5 toys I used to have that I now miss

Stretch Armstrong

You could pull on Stretch's arms and legs and they would, of course, stretch. And that was fun. But not nearly as fun as cutting Stretch open to see what was inside of him. Which I once did. Only once, though, because after that, Stretch was ruined. For the record, while my memory may be failing me here, I seem to remember that he was filled with a reddish goo.

Electronic Battleship

This took longer than regular Battleship because you had to spend time before the game even started entering the positions of all of your ships (one slot at a time). But it was cool because it made these awesome shooting noises once you actually began playing. Alas, though, this was another toy that fell victim to my urge to see what was inside, as I believe my friend Matt and I ripped open the game console one day and were disappointed to find only a small circuit board and a few wires. Did it not occur to me that the game would be unplayable after that? Apparently not.

Spirograph

Aw, who didn't love Spirograph? I was (and remain) a terrible artist, with no drawing skills to speak of. But with Spirograph's cool system of plastic rings and gear wheels, you could make all sorts of professional-looking designs. None of which looked as good as the ones on the packaging above, but still, pretty neat. I think I got my Spirograph at a garage sale. I bought a lot of my toys at garage sales. It never occurred to me until just now that my childhood apparently resembled that of a character in a Dickens novel.

Evel Knievel Crash Car

So what you did was you put the car onto that red and white cranky thing on the left side of the photo, and you started turning the wheel really hard, faster and faster. And eventually the car would take off and run into the nearest wall (or dining room table, or refrigerator, or dog) and it would break into a million pieces. Well, actually more like four pieces. You had to use your imagination to make it a million. Theoretically, the little Evel Knievel guy inside the car would survive every crash, because that's what the real Evel Knievel did in a series of Saturday afternoon stunts on ABC's "Wide World of Sports" in the 70s. Seriously, kids, look this guy up on YouTube. He was certifiably crazy.

The Millennium Falcon

I received the Millennium Falcon for my 11th birthday in the fall of 1980, at a time when I looked not too dissimilar to the boy in the picture above. Eleven is a funny age to get something like this, because you're really right on the edge of not playing with stuff like a plastic space ship anymore. But "The Empire Strikes Back" had just been released six months earlier and Star Wars Fever was still raging with me and my friends. Among us, we had almost every Star Wars action figure imaginable, all of which we placed into my Millennium Falcon at one time or another, and all of which inevitably suffered violent deaths in the Millennium Falcon. Because every time we played with the toy, we concocted a scenario that ended with the ship crashing, being blown up, or otherwise coming to no good. That, in a nutshell, is 11-year-old boys for you.