When toys were good...

This is all Mum's fault, mentioning Maskatron.

Let's also pay our respects to...

Star Wars - too obvious, but very few people remember Nien Numb, the strange vagina-faced co-pilot to Lando Calrissian in Return of the Jedi. What makes him special is that you had to save up tokens for him, send them off then wait like a, well, hyperactive impatient child until it arrived. Even now I can still gauge the quality of a Star Wars character by how it feels in your hand... TIE Fighter Pilot - good, AT-AT Commander - bad. I also have fond memories of having to make the characters stand at 90 degrees to each other because they couldn't hold their guns straight.

Micronauts - apparently the mission of the Micronauts was to put the eyes out of children across the country, such was the number of pointy firing things they boasted. This was the Force Commander which I remember owning. See those red rockets and the bullet in his belly button? They fired out, fast! Most of the rest of my Micronauts were hand-me-downs but that didn't make them any less lethal.

Evel Knievel - cunningly modeled on the real Evel in that it would career wildly round the living room crashing from skirting board to skirting board before collapsing in a heap under the dining table. Unless it wasn't correctly engaged in the "gyro energizer" in which case it would miss out the skirting board bit and go straight to the collapsing bit.

Zoids - I got this Zoid on my P7 trip to Edinburgh. I also bought a real fountain pen which felt very sophisticated in P7. I actually left both of these precious items in the hotel, but they forwarded them onto the school, which was nice of them. Zoids were wind up robots based on animals which you chose, bought, unpacked, assembled then left in a hotel room.

Transformers - the link shows "Hound", my first Transformer bought in the wee toy shop which used to be at the top of the Eastgate Centre in Inverness. The box had coded stats on it, only visible when you used the mystical "red cellophane"...quite expensive now, like. Special mention should be made here to the Rock Lords, who could transform into...rocks. Very impressive when all rolling down a hill into battle, less so the rest of the time.

Action Man - I wasn't huge into Action Man, but I think a special mention should go to the well meaning person who bought me the Action Man deep sea exploration outfit. Nice looking it may be, but where is a 7 year old boy supposed to play with this? The bath wasn't nearly deep enough so mine ended up clomping his way round the garden in Fort William looking more like a charity marathon runner than a man of action...

...and then this baby arrived on the scene and nothing was ever quite the same.