Did anyone else want this toy as a kid?

Mark1960

We used to make guns from sticks, and branches, and run around the woods playing cops & robbers (Harry Roberts and all that), but I do remember that particular gun from seeing it in the toy shop. The most lethal weapon I ever got my hands on was a spud gun. Can anybody remember them! You had to carry a potato round with you to reload! How bizarre!

Funkfingers

I remember the gun and war themed toys of the late Sixties and early Seventies. As ICBM mentions, these were an accepted norm at the time.

A few years later, the fashionable (i.e. television advertised) thing to have was the Raleigh Chopper bicycle. A lousy cycling experience with the added hazard for boys of impaling one’s recently dropped parts on the crossbar-mounted gear shift lever. 

EricTheWeary

ICBM said:

It was a different world back then. Daytime TV films were all cowboys & indians or WWII - an endless stream of baddies being mown down and guns in almost every frame - war comics were everywhere, and it wasn't thought politically incorrect for boys to have toy guns and run around pretending to shoot everyone in sight...

For quite a while my comic every week was Warlord. I was about 11. Just pages of people shooting Nazis. 

ICBM

Funkfingers said:

A few years later, the fashionable (i.e. television advertised) thing to have was the Raleigh Chopper bicycle. A lousy cycling experience with the added hazard for boys of impaling one’s recently dropped parts on the crossbar-mounted gear shift lever. 

I desperately wanted one, but my dad refused - not so much because of the gear lever but their tendency to involuntarily wheelie, go right over and smash the back of your head on the road. He was actually right.

I got a reissue one for my kids a few years ago - it's 'wrong' in terms of vintage accuracy in that it has a modern saddle set further forward, and a handlebar-mounted gear shift - but it's actually a much better bike.

I didn't buy them reissue toy guns though. Not least because they're girls .

Funkfingers

#Sexist.

Kittyfrisk

ICBM said:

Funkfingers said:

A few years later, the fashionable (i.e. television advertised) thing to have was the Raleigh Chopper bicycle. A lousy cycling experience with the added hazard for boys of impaling one’s recently dropped parts on the crossbar-mounted gear shift lever. 

I desperately wanted one, but my dad refused - not so much because of the gear lever but their tendency to involuntarily wheelie, go right over and smash the back of your head on the road. He was actually right.

I got a reissue one for my kids a few years ago - it's 'wrong' in terms of vintage accuracy in that it has a modern saddle set further forward, and a handlebar-mounted gear shift - but it's actually a much better bike.

I didn't buy them reissue toy guns though. Not least because they're girls .

Action Man ? 

ICBM

Kittyfrisk said:

Action Man ? 

I tried, I really did - when they were small we tried to avoid anything too stereotypically gender-specific... but they wanted Barbie and Baby Annabel.

Actually to be honest there is a giant water gun somewhere in the loft that looks like something out of Star Wars - other than being pink and yellow .

steven70

k

   

VimFuego

ESBlonde said:

Yep I remember it well enough. The boy across the road had one, the rest of us made wooden 'guns' in my dads shed. In those far off days real toys were hard to come by, we had trees and the neighbourhood.

jeez, I'm amazed you had the time or energy for playing, especially after your 16 hour shifts down the mine.

Sassafras

Kittyfrisk said:

ICBM said:

Funkfingers said:

A few years later, the fashionable (i.e. television advertised) thing to have was the Raleigh Chopper bicycle. A lousy cycling experience with the added hazard for boys of impaling one’s recently dropped parts on the crossbar-mounted gear shift lever. 

I desperately wanted one, but my dad refused - not so much because of the gear lever but their tendency to involuntarily wheelie, go right over and smash the back of your head on the road. He was actually right.

I got a reissue one for my kids a few years ago - it's 'wrong' in terms of vintage accuracy in that it has a modern saddle set further forward, and a handlebar-mounted gear shift - but it's actually a much better bike.

I didn't buy them reissue toy guns though. Not least because they're girls .

Action Man ? 

Valve amps and soldering irons?

Sassafras

I remember when all this was fields.

midlifecrisis

i remeber that johhny gun thing, if i remeber it was about £5, a fair whack in those days. I never wanted one, i wasnt into guns or action man, to me it was just dolls for boys. i always wanted a kite though.

BeardyAndy

My Dad was a gamekeeper and my Grandad a gunsmith so I was bought my first shotgun at 6, a Beretta 5 shot 20 bore semi automatic (sounds a lot more hardcore than it really was!) I was never really allowed toy guns as the whole "pointing guns at people" was frowned upon in my family for obvious reasons!

57Deluxe

best TV Ads for toys ever were ALL the Mattel ads in the 60s/70s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57AKK4mCRv8

ChuckManual

This is what I most wanted...



Never got it. 

Kilgore

ChuckManual said:

This is what I most wanted...



Never got it. 

I had one, but I really wanted the Duke Caboom one. 

p90fool

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I don't think a lot of people appreciate how much the Second World War formed us growing up in the couple of decades after it. 

We were obsessed with it, it was everywhere, comics, films, TV - it still pervaded everyday life. 

Our playground right up until the early 70s was a blitzed street with staircases sticking up out of the rubble, we had an air raid shelter on the green in between the houses and half my relatives lived in concrete prefabs built to replace the bombed streets.

Playing war games was the most natural thing in the world, as was wanting to own the best toy gun on the street. 

prowla

p90fool said:

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, I don't think a lot of people appreciate how much the Second World War formed us growing up in the couple of decades after it. 

We were obsessed with it, it was everywhere, comics, films, TV - it still pervaded everyday life. 

Our playground right up until the early 70s was a blitzed street with staircases sticking up out of the rubble, we had an air raid shelter on the green in between the houses and half my relatives lived in concrete prefabs built to replace the bombed streets.

Playing war games was the most natural thing in the world, as was wanting to own the best toy gun on the street. 

Picture Library comics: Commando, War, etc.

tony99

ChuckManual said:

This is what I most wanted...



Never got it. 

haha I had that, it was shit

I think back now to some of the tribulations I put my star wars figures through, I used to come up with various ways of punishing the baddies, at-at commander suffered the most, he ended up in a salad spinner at one point

axisus

I remember desperately wanting the Rock em sock em robot fighting game in the early 70s. Never got it of course, too expensive. I was quite thrilled a few years ago when it turned up in Toy Story 2!