July4: Top ten toys

 So this is going to be about the top 10 toys I have owned in my life. I'm doing them in chronological order rather than order of preference. That way I don't have to rank them.

1. Pooh Bear.

From what I've been told, this was given to me shortly after I was born. Right away, my parents decided that I should be a shill for Disney. When it was brand new, Pooh had two button eyes, the black velvet smile, and the trademark red shirt. Pooh has none of those things now. He's just oval shaped ball of orange fluff that only vaguely resembles a bear.

When I was an infant, my dad would put the bear on the edge of my bed and let it fall down. This made me laugh uproariously so he kept doing it over and over again.

2. Red balloon.

The red balloon was only in my possession for about an hour when I was two. I guess I got it at a shopping mall somewhere and it was the most important thing in the world. During the car ride home, I let go of the string and that balloon went right out the window and in to outer space. I was devastated and I wept over my lost balloon for about a week.

3. Bingo.

I guess my first few Christmases were pretty humdrum. When I was finally old enough to get excited about Christmas, I took one look at all the presents under the tree and then I cried and went back to bed. I was a real dope, I tell ya. It was one of the few Christmases when I had my parents entirely to myself. One year later and the present yield had to be split with a baby sister.

Somewhere in that first patch of early Christmases, I received a rocking horse (or, to be more accurate, a spring-mounted toy horse) named Bingo. There's a picture somewhere of me riding it, no hands on the handle, not at all looking pleased with myself. I guess I was at least a couple years away from always wanting to be the centre of attention.

4. Star Wars stuff

I didn't become a Disney shill but I sure became a Star Wars junkie. Like most kids, I was obsessed with all things Star Wars and I used to ask my best friend, Jason, unanswerable questions about the franchise like "What does Luke Skywalker like better, chocolate or vanilla?" It is a terrible thing that Jason has passed on now. That question was one of his most persistent memories of me.

So one year I got the Death Star and Jason got the Millennium Falcon. Between us we had a whole bunch of lesser spaceships and action figures* and we'd spend hours at a time replaying the Star Wars movie or coming up with scenarios of our own. I was always happy if I could be R2D2.

 I have vague memories of this spoiled kid who lived a few blocks away from me who claimed he had every single toy from Star Wars. He said he could replay the entire movie using his sets and action figures. I think he was devastated that none of us wanted to serve as his audience.

5. ELECTRONIC DETECTIVE

I was seven years old when I received Electronic Detective for Christmas in 1980. I had seen the game advertised on television and I fell in love with it immediately. Here is the commercial:

Man, if I saw that today, I'd STILL want that game. I had no idea who Don Adams was, had no idea that he had originated the roles of Maxwell Smart and Inspector Gadget, but it wasn't Mr. Adams that sold me on the game. It was the name. ELECTRONIC DETECTIVE. I was obsessed with detectives and I thought electronic things were pretty cool too. I knew that Electronic Detective wasn't a game for little kids (well, I believed that anyway) so I was a little scared that my parents would ignore it when they saw it on my Christmas list. Evidently, I built quite the case for it and was I ever excited when I opened it on Christmas morning.

I have written extensively on my love for this game and I even posted a YouTube tribute to it, which I attach below. I still love the game; it is still in my possession; it still works; I am still devastated when someone beats me at it. No one will play it with me though.

 

6. Atari 2600

Yeah, so I am a member of Generation X, which I sometimes call the home video game generation. That's because my generation was the first that was able to play video games at home. When my mom was a kid, her parents could bitch at her for spending all day in front of the television when it was so beautiful outside. My mom and dad had video games to complain about.

"I can't believe it." Those were the words I uttered when my dad invited me into the family room so I could behold the Atari 2600 hooked up to the television. I remember saying those words because I believed that the Atari 2600 cost as much money as a new car. I thought this was a supreme sacrifice on my dad's part.

The Atari came with a game called Combat, which was a series of one-on-one war themed games that you could play against an opponent. The other was Pac Man, which was light years away from the arcade version that had captured a nation and had inspired everything from Saturday morning cartoons to breakfast cereals.

Atari 2600 was a primitive system that had severe limitations. As such, the games became boring very quickly. I'm a moderate gamer today so I can say that one Atari game, Adventure, still stands as one of my absolute favourites.

7. Commodore 64

Later, the family got a Commodore 64 computer for Christmas. Although the Commodore later became more important to me because it gave me a medium to explore a fledgling writing talent (thanks to a primitive word processing program called PaperClip which would allow 243 lines of text before you had to save it as a file and then start a new document) it started its life as a means for entertainment. I received two Commodore 64 games for Christmas in 1985, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar and The Halley Project. Before that, my dad had bought me a game called Question that he picked up while on a business trip in Tucson.

I think my siblings and I had a few fights over who got the Commodore but none of them were particularly bloody and we seemed to resolve them amicably enough. The Commodore is still in my parents storage room in Calgary and, from what I recall, it still works.

8. Magic set.

I had abandoned all my Stars Wars stuff by the time I hit adolescence. I had a birthday coming up and my parents wanted to know what I'd like as a gift. I had recently developed an obsession with magic so I thought a magic set might be a nice thing. When my birthday arrived, I received the set shown above.

"Great Magician's Magic Set" is a nice try on the advertisers' part, who really wanted to convey that the plastic made in China tricks in that red box had once been performed by the likes of Houdini, Keller, and Thurston, whose likenesses appeared on the packaging. To be fair, the package did contain a miniature version of the cups and balls, which is to magic what the treble clef is to music. But the box did not contain miracles; it contained little plastic puzzles - a drawer that could vanish a die, a box where you could place a half dollar inside and then plunge eight nails through it. The most common reaction, after seeing one of these "miracles" was not "holy smokes" but "how does that work?"

No matter. The Great Magician's Set did, for me, one of the two things that it's supposed to do - it led me to expand my magical horizons in search of more bona fide miracles that were more suited to my style. The other thing it's supposed to do, what it usually does, is make the aspiring magician say "this is boring now" and then the old beloved magic set gets sold at a garage sale for 50 cents.

A funny story: One of the tricks in that box was the amazing multiplying rice trick. The idea was that you showed two bowls: one was full of rice and the other was empty. When you poured the rice into the empty bowl, the rice doubled in size. As a kicker, you would pour the excess rice out of that bowl only to show that the rest of the rice had, miracle alert, turned to water.

I loved the concept of the trick but I could never get it to work. No matter how hard I practiced, I'd inevitably wind up with a bunch of minute rice scattered all over the floor. I took my frustrations to the Society of Young Magicians meeting one Saturday afternoon and my mentor, Paul Alberstat, took me aside and said: "It helps if you cook the rice first."

9. Camcorder

I'd been wanting a camcorder all through junior high and high school. I wanted one so I could make goofy movies that I could present for the inevitable class presentations. In Grade 10 French class, we were told to pair up and do presentations on anything that had to do with Paris. My partner, Todd, and I conceived of a miniature spy movie that took place at the Eiffel Tower. The problem was we didn't have a camcorder to make it (we also didn't have proximity to the Eiffel Tower but I'll let it go at that.)

In the end, we had to satisfy ourselves with an unproduced screenplay which our teacher resentfully accepted. Too bad I didn't have a camcorder to make a fool of myself.

Well I got that camcorder for a high school graduation present. I still have it in my closet where it sits a dusty abandoned relic to my young manhood. There's a cardboard box next to it that's filled with Super 8 camcorder tapes documenting my life of many years ago. One day, when I have the time and technology, I will convert all of those tapes to digital files and I will scare myself to death watching a younger me do magic shows, stand-up comedy, go on dates, and play with the family dog.

Today, everyone has a camcorder on their phone. In retrospect, I'm happy that technology didn't exist way back when.

10. Vacuum cleaner

God bless my sister who knows that her nephew, who is autistic, loves vacuum cleaners. For his eighth birthday, she sent him a vacuum of his own. It's a mini vacuum but that doesn't matter. My kid still loves it and, whenever he goes home, the first thing he does is check that it's still there.

There used to be a museum of vacuum cleaners somewhere in Missouri. It is permanently closed now. Too bad. I would have liked to take my kid there. I wonder if he would have ever left.

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* I would like to shake the hand of the marketing executive who coined the term "action figure." He persuaded a generation of little boys that it's okay to play with dolls. I know I would have had a hissy fit if someone referred to my plastic Han Solo as a Star Wars doll.