I used to play for freaking HOURS with triangle shaped pieces of wood intended for use as geometry-education toys. The single triangles were fighters, the two-triangles-put-together were bombers. The six-triangles-hexagon was a death star. The twelve-triangles-put-together-dodecagon was I forget what but it was vicious. I basically played flatland star wars, going “wshooo” “pyew”

A childs imagination is a function of money and time(). With less money (ergo, less toys), and more time(Both time(free) and time(elapsed)), it grows.

i kind of agree that kids today have no need to have imaginations of their own because of the toys available… on the other hand things like video games/higher tech toys do have their advantages. all in moderation, though. i think a healthy balance of sticks and mud vs. wii and computer is what it’s all about.

Also, these toys didn’t encourage imagination. I was a kid when these toys came out and these toys were interesting for about fifteen minutes. Army men were cool. So were empty boxes, sticks, and dirt clods.

That said, these old Ideal toys were lame! Ideal even eventually spoiled Moustrap, as clever as it was, by following up with two additional Rube Goldberg inspired “games”: Fish Bait game and Crazy Clock game. Flops.

But there’s always some really good toys, too. My favorite toy from 1963 has to be the VacuFormer. Making fun stuff out of melted plastic was really “hot!”

One really BIG difference between then and now is TIME. Yesteryear’s kids had plenty of unplanned leisure time to explore and play, or just read comic books. Even the toy tv ads were slow paced and much l-o-g-e-r. By comparison today’s kids are hyper-scheduled and have ZERO unplanned, free time..and they grow older younger. By the time kids are 8 years old, they are pretty much done with the toy store—they’re off to the Apple store or the mall for a Xbox or DS.

Also, besides the little racist characters, does anyone actually think toy advertising has changed that much? I feel like I could turn on certain channels and see pretty much the same exact thing right now.

Gaming consoles have a lot of good about them, but what they don’t offer is a simple template for kids to project their playtime fantasies. And I think herein lies the true value of ‘boring’ toys.

coop

On the other hand, a carrier-bag of toy soldiers sucked up great swathes of my time as a child. The globemaster would have been cool. Well, the plane looked pants, but the stuff inside would have been a great addition to my army.

The dick tracey car… I really *like* that very primitive “remote control” they have going, there. The siren-whistle woulda been suitably parent-annoying, too.

The moving doll is very uncanny valley, yeah :)

I used my army men and a shoebox to recreate the Rolling Stones playing Altamont.

you got an app for that? zzzzzzz…

Toys like the plane, doll, and car require a kid to use his or her head, create scenarios, and has almost limitless potential. With the instant feedback (make the right decision or your character dies) of video games the creativity really isn’t there.

Give me and my boy a set of blocks, some versatile toys that could be used for many things, and a small patch of woods to explore and make up games in, and we’ll be happy.

I took the bottle apart to see how it worked. It was a two concentric cylinders with the liquid between them. That small amount of liquid then fit in the cap of the bottle. It would have been a happy discovery; -IF- I could have put the damn thing back together again.

I had a friend who had the Globetrotter set. This was when you could order 300+ soldiers from the back of comic books. I’m sure we were impressed then, but now it looks like they put wings on a box that a few crappy soldiers come in. IIRC the beacon part of the search-light shown in the ad was actually a foil covered round piece of cardboard. Batteries (and fun) not included.

Which begs the question, was the monkey banging cymbals ever fun in a non-ironic way?

OTOH that Globemaster? I’d have killed for that.

Lemme tell you, if you’re just making Star Wars scenarios with a Star Wars Lego set, _you’re_ the one with a limited imagination.

Likewise, my kid and his friends will play something on the Wii — like a Zelda game — for about 30 min. Then, they’ll spend the next hour or so playing at being Link… with improvised swords and shields, no less. If you encourage and let kids play, they will _play_. If you just give them an electronic doo-dad and say, “Have at it, kids. Just stay here and don’t bother me,” then they’ll become waddling meatbags.