Reader Top Ten Greatest Toys of Childhood: Bruce Nims

Reader and friend, Bruce Nims, starts us off this Saturday morning with his list of the top ten greatest toys of his childhood.

Bruce writes:

"As always, it is a pleasure to be speaking with you and another interesting top 10 list.  Here is my top 10 list of toys I played with a boy.  As always, these are in no particular order:

1. Starbird -- Based upon what other readers have submitted this was an extremely popular toy and probably my overall favorite.  Because of a lack of organization between my parents and my uncle, I ended up with 2 of these for Christmas and it was pure heaven.  Once of the most beautiful space ships toys of the era with really interesting sound affects (the engine sound would change pitch as you pointed the nose up or down).  The front part was detachable as were the vertical stabilizers (which were actually small fighter craft.).  You could remove the main engine and attach to the front section and make a much smaller craft.  The detail on the toy was really well done (for example, there were landing rocket vents on the ventral side of the wings).

2. Big Trak  - Programmable futuristic tank with a laser cannon.  What more do you want!  A lot of fun and I spent countless hours to program this thing to navigate throughout my house shooting at imaginary targets.  A lot of fun.

3.Millennium Falcon – An excellent version of one the most interesting looking space ships in movie history.

4.X-wing  -- Who didn't want one of these?  I never understood the light in the nose cone as that was not a weapon.  It would have been much cooler if there was a little LED light at the end of each of the 4 laser cannons, but that was probably asking too much.

5.TIE fighter - Another great toy, but like the Xwing, the LED light made no sense.  There should have been twin LED lights in the front to emulate the twin laser cannons of the actual ship.  J

6.Eagle One -  A lot has been said about this toy by others and I agree with it all.  An amazingly detailed toy.  The thing I like about this more than any other toy on this list is that the proportions and scale seems a lot more realistic.  (The Star Wars toys were obviously squished to fit a certain size package but still work with the figures for instance).  The eagle one and the figures felt just right.  Only downside is that this thing was huge (at least for a small boy).

7.Ramagon – A tinker toys knock off but I preferred these because they allowed for more interesting shapes, looked futuristic and had snap in panels so you could make enclosures.  I really loved these things.

8.Micronauts Rocket Tubes – Another futuristic toy that I just loved and spend many hours playing though truth be told, there really wasn't much you would do with it.  The aircars could go forward or backwards there were not enough track (tube?) sections to have much variety.  Just the whole thing just looked cool as hell and those cars moved pretty damn fast.

  

9. Shogun Warriors Mazinga – A giant robot with a laser sword and a hand that shot rockets (and shot them FAR).  Nothing more needs to be said.  Just awesome

  

10. Super Joe Avenger Pursuit Craft – From what I understand this was supposed to be a spin off from the GI Joe line of toys.  Super Joe was about 8 inches tall, instead of 12 inch tall normal GI Joe figures of the time, which allowed for more interesting vehicles such as this one, the Avenger Pursuit Craft.  I think these toys were only made a couple of years and I don't know if any other vehicles were made.  This was a VTOL designed vehicle (the wing would pivot to allow the engines to point down) that could land on land or sea and had several different modes.  It also had a nice storage compartment in the back to hold all of Super Joe's gear.

11.  Colecovision (yeah, I'm cheating but I really need more than 10 here).  – This was the most powerful game system of its generation by a long short.  The arcade ports where the best ports you could get (in fact, some of the ports were better than the arcade gameplay wise).  It can with Donkey Kong packed it.  It was expandable and one of the expansion modules would let you play Atari 2600 games.  Another of the expansion modules was a true roller ball controller."

Bruce: I love your list, and our lists share at least three items in common (Big Trak, the Eagle, and the Star Bird).  All of your choices are excellent, but I was most thrilled to see that Super Joe plane/vehicle.  I have never seen one of those toys, but as a kid I loved the Super Joe toy line. I had the villain ("The Intruder?") and Joe with his light-up chest pack.  However, I didn't even know that vehicles were made for those figures.  

I also had a dear friend in my home town who had the Colecovision, which -- by the time it came out -- rather significantly outclassed my Atari 2600.  I still remember playing Zaxxon and Donkey Kong on the Colecovision at his house...

I also had the Rocket Tubes. They were a birthday gift from my Aunt Patty and Uncle Bob, and I loved them. I've been wanting to get a set of those for Joel, but I'm always afraid to pull the trigger on E-Bay, because I don't know if the toy will still work once I get it here.  There would be nothing worse than assembling it together, and then finding out that it's non-functional.  We had that happen not too long ago with a Terminator 2 Bio Flesh Regenerator...

Anyway, this is such an awesome list.  We must have had very similar childhoods because I had eight of the eleven toys on your list, and positively played them OUT!