I had a General Custer figure from this toy line, but I never knew anything about Johnny West until long after I napalmed it along with a lot of my 12" GI Joes.
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The Evil Kneivel toys were great, even with the scraped knuckles trying to get it to go faster each time.
Also had the Battlestar Galactica launcher. It quickly became a “what else can we launch with this” toy.
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Barbies! (Of course.)
Tonkas and Matchbox cars/trucks!
Last time I was at Mom’s house, I saw my old Fisher Price Safari set and was touched to note that we kids loved it but still managed to keep it complete/intact. She or my brother probably put it on ebay. Which is fine with me. I don’t have room to display that kind of thing.
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Holy cowchips, Batman! I remember those Johhny West toys from visiting my grandparents. They had all girls, so I’m guessing they belonged to my youngest, horse-loving aunt. I remember all of the little accessories and stuff still being there, too.
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My brother and I had quite a collection of Matchbox cars back in the day.
I also had this playset:
Really cool for a kid who had never been to an airport in his life at the time.
My brother had this:
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My sis got the Barbie airline set one year and we loved it. Really the same type of carrying case which unfolded to be the galley and part of an aisle with seats. With the plane exterior painted/printed on the outside. SO. COOL.
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Tonkas weren’t so tough. We sat on them and rode them down a hill and crashed them, and the stupid cheap axles bent.
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We must be about the same age. I had all those, including MUSCLE, which frankly I forgot existed until you posted that pic. Thanks for the memories (seriously).
I’ll add two more from this era:
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Go-Bots, which were shameless cheap rip-offs of Transformers and MASK
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Crystar. I don’t remember the story behind them, but they were action figures about the size of Star Wars figures and themed to fire/lava and crystal/ice.
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The Sears Wish Book encouraged us to play Oppression by Marx.
edit: no shade at John Ford, his depiction of Native Americans was entirely atypical of his time, thankfully.
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The cool thing about these toys is that they came FREE in boxes of laundry detergent!
As a young boy, I had the Pogo, Porky Pine, Howland Owl and Albert the Alligator figures. As an older boy, I used Ebay to complete the collection. These, along with my Viewmaster reels, are the only toys I still have left from the dear, departed past.
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I loved Pogo… the strip was a bit before my time, but my dad had a bunch of the original paperback collections. I read them until they (unfortunately) fell apart.
Amazing some of the imaginative stuff Walt Kelly came up with, both in this strip and elsewhere.
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Just give me a second to put my Transformers cap on…
As much as I believed that exact thought when I was younger. Go Bots actually released in North America in 1983 predating the launch of Transformers in '84 and M.A.S.K. in '85.
This of course is now completely irrelevant as all three are part of a shared universe under the Hasbro Brand with G.I.Joe, Inhumanoids, and others.
Bonus useless factoid: the original toyline never had a hyphen in the name, that was only included after Hasbro bought the line from Tonka and first used on TF Generation 2 releases.
The 2018 Go-Bots comic used it as a way to differentiate it was in a new continuity.
Crystar was one of REMCOs many attempts to be relevant in the 80’s, looked cool, had a Marvel comic, but yhea… pretty forgettable.
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If you would care to revisit some of the Pogo strips, Fantagraphics is publishing a series of books reprinting the entire daily & Sunday strips. They are already on Vol. 8, which goes up to the year 1964.
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Um, O.G.I. Joe has a question?
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Does it have to do with him getting a grip?
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I was the weird kid that wanted the plastic ice cubes, bricks, and barrels the toy vehicles plowed through in the commercials.
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