I am an only child. Despite my parents each having a brother and sister, I was an only grandchild. Only grandniece. Only niece.
The short version? I was spoiled.
There wasn’t much I remember wanting and not getting. I wouldn’t say I was a brat about it, though. My mothers love language is gift giving, which I understand better than ever now that I have my own daughter.
So I had a lot of toys.
Another thing I don’t remember is letting my toys collect dust. I loved to play and probably played with some of my toys for longer than most kids, or at least longer than some are willing to admit.
Bonus points: my parents saved a lot of my toys. They moved house not long after I gave birth to my daughter, and my husband and I inherited boxes of my toys. This means my daughter got a lot of stuff we never had to spend money on, which is awesome. It also means she’ll end up as spoiled as I am.
But I digress.
Trying to tackle what my favorite toys were is a challenge, so a top 5 is in order. With some honorable mentions.
Honorable mention: Gameboy/SNES
I’ve never really been a huge gamer, but my parents did buy me an original gray brick of a Gameboy, as well as a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. I didn’t ask for these things; they just fell under my Christmas tree. Occasionally I asked for a new game or saved up some money to buy one, and most of the time these were Disney games. I don’t think anything could compare to the love I felt for Tetris, though. To this day, I still play similar games on my phone. I wonder what it says about me that I love spatial relationship games. My mom and I would have Tetris competitions on long car rides, seeing who could score the most lines. For the SNES, I loved The Lion King and Aladdin and would even spend Saturday mornings before my parents got out of bed beating one of these games for fun. (Side note: Mariah Carey’s Daydream album always felt like it matched up well with Aladdin.) I also loved Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country; I don’t think I ever managed to beat the former, and the latter I played at a friend’s house and didn’t acquire my own copy until I was an adult.
Both of these game systems somehow still work.
Honorable Mention: Disney action figures
Loved these guys, particularly the human ones. (The Lion King came out when I was in fourth grade, but Simba and Nala just didn’t have the same clout for me as Aladdin and Jasmine or Pocahontas and John Smith, at least in figure form.) I loved sneaking some of these under my pillow at night to play before sleeping. Unfortunately, I know where the accessories for these are, but not my most beloved ones. I’m still hoping to find them someday.
Honorable Mention: CD collection
These aren’t toys, but I spent a lot of time, money, and energy collecting them, and I’ve still got them all. Luckily, my mom belonged to the BMG Music Club, which sent a catalog of CDs every month. Somehow they offered many discs for just a penny, so I definitely own some full albums that I wouldn’t otherwise. And some that were barely even worth that penny. Hundreds of the things. But at one point, I did aspire to be a pop star, so owning that many CDs makes a huge amount of sense.
Shauna’s Top 5 Favorite Toys From Childhood
5. Barbies
My mother remembers when the first Barbie was released, as well as my grandmother’s flabbergasted reaction to the doll’s “bazoombas.” I remember the rerelease of that original, with her cat eye sunglasses and iconic striped bathing suit. By that time, I don’t know how many Barbies I owned, but I loved the classics. I snagged me a reproduction of the 1960 Solo in the Spotlight, too, when she was rereleased.
What is it about this doll that is so infectiously magical? Is it her objective beauty, full of mythical body proportions and sparkling eyes? Is it her smile, filled with kindness? Her stable, long term relationship with hunky Ken? Her myriad accessories? (I distinctly remember the release of the “Fashion Avenue” line of clothes that friends of mine became obsessed with. My Barbies also had a Ferrari, a limo, a hot tub, a supermarket, and a Dream House. Remember, spoiled.)
It’s probably more along the lines of what Mattel knows and frequently plays up. Barbie can do anything. She has been a supermodel, a teacher, a singer, an astronaut, a fairy princess, a butterfly, a vet, a sister, and a girlfriend, and that doesn’t scratch the surface of her resume. No matter what career a young person wants to pursue, their fantasies can be played out with Barbie.
4. Polly Pockets
I have always been a lover of small things, so Polly Pockets were practically made for me. The idea behind this toy was ingenious - each playset was its own house or other setting that closed up like a makeup compact and fit right into your pocket. They came with 3 or 4 tiny dolls that bent at the waist and fit into seats, little standing positions, and other nooks and crannies in their compacts. The eponymous Polly was a constant, frequently dressed in a red jumpsuit, blonde hair styled in close cropped curls. (Don’t worry - her dweeby wardrobe expanded over the years.)
My first Polly Pocket looked on the outside like a magenta flower. Inside, it was a miniature restaurant, complete with a seating area, a kitchen, and a small clock that turned in a circle. Red Polly was present, along with several other patrons. The character that stood out to me the most in this set, though, was one my mom named “Chef Bob.” He wore a stark white chef’s outfit, complete with a tall hat, and had a tiny mustache painted onto his face. I don’t know why we were in a hospital waiting room at the time, but I remember sitting there playing with my mom when she breathed life into the little chef’s persona. His favorite thing to do was take a few nips of the cooking sherry while he worked and fall off the top level of the restaurant. Probably not the most appropriate for however old I was at the time (maybe 8?), but I thought it was hilarious.
My best friend, Amy, also had a passion for Polly. In the summer, our families rented houses in Ocean City together for a week, and we would both bring our Pocket haul. We laid out some impressive Polly towns, especially later in our collecting when Pollyville sets were released. These sort of defeated the purpose of the “Pockets,” as they were tiny 3D houses. They lifted open so you could play inside. They elevated the beauty of Polly Pocket to another level, though I did mildly lament that these were a bit harder to transport. Amy and I would do some painstaking city planning, placing restaurants, apartment blocks, fairytale castles, mansions, and forests where we found most appropriate. Then we would argue over who got to be which of the little dolls. There were always a few we both coveted. But we eventually ironed it out and had weeklong sessions of nonstop Polly play.
I still own all of my Polly Pockets, and I cannot WAIT until my daughter is old enough to play with them with her. But those tiny pieces will DEFINITELY require her to be older than 3 ½ to play with properly.
3. Beanie Babies
I’m not saying I’m directly responsible for the Beanie Baby bubble of the late 90s, but I certainly didn’t not contribute to it.
When I was in sixth grade, it became fashionable almost overnight to start carrying a Beanie Baby around with you all day in school. While being traditionally popular wasn’t the most important thing in the world to me, I wanted to at least fit in. And, if we’re being honest, I still collected stuffed animals at that point - still occasionally do - so Beanie Babies were a trend I could get on board with. I believe my first one was a lavender colored hippo named Happy. At my birthday party that year, I was gifted at least 3; I’m pretty sure Congo the Gorilla and Patty the Platypus were among them.
Long after my friends stopped collecting Beanies, I kept it up. See, the thing was, I’ve always loved collecting things. My mom used to joke that my favorite collection was my collection of collections. And Beanie Babies were infinitely collectable. New Beanies were always being released, while others were retired, meaning the Ty company would no longer make those. Which meant they would be worth more money, especially if they weren’t made for that long, or if there was some kind of discoloration or wrong hang tag the company accidentally let slip through their plans.
Pretty soon, Beanies were highly collectable, among adults as well as kids. The rise of the internet coincided with the Beanie popularity, and it must have contributed to it. Ty.com was a website I visited frequently to get the latest list of toys I didn’t have. I printed checklists for my parents and kept records of what I owned in a notebook dedicated just to Beanies. Ebay also played a big part in the rise of the importance of Beanie Babies. The white elephant of Ty happens to be a royal blue elephant, a Beanie Baby named Peanut. Apparently Peanut was produced in his royal blue color for a very short amount of time before the company said that the coloring was a mistake and switched to a light blue output. Combine the popularity of the toy with the short production time, and a huge heaping of internet publicity, and the desire for this Beanie skyrocketed. To this day, you can still find them being sold on Ebay for approx $3,000.
At the time, though, there were quite a few other Beanies that people paid way more than the standard $5 for, based on Ty saying they were rare or releasing them with the wrong hang tags for a short time or some other mistake that was published online before the Beanie was even released. My own parents paid $100 for Princess, the purple Princess Diana memorial bear that I now own at least 2 if not 3 or 4 of, and $100 for Erin, the first emerald green St. Patrick’s Day bear. Today, some versions of Princess go for thousands on Ebay, but the type that I own go for as low as $.99. The situation with Erin is the same.
Hence the bubble. Beanies were worth a bunch just due to their popularity - and now they’re not. Its given economics teachers something kind of interesting to talk about, how stuffed animals affected the money flow in America to a certain extent in the late 90s.
While I thought it was fun to watch the value of a select few of my Beanies, for the most part, they just brought a momentary smile to my face. There was even a period of a few months in college where I decided I was going to buy myself a new Beanie once a week as a small token of happiness. Now I have gigantic bins of these tokens in my basement, and my daughter gets a lot of pleasure out of pulling them out and learning their names.
2. Star Wars Action Figures
Star Wars celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1997 with a theatrical rerelease. I had never seen the trilogy of movies, and it was of absolutely zero interest to me. My parents, on the other hand, particularly my dad, couldn’t wait to expose me to the pop culture phenomenon, confident that I would love it.
Love is an understated term for how I would come to feel about the series. I don’t know if it was the self-rescuing princess, the enduring good vs. evil plot, or, most likely, the witty banter that made all the characters so endearing, but I fell head over heels for this movie. As soon as I could, I ran to KayBee Toys and scarfed up whatever Star Wars action figures I could. I had only seen 1977’s’ A New Hope, and all I could find were Jedi Luke, Bousch Leia, and Frozen in Carbonite Han, iterations on the characters who didn’t appear until Return of the Jedi. So I didn’t understand who those were, but whatever. I had to have a piece of this.
My next door neighbor, Jordan, fell for Star Wars as hard as I did. His dad was big on buying whatever his son wanted, and he was not above some trips to galaxies far, far away to find us rarer toys. The struggle to find Jabba the Hutt in this wave of action figures was real, and though we tracked it down at the now defunct Rt. 18 Flea Market, I’m not sure how we caught wind of its existence there.
This was another collection I spent hours playing with. I’d take whatever I had that Jordan didn’t over to his house, and we would play for hours.
And then, about five years later, I met a man with a passion for Star Wars that rivaled mine. And now, twenty years later, our combined Star Wars action figure collection is… Well, it’s large. We have a lot of doubles. But better that than either of us meet someone who made us get rid of them! Imagine!
Sadly, the classic 3 ¾ in. style figure has been mostly discontinued now. There are still some occasional releases, but as they’re so limited and tend to be special edition style figures, they go for way more than they used to. I believe when I started collecting, they were $5 each, and now the same style tends to go for, I kid you not, around $20. I know we’re talking a time span of 30 years, but there is no way that a small amount of plastic can be worth that much. And so we don’t buy them anymore. At least we collected through the best movies, and again, our daughter is breathing new life into these things as we speak.
1. My Lovies
When I was far too young to remember, my mom’s friend Margie gifted me a sort of stuffed animal, a flat gray cat wearing overalls with a soft book sewn onto his front. I’m assuming it was my mom who named him Mr. Kitty, and he and I became completely inseparable. My daughter has her own lovey, named Rattalie, and if what my parents went through with Mr. Kitty is anywhere close to what we do with Rattalie, they had to make sure he was with us at all times. Car ride? Make sure you bring Mr. Kitty. Trip to the grocery store? Kitty. Sleeping over at a grandparent’s house? Kitty. I regularly refer to Rattalie as Lily’s best friend, and I know this loving bond was the same I shared with Kitty. A necessity for sleeping. A comfort for sad times. The thing I loved the most in this world.
Unfortunately, the fabric Mr. Kitty was made from was thinner than paper thin. One of my calming motions was to rub a knuckle pretty hard against Mr. Kitty, and this caused him to develop some rather large holes. My dad used to take old pairs of jeans he wasn’t wearing anymore and cut parts of them out to patch up Kitty. He retained his shape, even if his details turned into soft blue lines.
Even more unfortunately, Mr. Kitty got lost. (My husband and I have tried to head off this possibility with Rattalie by having extras on hand, but Lily has cuddled Rattalie into such a flopsy state that any replacement would be easily detectable. Extra caution is the name of our game.) But my parents were able to replace him, which they had to do twice. The second time, they got a smaller version of him, but at least it was something. I don’t know if I showed any visible upset at replacement Kitty, but it didn’t do me any long term emotional damage.
But then, the unthinkable happened. One night, we went out to dinner, and while strapping me into the car seat, Mr. Kitty fell. The car door closed. We drove home before the loss was realized. My dad went back the next day, but to no avail. And this time, there were no more replacement Kitties to be found. How would I go on?
For a short time, I had a replacement kitten, a small black one with a rattle in its tail. I don’t remember what I named it. It was a decent enough stand-in, but I never bonded with it the same way I did Mr. Kitty.
Then, for I believe my fifth birthday, my parents ordered a Fudgie the Whale cake for me from Carvel. But when my mom went to pick it up, it wasn’t ready. It turns out that around the holidays, Carvel turns their Fudgie cakes on their sides and they become Santa. This is what I get for having a December birthday.
Seeing as we had to wait for a new cake to be made, we were compensated with a stuffed Fudgie. He was a strange brown, fuzzy blob of a whale in a rough white sailor’s hat - and it was love at first sight. Everywhere that Shauna went, Fudgie went. He also earned holes of love. His sailor’s hat basically disintegrated off his head. All because of how hard I cuddled him. Fudgie did get lost at some point (I broke out the black kitty with the rattle in its tail again), and a good Samaritan Carvel worker that we spoke to about it volunteered to give us her daughter’s Fudgie from her personal collection. She is a true lifesaving hero.
I don’t know how old I was when that happened, but I couldn’t have been more than about 8. So we’re talking close to 30 years ago. And to this day, I still have and adore that Fudgie. He is probably one of the world’s most traveled stuffed animals, having been to the UK, Ireland, Norway, Israel, India, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and several other countries. Dare I admit that I still can’t sleep without him? I would be lost if I lost him.
I know I’m not the only adult who still cuddles a lovey. I also know that some people would like to, but they have partners who force them to stop. How does my husband feel about it? Roundabout 2006, my biggest, most special Christmas present was wrapped in a shoebox. It held a brand new Fudgie the Whale, still in his plastic wrap, that my husband had spent weeks hunting down on eBay. They’re not so easy to find as they were probably not made for long, and I’m not even sure they were sold widely to the public. Now Lily refers to these as “Mommy’s Fudgie” (the beat up one I still cuddle, who has no hat, whose eyes are worn into blank black orbs like a shark’s, whose fur is slicked down to his body rather than as puffy as it once was) and “Daddy’s Fudgie,” the new one that lives on top of the dresser.
Yes, I watch Lily with Rattalie, and I understand the love and devotion she has to this doll. I have had the same thing for 30 years, as well as a similar devotion for years before.
In short, it is okay to love your toys, to keep your toys, to share your toys with your progeny.
And may you all find a partner who finds you a new Fudgie on eBay.
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