I just threw out most of my childhood toys.

I'm visiting my family for the holidays. My brother and I had time to go through the old boxes of childhood toys that ended up in his basement after decades of attics and storage areas.

This was mostly stuff from the 80s and very early 90s.

Masters of the Universe, Thundercats, TMNT, Real Ghostbusters and other assorted items like Tigersharks.

Just about all of them had developed a sticky, slimy film over them. The smell of decaying plastic was pungent.

Maybe they could have been cleaned up and restored. But still, most of them were broken and missing parts anyway. In the end, we ended unceremoniously dumping the boxes in the trash bins.

I know it was the "practical" thing to do. All these boxes were doing was taking up space. The toys can't be salvaged. I'll never "play" with them or display them again, and none of my nephews will ever want to play with them since they have their own toys and tablets and stuff. And then there's the whole plastic degradation issue.

Well, why didn't I sell them? Cause they were in bad condition. I suppose I could have sifted through the boxes for decent "parts" and sold those but honestly that's more work than I want to do. I look at this way...there are just that many fewer vintage toys out there now, so I just made people's collections more valuable by removing these from circulation.

I'm don't regret it...it's just sad, you know? For guys like us that are so attached emotionally to our toys, it's never easy to let any of them go, especially the remnants from childhood.

Just wonder if anyone else has had similar experiences.

I wonder if my 1/6 collection will end up deteriorating in a similar fashion 30 years from now (As i type, ED-209's dome now has visible cracks).

I gave away all of my old toys a few years back: Spider-Man figures, Star Wars POTF and Micromachines, Jurassic Park figures, Pokemon cards and so on and so forth. Unlike you and your situation, however, I regret the hell out of it and it wasn't the practical thing to do at all. It was forced on me.

All of this is to say that I can relate to your sadness. I hope that your sadness will lift once more time passes and you gain more perspective. Besides, it isn't so much the toys that bear importance but the memories that you have with them, and those will last you a lifetime.

Tough business. Lots of memories are attached to my old toys, and as with many of us, those are the foundation for my current collecting habits, such that they are. But as I get older and older, I realize that material things don't really matter. The memories are all that matter.

I had a bunch of star wars and he-man toys in the 80s. When I got a bit older I shot most of them up with a BB gun. Was a dumb thing to do but mine were played with so much they would not have had much monetary value. As Kara says the memory of them is what drives me to buy the current stuff that I would have died for when I was kid.

Interesting, I have some from those years and they are still perfect. I would bet your basement has high humidity or they were stored near heating vents.

Yeah they were stored in horrible conditions for basically the last 20 years. Attics that would be stifling and humid in the summer, and frigid in the winter. All of them kind of thrown together in boxes, plastics touching and mingling and basically melting over the years.

I'm not terribly upset or anything, but it certainly wasn't easy to finally dispose of them after holding on to them all these years. But yeah, they weren't worth anything so it wasn't about money.

Yes. Lost some, destroyed a lot. Held onto things I thought I wanted forever, but when I sold them off or even gave them to someone that wanted it I never really thought about them after that. Of course there are some things (various collectibles) I still have from early adulthood (20's mostly), but they're not the same as childhood toys and are not nearly as beaten up. Things come and go, from my experience it's when you give thought to them and display or use them with some sort of regularity, those are the things you eventually end up keeping.

All of my childhood toys ended up given away, binned, or melted with magnifying glass.

I have since replaced the first run of 3/4 inch kenner Star Wars figures loose; Mattel Mork and Mindy; Mego 1st wave of Trek characters, Mego Muhammad Ali/opponent and Ring--all carded.
Still hunting for Mego Micronauts--I really enjoyed those figures when I was younger lots of great memories playing with them.

I sadly gave away my toys throughout the years. I still have a lot boxed up though. I'm hoping to pass them down to my kids, if I ever have any.

I didn't notice my childhood box of Star Wars action figures had been stolen during a break-in until months later. I had not expected a thief would go after an old box of toys like that.

I heard a little while after the break-in that my stolen laptop had been recovered but by then I had got a replacement through insurance, so the laptop went off to police auction ... shortly after the police auction I went into an antique shop in the city. There were all my Star Wars figures for sale. I could tell they were mine because I had coloured parts of the Stormtroopers in black, cut Darth Vader's coat, and some had accessories and some didn't, etc. Nothing I could do about it. Still feels like a punch in the gut just thinking about it now.

jimminy said:

I didn't notice my childhood box of Star Wars action figures had been stolen during a break-in until months later. I had not expected a thief would go after an old box of toys like that.

I heard a little while after the break-in that my stolen laptop had been recovered but by then I had got a replacement through insurance, so the laptop went off to police auction ... shortly after the police auction I went into an antique shop in the city. There were all my Star Wars figures for sale. I could tell they were mine because I had coloured parts of the Stormtroopers in black, cut Darth Vader's coat, and some had accessories and some didn't, etc. Nothing I could do about it. Still feels like a punch in the gut just thinking about it now.

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That's a horrible story, man! That sucks. It's sad what some people will do. I'm assuming they wanted a lot of money for the pieces. Did you buy back the pieces? I'm assume you had no recourse?

My kids play with most of my old stuff. Star Wars. Starting Lineup. Star Trek. A bunch of old Disney PVCs and McDonald's Happy Meal toys (from when they had cool stuff). Still gets some mileage.

I kept back a few. Not many, though.

SnakeDoc

Chapter 2099 said:

That's a horrible story, man! That sucks. It's sad what some people will do. I'm assuming they wanted a lot of money for the pieces. Did you buy back the pieces? I'm assume you had no recourse?

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No well because I didn't open the old plastic container they were in much I didn't realise they had been stolen right away. I knew I'd been having trouble finding them, but I'd moved a lot and been overseas for a while, and I assumed the container with all my figs was just in another box somewhere, or still in a friend's shed where I had stored some stuff for a couple of months. It hadn't even crossed my mind that someone would have stolen them.

The antique shop must have bought them all from the police auction, so there wasn't really anything I could do. It didn't seem worth it to buy just a few. Ah well! If I ever get rich I'll collect the sixth scale line and tell myself, 'See? You replaced them with even better versions!' But nothing quite matches up to the ones you had as a kid and customised in all your silly kid ways.

Ah well. Life! You think of all the bad things that happen to people and losing a few kids' toys doesn't even register on the grand scale. But I can't see a Kenner Star Wars fig now without feeling a pang

SnakeDoctor said:

My kids play with most of my old stuff. Star Wars. Starting Lineup. Star Trek. A bunch of old Disney PVCs and McDonald's Happy Meal toys (from when they had cool stuff). Still gets some mileage.

I kept back a few. Not many, though.

SnakeDoc

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That's cool to see the kids getting into them. I remember as a kid when I visited my grandma's I always used to play with the stuff that belonged to my dad and his brothers - Hot Wheels racing tracks, Cowboys and Indians with a plastic town, all this stuff that was big in the late fifties and early sixties.

And while I don't have any particular plan or desire for kids, I am kind of hoping that a kid of some kind will get joy out of my comic collection some day. Sure, I bag and box my comics, but they are there to be read. I got into comics because I would stay at my grandma's sometimes when I was sick from school, and again, there were the comics my dad and his brothers used to buy ... fun Silver Age weirdness about Hot-Rodders and Beatniks. Old Mad Magazines. A few comics based on sixties TV shows. And so now I have boxes and boxes of comics of my own ... If I ever have a kid they are going to be sorted for a loooooootttttt of sick days