Most boring toy

[Thestral]

My parents brought home these Tagamet stomach characters once and they got thrown in with everything else to become part of some army.

That's what I did too! Well, not the Tagamet, but throwing everything together to be part of some big random army. Worf, Donatello, some dinosaurs, hey look a couple horses and Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars... to name a few. Crossovers were my thing with my toys before I knew what crossovers were.

I liked making paper airplanes too, giving them different names and flying them off my parents deck to see which one would go furthest. If they wound up on the neighbor's roof it counted as an automatic win.

 

[Mary Ann]

When I was 6 or 7 years old, someone gave me a toy ironing board and iron. Like any kid think--or adult, for that matter--finds ironing fun. But the one saving grace was that this was way back when they still made toys out of cheap metal.

That metal ironing board made a handy weapon for attacking older sisters with. I tried sliding down the stairs with it, but the darn legs kept unfolding and made it hard to sit on.

I never liked all that girly stuff. I was really into Matchbox cars, trains and Legos.

I had an ironing board and iron like yours, and it was pretty much the only girly thing I played with. The iron was metal with a wooden handle, and I used to hold it against my mother's iron to get it hot so I could iron the hankerchiefs. I should point out that my ironing phase died out when I was 5, and it would be another 10 years before I ironed anything again, and that was under duress.

Ooh, I just remembered my brothers' Scaletrix (sp?) track. There were 4 of us kids, and we each had our own car. We got our money's worth out of that toy.

I agree with those of you who say that modern Lego pieces are too specialised. My older son is Lego mad, and spends nearly all his money on it, and while some of the sets are pretty cool I much prefer the 60s and 70s Lego I used to play with. The simple pieces were much more versatile, and I spent more time building my own creations than building the actual sets.

 

[scotpens]

This gets the prize for most boring toy ever.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iDyJXjbGl8[/yt]

ThinkGeek was (is?) selling a 2001: A Space Odyssey Monolith "action figure". A black block.

I think it is hilarious (like the Herbert Hoover Action Figure I once saw), but kids may be pretty bored with it (I doubt that kids are the target audience, anyway!).....

That's like a Franklin Delano Roosevelt Action Figure -- you can, uh, roll him around.

The cigarette holder would have to go, though.

 

[Showdown]

I loved Lego sets. Back in the day, my brother and I would make all sorts of stuff. We made tanks and space ships out of race cars.

I don't find Lego friends interesting, but I'm a guy. I don't its bad. It looks like Barbie version of Lego.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

My brother and I really wanted a Great Garloo for Christmas. The ad:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0p0WRhAp9o[/yt]

What is shown here but not really made clear is that Garloo is attached to his "remote control" by a cable that's no more than, oh, three or four feet long. The ad gives a rather misleading sense that you could control him from a distance.

Very disappointing.

 

[trekkiedane]

The best thing about chalk is drawing all over the outside of your house. Murals.

Once, a neighbor had remodeled and threw out a ton of drywall.

We drew on a half a block of our street with pieces of it.

I grew up in suburbs that were in the process of being build; us kids had a never-ending supply of drywall - add that it was a long time ago and at one point there was something the adults called an "energy crisis" which had resulted in car-driving being prohibited on Sundays... just imagine what suburban streets looked like Monday mornings

Crossbows and Catapults

I've never seen that game, but crossbows and catapults were amongst the things we quite often build out of Lego (and elastic bands).

When I was playing with legos there was no space sets, pirate sets or any other theme sets. There were just blocks, windows, roofs and doors, and wheels, trees, and boards. There weren't even any figures (they didn't come out until the 1970s).

So when we played with Legos we created from scratch.

When the first cogs came out (big yellow, medium blue and small red) I was given a 'set' -brilliant addition to the motors
I write 'set' because it wasn't so much a set in the sense that it was this one thing, it was just a box of cogs and whatnots to add to the just a box of blocks and whatnots you already had.

I must've had a lots and lots of most boring toy ever, I had a big room filled with stuff and back then people really went overboard on x-mas , but the thing I remember as the 'most boring ever' was the 12V Lego train-set:

This transformer:

and this train w tracks:

All it could do was drive around in a circle...

I already had the 4.5V motor;

But the 12V motor had the advantage of never running out of batteries AND you could adjust the speed of the motor from almost not moving to going really fast -That made this motor and the transformer the BEST toy ever... Just imagine all the motorized weaponry you could build

On the subject of the five best toys of all time, the creek down two short cul-de-sac's from where I lived, definitely ranked up there (why isn't water on the list?) -we would even build tricorders and phasers out of Lego and go there and be on an alien planet

Almost forgot my opinion of the ATM-play-set: sounds like one of the things that could make a boring board game, like Monopoly, a bit less boring -but on itself it's about as much fun as a plastic cash register...

 

[Mary Ann]

the thing I remember as the 'most boring ever' was the 12V Lego train-set:

This transformer:

and this train w tracks:

All it could do was drive around in a circle...

I can assure you that, had you been given more accessories to the basic train, it was a great toy. My youngest brother (who's 4 years older than me) had one of these, and seeing as he had loads of tracks, points, level crossings, multiple engines, and so forth, we could build a great track. All our relatives knew to buy my brother Lego for his birthday and Christmas, so his collection built up very quickly. When we moved back to Canada from the Netherlands we took the train set, and it ran on a transformer for years.

 

[trekkiedane]

I can assure you that, had you been given more accessories to the basic train, it was a great toy. My youngest brother (who's 4 years older than me) had one of these, and seeing as he had loads of tracks, points, level crossings, multiple engines, and so forth, we could build a great track. All our relatives knew to buy my brother Lego for his birthday and Christmas, so his collection built up very quickly. When we moved back to Canada from the Netherlands we took the train set, and it ran on a transformer for years.

My point was that it takes more than a circle track for a train set to be a great toy (and that a powerful motor is a great toy in itself), once the entire top of the transformer is filled with point-remotes you can build some intricate systems and even -however weird it sounds- play with the train set as if it were a train set

 

[Mary Ann]

Indeed. My brother and I literally wore out that train set. It's such a shame that Lego never brought out that electric train in North America in the '70s.

 

[trekkiedane]

^'Wore out' -I only had to get a new motor to put into the Lego motor once

Fun sidetrack: at some point, when I was a kid, our washing machine broke down... caught fire actually; the small electric motor that ran the timer literally burned out.

Being an electrician dad of course tried to do the repair himself, but the motor that had 'malfunctioned' was not a spare part -the entire timer was! now such a timer came to a price of about third of a whole new washer so my parents couldn't afford the needed part.
One week of laundromats and they'd had enough of that. So dad swiped the transformator and 12V Lego motor and some of my Meccano (which technically speaking was his) and made a redneck-repair to the washer-timer

You could say that we had the first washer in Denmark with an adjustable washing-cycle

 

[Lindley]

(and that a powerful motor is a great toy in itself)

Indeed, I rigged up all kinds of things with a motorized pulley I had when I was little.