I grew up with my fair share of toys. Some were destroyed due to my being an overly sugar-fortified young boy, but a lot of my toys were lost to the constant moving we did. My Dad, being a teacher, moved sometimes on a yearly basis (we moved twice in 1969, great…). So as we would load up boxes, my Dad would come along and go “I’m renting the smaller U-Haul truck, this won’t fit,” and he proceeded to thin out each of our “treasures”. But, I lost all of my childhood toys to a huge flood in 1972. Amongst the toys I wish I had today was my “Lost In Space Switch-N-Go” set that goes on eBay for $2000 – $3000 dollars. I even had the rare Sears version… cha-ching! But, after the flood, which was mostly sewer water, my Dad went to my basement room and tossed out all my models (an original lighted AMT Star Trek Enterprise kit… original…) and my toys. ARGH! I could have retired on those damn things today as most were original models from Aurora that most people today pay premium prices for.
So, I feel for Bud having to sell his prized processions. But, as a parent, I heartily agree with Mrs. Chambers too. You need $14 Grand? Sell your shit, then talk to me… I’m a model parent… ask my sons!
So, the mother who not only spawned Bud, but also gave us at least one daughter who’s Centerfold of the Year material, the nameless Mrs. Chambers has resurfaced in today’s comic. I’ve also noticed that all my “old” characters wear reading glasses. Heh, that’s one way to make them look old.
I’ve featured songs from “Toys In The Attic” before, and the title track just grabs you and pulls you into a fantastic classic rock album. Not a bad song on the album and they’ve never had a similarly consistent album since. Aerosmith rocks, but never like they did on this album.
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I’ve saved most of my old playthings, although too much nostalgia is definitely a bad thing (was that the moral of “Labryinth”? No, the moral of that was “stay the hell away from hyperactive self-dismembering chicken goblins”).
Somewhere, out there, a soggy Lost in Space Robot is wandering about, trying to find his beloved Byron…
Aw, you made a tear come to my eye thinking of my old Robot stuck in some garbage pile rotting with the old lettuce and tomatoes of the time…
Now, wasn’t that the moral of Toy Story 3? Or was it bears are just mean…
🙂
The good news is my parents never moved and never threw out anything.
The bad news I never had toys that had any value.
Life bites you no matter what…
LOL
I had loads of toys which now would be worth a lot of money, if I hadn’t opened the box and played with them!
That’s the trouble with giving toys to kids, they mess them up, play with them, lose the wheels, break bits off and paint them bright shiny colours! 😀
Who on earth kept everything in pristine condition? (Apart from my current boss, but he’s a bit weird and incredibly anally retentive. I don’t reckon he had a childhood really! 😉 )
The final “demolition” of my childhood toys and memories was when my parents raided their loft, after I had moved out and had my own place, and sorted all my toys out to send off for my cousin’s kids to play with. Off they went to another childhood battering! 😀
If there’s anything left of any of them by now I doubt they’d be worth more than scrap weight!
However, I did find a box of all my old Airfix aeroplane kits, that had originally hung all over my bedroom ceiling at home. They are certainly a bit (read totally) battered and yet, back then, I was so proud of the paint job that I did on them with the old Humbrol Oil Paints that I slapped all over them.
The good old days eh?
😉
Ah, to have just a few of those old Aurora models… like the Lost in Space Robot or the original Enterprise… bad glue and paint jobs and all.
🙂
As a modeler myself, I feel your pain about those old Aurora kits. But guess what! Two model companies, Polar Lights and Moebius, are re-issuing a lot of the old Aurora line at very reasonable prices! (The bonus is that they are cutting new molds for kits that were lost or destroyed when Aurora went bankrupt in, ironically, 1977.)
I just recently brought a whole bunch of toys from my parents house and my kids are currently loving and playing with them all. It gives me a Toy Story 3 type feel. I love how she is about to write that check and then whoa… they’re up in the attic.
Isn’t it cool when your kids discover things from your past… and like them?
I bought the entire VHS series of “Lost In Space” back in the mid-90s. And every month when a new 2-episode tape arrived, my two youngest boys would be glued to the set with me enjoying this campy old 60s TV series… bad acting and effects included. They would make fun of it afterward, but not much kept them quiet for 2 hours one a month!
🙂
My toys never had any kind of monetary value, but when my mom sold all my Thundercats action figures at a garage sale, I was PISSED. Luckily, thanks to ebay, I replaced them, plus more.
Everyone had their poison. For my wife, it was She-ra. Like me, though, she doesn’t keep many dust catchers around or at least we call them that. 🙂
OH PRAISE THE GOD EBAY AND IT’S BOUNTIFUL AUCTIONS OF CRAP WE JUST HAVE TO HAVE!!
Yes, I too have made some expensive purchases on eBay for some rare old toys I once had. Spent $300 on this cheesy plastic “flying” model of Fireball XL5. The damn thing probably cost like $2 in 1965… but I had to have it!
I bow down to thee eBay…
🙂
eBay’s helped me out a couple of times… I used to have a Radio Shack handheld electronic Uno (the later Mattel version sucks!), but I lost it when I had to move in a hurry. A couple of years ago, I got nostalgic for it, so I hunted it down on eBay, and was so glad I did 😀
It is a great album! I love Aerosmith but their music went down hill when they quit writing their own songs (around the album Pump). Truthfully, I think Permanent Vacation is their last good album.
Most of my childhood toys were given away. I had the opportunity to try and sell them but most of them really didn’t seem worth the trouble. While I had a lot of Star Wars toys, most people are only interested in figures that are ultra rare or still in the blister pack. I do, though, have one of the first generation Transformers (Jetfire) that I keep on a desk in my studio. I really don’t like to keep a lot of dust catchers around and the few that I have stay in my studio.
I feel Bud’s pain… about 20 years ago, I found myself broke & in dire need of transportation. My mom had thankfully saved most of my childhood toys, so I sold several GI Joe’s with a ton of accessories (the original 12-13″ figures that came in the wooden foot lockers, NOT the smaller action figures that came out later…), DC & Marvel action figures, a slew of Matchbox, Hotwheels & Johnny Lightning cars, both wind-up & battery powered robots & cars & trucks, various TV & movie spy series (Man From U.N.C.L.E., James Bond, The Saint, Secret Agent Man) gizmos & gadgets, an a few other odds & ends that I don’t recall.
I got $1500.00 for the lot (enuff for a good used Chevy truck!) that I’m sure the collectors shop probably turned for several times that, oh well, c’est la vie…
Yeah, “Toys in the Attic” – definately the best of the lot. I agree with you, too, shaggyfreak… “PM” was their last good album. Altho I wouldn’t wish alcoholism/addiction on anyone, I really think that once they all dried out & got straight, their music went south!
OH, the Man from U.N.C.L.E.! Man, that brings back some memories.
I remember seeing some made-for-TV movie that reunited most of the cast and thinking “How embarrassing!”. The movie was total trash. But, fun to see none the less.
Yep, you gotta do what you gotta do… I’ve sold some really cool things in my life… mostly band gear and stuff, but also a lot of things from my old office. Bad times are hard on collectors!
😛
As usual, I’m the odd one out – no childhood toys, due to 1) family poverty and 2) lack of interest on my part (my idea of toys was books, scribble books, and oh yeah those funny ape-descended creatures that did interesting things when I manipulated them, muhahaha). However. HOWEVER. I’ve more than made up for it since the age of 21. Soooo many cuddly toys (including, f’rinstance, anteater, flamingo, warthog, ferret, blue-ringed octopus, and Triceratops), plus a scary number of resin pop-culture figurines (mostly sent to me by friends and fans).
OTOH my husband – who’s much younger than you and thus grew up in the era of toys galore – appears to have kept EVERYTHING from his childhood, from his one-eyed teddy bear to endless boxes of inch-high models of dinosaurs and soldiers and cartoon characters and…well, *everything*. I wonder about that man sometimes 😀
This is one of my favorite comedic moments in 1977.
Omg this reminds me how I have a bunch of Barbies upstairs. Thank for an idea to make some money. 😀
Whew! Finally got myself up-to-date with the comic… I love archive trawls 🙂
Love the comic, Byron! Quite a few literal LOLs in the wee small hours as I went from strip to strip… (and I’ve dotted a few comments in those earlier strips, too, especially the one about Frijid Pink)
Thanks for the laughs, and I look forward to more!
Oh, gods – the toy thing! Between the movers losing most of my G.I. Joe stuff – and a pile of original Japanese anime and Godzilla goodies my dad picked up for me overseas – somewhere between Hawaii and Virginia in 1976; a yard-sale purge where I sold a bunch of my Marx and Airfix plastic soldiers; an accident where I forgot a bunch of Matchbox cars at school on my last day before our move; and an… incident… where my best friend’s mom cleaned out their basement and threw out the remainder of my G.I. Joes and Best of the West figures (which we’d been playing with a week or two earlier), I lost most of my favorite childhood toys in a little over a year.
Just as well, I guess, given that I went through my “hit your teens, trash your childhood” phase shortly afterward, and shot my Aurora monster and dinosaur models up with a BB gun…
I managed to keep my model trains, refurbished my Airfix army collection during my mid-teens, and got into military models, wargame miniatures and Dungeons & Dragons by around 1979. I was “too old” to get into the Star Wars stuff, but my very first job involved painting Airfix Napoleonic armies for a much older friend, so HO-scale toy soldiers were still “acceptable” at that age. By 1982, though, everything but the gaming minis and the refurbished Airfix armies were either given away, tossed out, destroyed or put in storage. (Toys aren’t cool when the girls come over, y’know… or at least they weren’t in the early 1980s!)
All those toys except the gaming minis (which I still have) are long gone. Man, it makes me sick when I look that stuff up online and see how much it’s worth these days. And yeah – the last two Toy Story movies made me cry like a baby! 🙂
GREAT Aerosmith track! Believe it or not, I’d never heard it until this morning. Aside for a few songs, I was never a big fan of theirs and for some reason “Toys in the Attic” never made it onto the one Greatest Hits albums of theirs I do own!