What was your favorite toy as a child

[shadowmouse]

Don’t be reductive. Books aren’t toys, they’re far more than that.

Welp, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you don't know much about my childhood. My cat wasn't a toy. AH board games weren't really toys. Swimming and martial arts weren't toys. Aside from that I spent my time with ... books.

I was a novelty discovered in an educational experiment, a designated prodigy. I didn't exactly have a normal childhood.

[Ghostpanther]

Growing up extremely poor, I do not remember having enough toys to even remember a favorite one. Maybe if you want to count a Dr. Pepper glass bottle, which I pretended was a Pontiac. I did not have my first bicycle until I got out of the Army and bought one for myself 5 years after.

[letssee]

HOT WHEELS

aside from consoles though

[Powerogue]

Legos and a lot of Fisher Price's old stuff. Not sure what it is in retrospect with them and making characters without eyes. But they had pirates, knights, darn near every theme I could want.

[Kyphael]

The 90's version I owned was a knock off though but still my favorite toy I ever owned and I think I got it as a birthday present, 8th or 9th, I've honestly forgotten which.

[endersblade]

Bone Age or Dino Riders. I had almost all of both of them.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Transformer action figures
G. I Joes
And fucking Barbie lmfao when I was real young.
Hot wheels
Voltron
He-Man
Spider-Man
Rubic Cube

[Stardrift]

Lego. More specifically Bionicles. Those things were the shit and I had almost all of them

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Welp, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you don't know much about my childhood. My cat wasn't a toy. AH board games weren't really toys. Swimming and martial arts weren't toys. Aside from that I spent my time with ... books.

I was a novelty discovered in an educational experiment, a designated prodigy. I didn't exactly have a normal childhood.

Having autism isn't a talent and doesn't make you a prodigy.

[Caerule]

Pfft. That differs from year to year. Favorite belonging among my toys was, and remains as I still got it, a Glow in the Dark Caterpillar. I guess on a spiritual level I considered him the leader of my toys.

[Bildur]

Books, lots of them and pencils & paper.
That and a stuffed tiger I got in preschool and of course was named Tigger

[Gref]

k-nex and legos. then my atari 2600.
hoo boy, the castles I would make with legos together with carton kits. then I would have the best siege fight ever every time.
all the traps and shit when the lego soldiers gets inside. poor lego guys, how many times they lost arms, legs and heads to my deadly traps inside my own castle. hehe good times.

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Lego, and pretty much all from MASK.

you mean the Mobile Armored Strike Kommand? if that is so, damn you were lucky, I didnt have a chance to buy them back in my days.

[Gaaz]

Favorite toys - explosives and fireworks. I have been tinkering with them since I was 8-10 years old. Also, toy soldiers in power armor and with animal heads. Me and my friends built a castle in my backyard out of some plywood boxes. Water trench, towers and all. These soldiers got upgraded with tin armor (made from cans), swords (hammered from nails) and shields (made from coins laid on a railway track to be squashed by a freight train into a nice thin metal sheet) and made to man the castle. We then laid siege to it, using firecrackers and small rockets to breach it. The final boss was a toy robot-plane transformer, who got the largest nuke right under him. I mean the firecracker was like 50 grams or so, probably enough to go fishing with. Pieces of the robot were showing up all over the place even a year later.
Also made smoke grenades out of plastic mosaic and old newspapers, shockers out of day lamp capacitors (never shocked anyone though), single shot rifles out of pipes (used firecrackers and bolts as a charge), all manner of slingshots (pipe, plank and the usual dual branch). At about 11-12 discovered computers and video game consoles and my interests somewhat shifted. Went to a boarding school when I was 13, so had to forget about more dangerous stuff almost completely. Almost.
Never hurt anyone intentionally or otherwise though. Somehow always followed common sense safety precautions.

[shadowmouse]

There’s literally one thing you named that’s a toy, denied it is one, and claimed to be a prodigy.

I doubt you mean the cat, so you are probably thinking of board games. You're probably too young to know AH was Avalon Hill. In those days (1960s) they did the early military simulation stuff with college students and older as their market -- hex grid maps, cardboard counters, battles like Waterloo or Guadalcanal. So as I said, not really toys in the usual sense and since you split hairs over books it would seem fair to say not in the sense you're thinking. As far as claiming to be a prodigy, you might want to tidy up your writing -- I said I was designated as such.

Having autism isn't a talent

Then it is probably just as well that I don't have it.

Part of getting studied, one gets tested a lot for things like that.

Growing up extremely poor, I do not remember having enough toys to even remember a favorite one.

I got through comparatively lucky but my parents went and became parents as flat broke undergraduates who moved every couple of years while my father progressed through his studies and eventually academia. Flat broke undergrads doesn't make it to the level you grew up with, but it wasn't exactly high up the food chain. Anything that didn't fit into the car didn't make it and books got priority over toys.

[Dwarfhamster]

GI Joe figures. TMNT too.

[enigma77]

Gameboy Color

[Captain N]

Snake Mountain (with the microphone) and Castle Grayskull.

[shadowmouse]

Very much toys. I still enjoy games based on said designs.

To each their own. In the 60s those things were still a novelty aimed at an older market, by now they may well have filtered down to younger age groups. Then again, I saw my books as a substitute for toys. There is plenty of grey area for different takes on some things -- a person who enjoys Warhammer 40K might or might not take issue with being described as playing with toy soldiers for example.

[shadowmouse]

And yet it’s entirely accurate to describe it as such.

<bungee steps gingerly away from the keyboard hoping to avoid the wrath of triggered tabletop gamers>

"He went there, I didn't, get that tar and those feathers away from me!"

I will now go off and play doctor with a nice young lady.

[Cosmic Janitor]

I'll be honest, I had way too many toys as a kid. I enjoyed Lego, Knex, the LGB toy train and all the action figures I bought, later on the gaming consoles and lastly my PC. There was no favorite unless you ask me for a specific time frame.

[Puupi]

Probably my Dino Riders figures.