Almost Forgotten Toys from the ‘70s

Here is a nostalgic list of some toys from the past that Gen Xers should remember well.

Although much of the entertainment that kids today have available to them is brought to them virtually via their phones and tablets, the toys they have actually have some similarities between the toys we had in the ‘70s.

Everything seems to light up, walk, talk, cry, poop, or fly. Our toys behaved similarity though their sophistication might have been a little more limited.

Where electronic toys were starting to rise in popularity in the ‘70s, we did have some toys that were more mechanical in nature.

One of my favorites was the Fisher Price garage with small wooden Little People with cars that seemed to roll forever.

Another one of my favorites was the seemingly simple toys called Weebles. Weebles were little egg-shaped people who, as the advertisement claimed, would “wobble but they don’t fall down.”

Some of our toys were painful.

Clackers were simply two giant, heavy marbles joined together by a string. You would hold the string in the center and move your hand up and down. Hopefully, the marbles would start clacking. If you were skilled, you could get them to clack above and below your hand in repetition.

The problem was when they did not connect, they often hit your arm leaving one sore and bruised.

Of course, some of our toys did more than just leave you bruised. Some could kill you.

Is it any wonder that Lawn Darts were discontinued? It didn’t take too many lawsuits from people injured by wayward darts to cause the toy manufacturer to rethink the idea of putting heavy metal tips on extra-large darts.

Before we raced cars on gaming consoles, we could navigate a small car through a track that rolled through a small conveyor belt mechanism.

You didn’t wreck or die when you went off road but that didn’t take away from the hours of fun that we had pretending to drive with our Drive Yourself Crazy hand-held game.

Of course, electronic toys did eventually become available to us.

I can remember my elementary teachers having to take away our electronic football games by Mattel.

To play the game, one had to move a football player represented by a blinking red light past defenders represented by solid red lights.

Although it was absent the graphics of today’s games, we still managed to enjoy it for hours on end until the batteries would finally give out.

A lucky few had the hand-held Merlin game. This game was a little more difficult to master than the football game. I remember one game mode had a player turning the lights of various buttons on or off to achieve certain patterns.

Of course, towards the end of the decade, you were the most popular kid on the block if you owned the Atari Video Computer System. Finally, we had graphics and games that weren’t simple blinking lights.

All consoles came with the game Combat, a maze you had to navigate while battling each other with tanks.

As you bought new games, you were especially fortunate if you owned Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Break-Out.

I was recently saw a small version of the Atari with hundreds of built-in games for only $20. I have also seen new versions of some of our bygone toys such as the Easy Bake Oven and Lite Brite.

One can still find an occasional toy from the past sold new in the stores such as a Simon (yet another blinking light follow-the-pattern game), a Slinky or an Etch-A-Sketch. These toys seem to no have not needed any updating.

Even if you had every toy mentioned above, you eventually grew bored with them and wanted to do something different.

My seven-year-old daughter has so many toys and electronics that we have to rotate the ones she is allowed in her room. Yet, she will often lament that she is bored and has nothing to do.

I am quite sure that I, too, complained similarly to my mother.

As always, the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Most of her toys are still made up of just blinking lights and tiny electronic chips with switches that are either turned on or off. Sure, what they can do may be way more sophisticated, but game for game, I think the ‘70s toys have stood the test of time.

For another nostalgic post by Curt: