blast from the past

Friday's "Epic Win" (a new site from the I Can Has Cheezburger people - it's called "Nostalgic Win" or somesuch and is aimed at gen-xers and the generation a half-generation behind us).

It was the Fisher-Price farm set. As I said earlier, I owned one of these (so I bought the little ornament of it).

We had lots of Fisher-Price stuff in my family. I had a bunch of stuff, and later on, when my brother came along, we got more. I'm talking the "Little People" stuff here - we had other things like that "chatty phone" or whatever it was called, but it seemed like we played the most with the Little People sets.

I know I had the farm. And the town, which was cool because it was a whole bunch of buildings with a sort of arch-shaped thing (WITH a "stoplight" in it, even) to connect the two sections). And you could sort of latch the whole thing up and carry it to a friend's house.

And I had the castle, which was one of the best Christmas presents ever, and it was one of those "I really really really really want this Santa will you PLEASE bring me this it is the only thing I really want" gifts. And I got it. And I think every kid should experience that once in their life - wanting a toy so badly you can TASTE it, and then waking up Christmas morning (or the morning of your birthday) and finding out that you GOT that toy.

And even better, the castle was as fun as it looked in the Sears catalog. I played with it a lot.

We also had the schoolhouse. And the bus (I think that was my brother's). And I had an "A Frame" house, which was also a lot of fun - it was a two-story dollhouse and it came with two very important things: first, a ladder to connect the two floors. I know I was too much of a stickler for authenticity but I kind of hated it when a dollhouse-type toy had multiple floors and no way for the dolls to GET between those floors. Oh, sure, you could pretend your hand was an elevator - but really, how many houses had elevators? (especially in the shape of a giant hand). So the "ladder" was an important thing.

The other nice thing about the A-frame was that the ends were a sort of plexiglas material - they were clear - and they had little sliding doors in them. So there were doors leading out to the patio and to the balconies on the upper floor and they really worked like real doors AND you could see through them.

And again, the A-frame had the cool feature (common on most of those Little People toys) that you could put the whole family and all its furniture (and I think the ladder too) inside the house, and you could latch it up, and you could carry it with you - so it was easy to take to a friend's house, as I said, but it also made cleaning up the toys easier, because you could put everything where it was supposed to be.

Another thing I liked about the Fisher-Price stuff - especially when my brother was little - was that it was all kind of on the same scale. So you could line up the town and the schoolhouse and the A-frame and the farm and you could have the Little People go between all of them - the school kids could go on a field trip to the farm on the bus. Or the kids from the a-frame house could go to school, and the mom and dad could go into the town to work or shop. It was a whole little world and I was into little worlds like that when I was a kid.

(And even not-so-much of a kid. My brother is five years younger than I am, and so I had a wonderful excuse to keep playing with stuff even when the kids at school would have made fun of me for being too old: "I'm just babysitting my brother" or something like that. Oh, yes, I was really playing. But I was able to save face by claiming I was just "watching" him or something).

Later on, we had a Sesame Street playset, which was nice too, but, like the castle, it didn't mesh very well with the "every-day-ness" of the other Little People sets - somehow it seemed weird to have this big medieval castle sitting next to the A-frame, or to think of Bobby and Jenny from the A-frame house visiting Grover and company....

The Fisher Price Little People stuff were some of the best toys we had as kids.

I actually have one of the horses - the kind that came with the 1970s farm set and with the castle (they have a different style now) sitting on one of the bookshelves in my bedroom. I found it at one of those "antiques, vintage stuff, and old junk" stores around here. It was like a buck and it was in good shape so I bought it, just for old times' sake. Those Fisher Price horses - they had jointed legs and a head that would go up and down - were some of my favorite things about the playsets. (The castle came with a black horse and a brown horse. The brown horse I had broke one of his ears at some point which always made me sad). The farm set also had a horse, and a cow, and a pig, and a dog, and a couple of chickens. And they were all fully jointed, kind of chunky animals - they felt good in your hands and they were fun to move through whatever little dramas you imagined for them. The people were fun, too - and our Little People kind of straddled two eras. Some of the ones from the sets I had were wood; the ones from the later sets were plastic. (And again - the modern Little People are a slightly different shape, a little chunkier). They were simple so you could project whatever personality you wanted on them - the kindly schoolteacher with her blonde bun, the little kid who always got in trouble....

They were good toys. Or at least, they were good toys for my brother and me, because a favorite way to play was to make up little stories and move the figures through them.

Another group of toys (where I can't really say where "mine" ended and my brother's began) was Lego. Lego bricks are, I think, one of the more brilliant toy inventions out there. You can make anything you want (pretty much) out of them. My brother would build spaceships and cars and stuff; I would build houses for my tiny dolls or plastic animals. (No, our parents didn't try to gender-track us, it just seemed to happen). My brother and I didn't always get along - in fact, we often argued in the way kids do. But dump a big box of Lego bricks on the floor in front of us and we could sit for hours and not bug each other.