It’s been a long, LONG time, but these babies are still awesome.
The Christmas of 1972 was my first yuletide on this rock, so I thought it might be fun to look back at what toys the groovy kids of the day were jonesing for that December.
Here goes …
Fisher-Price Play Farm
No matter who you were, and whether you were a boy or girl, chances are you had Fisher-Price Little People running around your toys bins/closets/bags/carpet in the 1970s and 1980s.
This one was early enough that my copy came from a garage sale and was missing a few wheels and horse parts. I still loved it, though, and would spend hours (OK, minutes) pretending I was a right proper farmer. Soooooey!
Beauty Parlor Hairstyling and Make Up Set
So this thing was just a big vinyl lady’s head, but it had hair and came with beauty supplies.
Creepy as hell, but practical (I guess).
I mean, where else could you learn to help another person get ready for a prom or their own funeral without, like, you know … risking jail time?
Of course, if you were a boy in the 1970s, you weren’t allowed to play with stuff like this. My dad would have knocked me across the room if he’d caught me even looking at one of these.
I looked anyway. Furtively.
Toss Across Game
This is another of those toys that made the rounds at garage sales for decades.
It’s basically a cornhole board with cubes that flip when you hit them with a beanbag, but with a more dignified name. It’s great bored-afternoon fun, and you could always wing each other with the bags if things went downhill.
Easy-Bake Oven
Duh.
Every list like this has to have the Easy-Bake Oven.
It was the only way your parents would knowingly let you do stuff in your room that you thought might burn the house down.
It helped a lot with the old “playing house” game, too, because how could you cohabitate without some way of feeding yourself.
Hard, bitter goodies never tasted so good.
Ouija Board
This one was/is more for the older set than preschool and early grade school kids.
But the truth is, you can’t have any kind of proper weekend get-together as a group of young hooligans without scaring the crap out of each other somewhere along the line.
And, for decades, the Ouija has been the bast way to do that. Why, you can summons everything from ghosts and demons to your father’s dead hopes and dreams with one of these. And … it’s so easy, even a child can use it.
Score!
Talky Crissy Doll
No word on whether Rod Serling collected royalties from this one, but you can be sure the The Twilight Zone creator planted some seeds with his “Talky Tina” doll in the episode entitled “Living Doll.”
Anyway, Talky Crissy wasn’t quite as, um, talky as Tina was, but she did give you “I don’t think so” on occasion. Good training for boys, if nothing else.
And Talky Crissy was the perfect adjunct to the Quija Board. Once you got your seance rocking and rolling — with Crissy included — it was not unusual to hear the familiar, “I don’t like you very much.”
Skateboard
A kid who didn’t skateboard in 1972 was like a kid who didn’t fidget-spin in 2017. A total square, man.
So, if you were older than, say, three, at Christmas of 1972, you were asking for a new skateboard.
But you couldn’t just have any old skateboard … no, you needed one with the self-contained Cadillac Wheels invented by Frank Nasworthy.
Big Wheel
I drove a Big Wheel most of my childhood, and it served me well. But I have two beefs with the buggy that I just can’t get over …
- I always wanted a Green Machine, but my parents told me I couldn’t handle the funky controls. Bunk.
- When I was 5, a neighborhood boy named Jimmy Dean tried to move in on my eight-year-old girlfriend, Carrie. He drove up to her like James Dean on his Big Wheel and offered her a ride. I had no wheels at the time, so I ran over to his Big Wheel and picked up the front end. I flipped it over backwards, and he looked like a fool, sprawled all over the sidewalk. Until he got up and punched me in the eye. I ran inside … and got in trouble for starting a fight.
The Big Wheel is still cool, though.
The Sun Set — Malibu Barbie and Friends
OK, so before Star Wars, the greatest toy universe that I ever saw belonged to the one and only Barbie. One of my neighborhood friends was a girl who would play with me if all her other options were exhausted, and I got to see firsthand the Christmas largess that Barbie and friends could bestow upon a properly spoiled female child of the era.
Holy crap, Batman!
Cars and houses and apartments and Ski Doos and campers and men and women and beauty accessories and sporting goods and dogs and … just about anything you could imagine.
Looking back, I’m pretty sure Barbie had an iPhone sometime in the 1980s. How did that happen??
Anyway, in 1972, Malibu Barbie regaled the Christmas season with her tanned friends and colorfully-clad Ken and beach cabin. Must have been great fun for children buried under ten feet of snow in the midwest and northeast.
Uno
According to Livingly.com, Uno was the best-selling “toy” at Christmas of 1972.
Meh.
I mean, you do play Uno, but c’mon. Ain’t no kid jumping for joy on Christmas morning when he unwraps a flat box package and finds Uno inside.
A wallet with money? Sure.
Cigarettes? Probably, especially in 1972.
But finding Uno just means your parents expect you to play with them. So, kids in 1972 were either much dweebier than we were a few years later, or their parents were mind-controlling them.
Probably used some special “candy” left over from the late 1960s.