heroes in a half shell

over the years i have collected many toys, and sold almost as many in garage sales. some how the immediate cash flow was worth getting rid of so many toys that made me so happy. i used to have tons and tons of teenage mutant ninja turtles stuff! i had dozens of figures, i even had a really cool pizza shooter tank thingy! over time all of them have gone the way of the bargain bin garage sale. all except the original turtles themselves. i could never quite convince myself to give up these originals. and now, i'm glad i never did!
i spent so much time playing with these guys. if i wasnt playing with them, i was using my imagination pretending to be them! leonardo was always my favorite- he had two swords, after all!

car pens

these came in a wendy's kids meal. they are just pens with caps in the shape of cars. i remember getting them and thinking 'aw, how lame- its not even from a movie or anything!', but then it turned out that they were tons of fun! the wheels on the cars actually turned better than some matchbox cars i've had! i loved the fact that i had two of them, that way i could always play with them like they were in a race or something. i would always imagine while i played with them that they were really fast cars, but when the caps came off, then they could turn into 'turbo' cars that could rocket into the air and could fly. ah, the imagination of youth!

pack man

i got this when i was pretty little from a flea market. i am not really sure why i got it, but its probably just because it has pac-man on it. its a small toy backpack (about three inches tall). i used to love filling it with stuff and then strapping it on to my big action figures and pretending they were going on a hike.

steelcase truck

my dad has worked at steelcase all my life, his father had worked there for fifteen years before him too. it is a top of the line office furnature maker. i remember when i was growing up going over to my grammas house where she had a huge steelcase truck toy that was about two feet long. when ever we would go over there it was the first thing i would rush to get. when i was about six it was the coolest thing in the world- a toy of the place my dad worked! in high school i still looked back fondly at that truck. my parents were looking for some new office chairs for their desks at home, so we went to the steelcase employee store. and there, sitting on one of the shelves was that same giant toy truck! at this point i was too old to play with it like i used to, but i did get this littler version to put on the shelf in my room. its only about 6 inches long, but every time i look at it i remember the great times i had growing up in my grammas house.

rubics cube

the whole rubics cube thing always interested me. i remember getting the regular cube once from gemmon's, a hardware store that my dad and mom would always drag me to. in middle school there was a bit of a resurgence in its popularity among my friends, i remember nathan kuperus was really fascinated by them. we would spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the sides. he was pretty good and could get multiple sides at once. i always remained a novice and could only ever get one side at a time. a few years later i remember coming across another version of the cube, but this time it was cut at different angles and had lopsided bits to try and figure out! i am even worse at this one. every once in a while i will still pull these out and give them a go, making absolutely no improvement, then frustratedly throwing them back into the storage bin i found them in.

reindeer

im not entirely sure where this came from. for some reason i think it might have been from a fast food joint as a christmas toy with a kids meal. its basically a beenie baby reindeer before there was such a thing as a beenie baby. im not sure why, but i really loved this thing! i would spend hours on end playing with it, trying to get it to stand, throwing it up in the air and catching it. i was pretty young, so i must have been easily ammused. this was not actually my original reindeer, i think this one is actually my sisters. my original one somehow got ripped. one of its legs got ripped and the little plastic beans poored out. i was so sad, so i made a splint for his leg out of cardboard and rubberbands. i was a strange child...

edward scissorhands and crow

among my (many) obsessions growing up were these two movies: 'edward scissorhands', and 'the crow'. im not entirely sure why i was obsessed with them, but i was.
i saw edward scissorhands when it game out on tape and i really loved it, i even got my dad to watch it! i remember many times day dreaming about what it might be like to have scissorhands, i think i might have even gone so far as to make a fake pair out of cardboard and playing around in the backyard imagining i was trimming the bushes into different animal shapes.
my fascination with the crow is a little harder to explain. the movie was rated R, so my mom refused to let me see it, but for some reason i was still obsessed with it. i think it might have stemmed from the fact that at the time it came out i was just starting to explore the world of comics beyond superheroes, and i remember paging through a few issues of 'the crow' comic book and really being entranced. im sure some of my interest in the movie was also brought on by the death of the actor brandon lee during the filming of it. i must have had some morbid curiosity to see it that i just couldnt let go of. years later mcfarlane toys made figures of these two characters, which i obviously had to buy. the figures i still have, and they came with these weird looking mini poster holders. i guess they were so that you could display them behind the figure? i dont know, but i kept them anyway...

x-men figures

i always loved action figures, and i really loved comic books, so it was a dream come true when they started making action figures of x-men characters! at the time i really thought they looked great. whenever we would go to the store i would try and get my mom to buy me a new one, shes a bit of a push over, so i had a ton of them!
pictured here are cable, one of my favorite characters at the time; longshot; magneto, who had real magnets in his body; cyclops, which i won from fox (explained here); wolverine; and on the back are two characters who i have no idea who they are... these guys always came with the craziest accessories, which were always fun to play with, but the one thing that annoyed me was that most of the accessories would only fit the hands of that particular character and none others. that always struck me as poor designing...

micro machines

one of my favorite toys growing up was micro machines. all they were was just littler matchbox cars, but for some reason i really loved them. i know these things are still being sold in stores now, but they were a ton cooler back then. they used to be a lot smaller then they make them now, they were about the size of a penny, and surprisingly detailed.
i would play with these things for hours! i had a couple play sets to mess around on, so they kept me busy for hours. there was even a time when my friend joel and i would build play sets of our own. we would spend hours and days building race tracks out of paper and tape for these things to whiz around in.
one really fun thing about my micro machines is that i still have most of them, and my little nephew jackson plays with them now, so they are still being enjoyed!

transformer

this is my first transformer, or at least whats left of him... i remember getting this for christmas. my brother got one that year too, i got the cop car, and he got the race car. we both loved getting them, and for me, this started my life long love of all things transformers!
this one is from back in the day, back when they used to make the outsides out of metal instead of cheap plastic like they do now.
almost all the transformers at the time had one transforming move in common: the waist swivel. almost all the vehicles included twisting the top half around and making it face the other way. it was a cool twist, but unfortunately, it made the middle of the figure very weak and easy to break, as is evident by what remains of this poor toy...