neo-Geo (lol yeah right, as a kid I didn't even have friends who had friends who had cousins who had a Neo-Geo, it was like a Unicorn to us. So mysterious!) 2- (for real) a Hoverboard. For real. Really, I wanted this thing and actually expected it for years. 3- The Eternia Playset from MOTU. If I remember it was released later in the MOTU line and my parents stopped buying me any MOTU stuff assuming (correctly) I'd grow into a new childhood fad. BUT I still wanted it, it had a monorail, I still consider buying one now!
Not much story here. I begged, they laughed. I was able to get most toys I wanted with a combination of good behavior (that they knew about) and doing chores for small amounts of money. This was pretty much unobtainable.
Neo-Geo! great answer.. Mine would have to be 1. Big Green Machine bike 2. GI Joe USS Flag aircraft carrier (wow someone bet me to it as I was typing) 3. Death Star play-set
that flagship is rad in person, the one toyshop in my town had a display that revolved around it for years,for me it was the centurions figures which made no sense as they were not expensive and my mom would buy me whatever dumb crap I wanted except them, it was like there was some weird pact against me, but now I own basically all of them and it was waaaaaaaay cheaper than therapist bills
A different kind of grail, but I always wanted braces! When I was growing up, all the cool kids had braces but I had perfectly good teeth and to this day have never had braces (or retainers, etc). I always felt left out and played with the other kids' mini rubber bands Toy related, probably big Lego sets (pirates, castle, etc). I always wanted video games but my mom would never let me get any, saying "video games rot your mind" and "video games are useless," etc. etc. I finally got a gameboy color and pokemon - wasted many many hours away
apparently size does matter as the USS Flagg keeps showing up... but I really wanted an AT-AT and a bunch of service packs from the back of LEGO catalogs and a halfpipe
Yeah all my friends wanted that GI Joe ship too. I hated GI Joe as a kid, just wasn't into military stuff unless it was the Galactic Empire.
I had a Dinky Toys catalog and used to marvel at the weird Gerry Anderson related diecast space vehicles, which of course were mostly unavailable in the US. They always looked so awesome.
1. A 1/6th Batman figure with removable mask made of rubber (circa 1976), the gloves were also possibly removable. A kid on my street had it, i can still remember its intoxicating aroma. 2. The micronauts set with the compressed-air tube transport thing (circa 1979). Wow was that ever amazing to me. 3. One of those Giant Mazinger-Z/Grendizer type robots that could shoot its fists. 4. The BIG smurf house (that one smelt amazing too)!. runners-up: Millenium falcon and NAKED LADIES !! (thanks for reminding me Slack) In the end i only ever got the naked ladies
1985 Snake Eyes- I totally missed it when it came out, and it was the definitive Snake Eyes in the comics and cartoon- I had heaps of GI Joes, and so did the neighbor kids, but no one had a "2nd Snake Eyes"... (in fact no one had any Snake Eyes until the third version of SE came out in 1989) To this day I can't believe Hasbro never offered him as a mail-order re-release... Meanwhile, Jinx, and Breaker, and hooded Cobra Commander were available *for years* in the mailorder catalog. Anyways, flash forward (back) to about 1998-99, and Snake Eyes was finally mine and one of my very first ebay purchases. This one I had as a kid, but years of playing the hell out of it took it's toll and eventually it was gone... I also had a G2 Prime, but again parts were lost, toys were broken... through my late teens and early adulthood I would occasionally have a dream of walking into a Toys R Us and seeing G1 Optimus Prime available again... Eventually in 2000 Takara reissued Prime (for the first of many many times) and I picked it up then. It's on display with all my other g1 reissues and Snake Eyes, incedentially.
I had the USS Flag and the GI Joe base. Storm Shadow, Firefly and Cobra Commander with the sliver mask always eluded me. I had Firefly for about a day, and went out to the stream behind my house. GI Joe was having a massive battle with Zartan & Cobra. Hovercraft was deployed to take out the Hydrofoil. Torpedo'd the bow of the Hyrdofoil, which veered of into the rocks, flipped over sending most of Zartan's troops along with Firefly to Davy Jones' Locker. Flint and Duke celebrated. I then went to collect everyone and go in for cookies, when I realised that due to Firefly's camouflage, he was impossible to find against all the rocks and pebbles at the bottom of the stream Lost forever.
Space 1999 Eagle Transport by Mattel. I played with this every day and watched the show like it was my job: Action Jackson in his Snowsuit:
All of my childhood grails (Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow, USS Flagg, AT-AT, Optimus Prime, Millennium Falcon) have been mentioned already.
Soundwave. I waited for weeks and weeks for it to come in the mail. My Mom ordred it for me through a Sears catalogue and it was on backorder for like 6 months... I ran home from school everyday to check the mail, and every couple weeks I would get another another little pink backorder slip... It was seriously traumatic....Then... One day... It finally arrived. I was ecstatic. Hmmm seems like I STILL go through that same torture sometimes over a toy... I don't have him anymore but you can bet your ass I have the SDCC re-issue!!
I'm surprised no one mentioned Fortress Maximus. Never had a chance of seeing it in our small town with one toy store (Kaybees), but I actually had dreams about owning it. The toy in my dreams was kind of different from the real thing (it had a zip line), owing to the fact that I was going off the tiny catalog photo. Still want one. Come to think of it- I still have yet to see one in person.
my grail was the original voltron die cast lion set! my parents were all set to buy it for me when I was kid, but they had a recall on the set due to lead in the paint, which meant I could never get one =[ uggh then a few years ago i missed out on the anniversary set that they issued..oh well
I showed up in the world in the nineteen-seventies, born into a household that both had a TV and allowed me to watch it, therefore I wanted thousands of toys, each new advertising campaign adding something to the list. It's not like I wanted everything, mind you, but if there was even a whisper of SF about it, I probably wished I had it. I certainly did okay, with a dozen Star Wars figures, a couple of Megos, a die-cast Eagle from Space 1999, a box o' Matchboxs, etc. It's not like I was deprived of the spoils of lower middle-class opulence, but I always got the lower end of the toy line - Boba Fett, yes; Giant Boba Fett, no, etc. Between my pool of friends, though, I could probably get some hands-on time with most of my favorite toys over the course of a month of visiting. I made do. Thing is though, what I really really wanted (outside of a jet pack and, slightly more realistically, a personal hovercraft) was an Ultraman doll. I was completely obsessed - as Lixx put it about Space 1999, I watched the show every day like it was my job. Unlike, say, the Max Machine Nighthawk, or even the Shogun Warriors (I admit I would have killed for any of them. Todd Ferguson had a couple, so I could get my fix over at his house), Ultraman (and Hyata and Baltan and Seabozu and the VTOL and poor, poor Pigmon and Keronia and Dada, and, and, and...) didn't have a TV ad that I could fixate on, didn't have a micro-picture in the weekly color toy circular in the paper to squint at longingly, didn't have a mail-away tie-in with a cereal company. For all I knew, Ultraman toys simply did not exist! He and his friends (OH, and all his amazing and TERRIFYING looking enemies) only existed for a half-hour, five days a week AND THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH! I remember in one episode this little boy had a Baltan doll and I was so jealous. In another a kid was wearing a Halloween style plastic Ultraman half-mask. Torture. As time went on I forgot about or stopped caring about most of the toys I fixated on in youth, but my fixation on the imaginary toys never left me for the rest of my childhood, through adolescence, right up to the moment I stumbled on to my first silver and red Bandai on a shelf in a novelty store in the hipster district of Dallas. It's quite a a few years and an unending series of long stories that leads up to the Sofubi and Me of today, but suffice it to say the fixations did not all end that fateful day in Texas. It is, of course, 2011 now, and just this week I got another Ultraman, and another Baltan in the mail. Unfortunately that doesn't put a dent in my desire to find a ButanNoHana Seabozu, or a BearModel Bullton, or a Bullmark Jirass mini, or... The grailquests still continue, but most of them still hail from Nebulas M78. The sickness is in me.
My grail was one of the Inhumanoids from the 80's cartoon series. they were not really a great toy, however I wanted them and never got one. I begged and begged for one for Christmas. I was sure I had gotten one, the package was about the right size. there was the correct size opening in the front of the box. Then on Chirstmas morning I rushed to open it up and..... It was a pound puppies radio.
My grandmother got this for me. Within minutes of opening it, I managed to break a post that helped attach the slide/barrel to the trigger guard area. With that little post gone, it would not stay together at all. Megatron was ruined. I still had the box and decals in my lap. Haha.
