Old Toys ...

[WhiteCrow]

Good lord fans huh! It's like we get to a certain age and go into a toy buying frenzy all over again. You look at some posts here and it's people going into overdrive collecting toy sets.

But what about first time around? We all had a point where we reached a certain age, and got rid of toys, but did you clear them all out? Or did you hang on to just a couple because they were very, very special to you.

I thought it would be nice to have a thread for those special toys and the special stories.

For me two special ones I had to keep were ...

Remote Controlled R2D2



This guy is still at my mums on display - I'm not allowed to have him yet. I lost his remote control ages ago, no problem though as his left motor stopped working in 1986 anyway. I just love R2D2 toys - more I'm ashamed to say than K9 ones.

I loved robots and computers, and R2D2 always reflected a competence in engineering I wanted to have. He kind of stood guard in my room, somehow I always found that kind of reassuring. I also remember playing with him after K-9 and company, and leaving him on - he started doing his own thing after I left the room (must have been radio static), but just for a moment I thought he was coming alive.

The same thing happened when I pressed a sequence of buttons on my K-9 remote control this year.

[WhiteCrow]

To stop this becoming an uber-post I've split this into two ...

The other favourite from my childhood was this Star Was Imperial Cruiser, which we got whilst on holiday in Wales - I never saw them anywhere else.

This was just a legendary toy for me. I used to use this as my fill in space ship, not always Star Wars, in fact I soon seemed to build up a fleet of similar ships, but this was always my "flag ship".



What really caught my imagination as a child was the detail on the toy (looking at it today I'm still fascinated, making it almost a work of art) - it's like a giant circuit board, filled with interesting lumps and bumps on the surface, including a mysterious piping.

I guess as an engineer in training this is where my imagination took off. I would look at all the detail and imagine purpose to every section, every hatch. The piping I assumed to be some kind of underground train type "turbolift" for getting around the ship, I asked my son, and he thought it might be a power cable for sections of the ship (never thought of that myself).

I had several notebooks about the book, I imagined in notes and blueprints it being the flagship of my own (somewhat Star Trek ripoff) stories, keeping details about the Earth Alliance who ran them, the brave Captain Epton who ran it, the neutronic power core, the robot repair droids, and the bizzare crystaline robots they faught against (imagine evangelical Cybermen who've found God).

It's something I've really enjoyed passing on to my son, and he loves it as much as he goes, with it transporting his Star Wars risk army. Looking at it it fuelled my imagination as both an engineer and kind of started my aspirations to being a writer (still aspiring).

I still occasionally come across some of the notebooks I kept which are in the loft. I have to say though they are bloody awful, the way they are written. But to me they are lovely because it shows in detail my imagination at work - even if kind of ripping off everything going. I may yet have a career in Battlestar Galactica!

[Paul Monk]

I had one of those. Die cast metal with a plastic bit on top.
The one I had had a section that slid open in the bottom and it contained Princess Leia's tiny ship from the first film in it.

[WhiteCrow]

I had one of those. Die cast metal with a plastic bit on top.
The one I had had a section that slid open in the bottom and it contained Princess Leia's tiny ship from the first film in it.

Yes that's the one - although the detail on the plastic underside is nowhere near as good as that on the top.