re: Favorite Childhood Christmas Presents You Remember

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5 years old, best Christmas ever

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I was coming here to post the six million dollar man and the evil knievel wheely bike, but this was a great one I had, too.

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Wore the contact pads off the bottoms of them.

And this was a great Christmas around 1977:


I was a Saints and Cowboys fan, but my grandmother had no clue what to get so I wound up with the entire NFC Central.

Thingmaker set, 1970.

You pour the goop into the mould and place it on an electric hot plate. The heat cures the goop, producing plastic creepy crawling creatures.
For an eight year old boy, what could possibly go wrong with an open-faced hot plate that gets to 400 degrees?

Drum kit

As a kid my little small town in Arkansas had a field with a little mini-runway paved in it for people to fly RC planes, they'd have RC plane festivals and shows there every year. My grandpa took me a few times because I was absolutely obsessed with wanting a remote control plane and I loved watching them.

Well, one Christmas he finally hints to me that he's got me an RC plane, I literally couldn't sleep on Christmas Eve I was so excited. Then Christmas morning I go to unbox it, and I find one of these:



It's still a working, flying airplane but it's literally attached to cables that go to a handle the flyer has to hold. You have to stand in the middle and fly it in a circle, pulling up on the handle to elevate and down on the handle to descend.

My grandpa took me to fly it in the school parking lot literally less than 30 minutes after opening it. I could only fly it for about 2 minutes before I got too dizzy to even focus on the thing anymore and had to take a break, but I freakin loved every second of it. Flying it, and going to those RC airplane shows with my grandpa are probably my fondest memories with him outside of fishing on the White River.

A couple decades later my mom finally admitted to me that my grandpa was wanting to get me this fully kitted out RC airplane that would hang with the best of them at the shows, but my mom talked him out of spending that much money for one kid and not the others and she was worried I'd break it quickly with my lack of experience. So I wound up with the cable controlled one, which still made me the happiest kid alive that Christmas

Electric Football and Lever Hockey games.

This…
Played with that mountain thing for years…had dinosaurs attack the soldiers etc…it was my favorite toy of all time…made from hard plastic…my little brother who is 6 years younger than me played with it for years as well.
My mom tried to buy my brother a new one but it was crappy and cheap and he just kept playing with my old one.

Not quite the same lead up but I also got that same airplane as you did and was just as dizzy trying to turn in circles to watch it fly on the cable. still at home in a box somewhere.

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also smash up derby

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This one keeps popping up when I try to find the shitty late 80s toy I really wanted one year. It was a quasi R/C demolition derby toy. It had control/power wires from the cars running to a non functional score board structure above the walled arena that went back to two controllers that were along the arena wall on opposite sides to control the cars. The cars had parts that popped off and made the car non functional to win the derby.

It ended up being a piece of crap and broke like the day after Christmas and my parents returned it and got me something else instead of dealing with my bitching about it being broken. Wish I could figure out what that thing was.