My parents didn't have loads of cash. Dad was a self-employed hod carrier (often rained off in winter) and mum a sewing machinist. But they certainly made an effort at Christmas. When I was 10 I got this:
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And when I was 11 I got this:
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Both cost a lot of dosh back in the day, 1980 and 1981 and I absolutely treasured them. Will never forget the feeling of glee and excitement when I got my mitts on these fabulous presents.
What did you lot get for Christmas as kids?
Raleigh Grifter
Spesh Hardrock sport in purple. I'd been riding across the South Downs on a Falcon 10 speed racer up until that point and that Hardrock was the most awesome thing ever. I polished it every day, rode it to school and from Eastbourne to Cuckmere every weekend. Sadly the U-lock was cut and the bike stolen about a year later from outside a friends house. I was devestated. I think I was 13 or so at the time.
TCR (Total Control Racing) slotless truck racing set. Not entirely sure why the word "Control" featured in the name 😕 They'd only go round corners on the outside lane due to centrifugal force, and if you tried it at more than half speed the trucks (complete with trailers) would fling across the room 🙂
Oh and got one of these... (and I can *still* remember the theme tune for Dizzy)
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Transistor radio when i was 7
Claude Butler Majestic when i was 13.
Awesomes. Rock'n'roll'n'bikes.
My first 2 wheeled bike at the age of 6.
Father Christmas skulked into the room ( smelling of beer), tripped over my sister's toys, so I got to see him place the treasured present by the window.
From that day on I was hooked.
Red BMX that Mum had hidden behind the curtains 🙂
I learnt to ride without stabilisers the very same day...
+1 for the ZX81.
Enjoyed equally a few years later when I got a Spectrum 48k.
Those were the days.
Let's get serious now. Introducing...the Action Man Assault Tower...
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Not me in the pic, just googled it. The assault tower came with a zip line & everything. It was ace. Until my best mate fell backwards onto it & broke it.
2 or maybe 3 years ago my dad took me cycling on Christmas day. 60 miles around London, on road. Christmas lunch was a few sandwiches that had been in our back pockets for a couple of hours, under an archway, in the rain, next to a tramp. Its a tough ride, cause of how London is, all the stopping and starting, means you get really knackered and it takes hours longer then a normal 60 miles would.
It may sound weird, but its the only Christmas I can really remember.
A talking Action Man when I was 5 or 6 😀 , which my sister broke after about ten minutes 😥 .
Most other presents weren't up to much... 😥
ewok village or AT-AT
my nephew plays with them now (although my 11 month old boy is planning a take over bid)
awesome
Tamiya Sand Scorcher, i must have been about 12 😛
I loved it, wish i still had it they go for a fortune now, real cult stuff.
Manta Force cruiser thingy:
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The next year I got an amazing little base thingy to go with it:
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HELL YES
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An Emmelle Lazer in when I was about 13. I've ridden mountain bikes ever since.
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http://80stoyshop.com/images/mk1tuff.jp g"/> [/img]
That is all!!
My mum had a significant win on the bingo one year and so informed me that I could choose a brand new bike!! OMG (or whatever the 1983 equivalent was.. ACE! maybe)
Imagine my surprise when I woke up to a fully loaded Raleigh Equipe with 11 gears and an electric siren..
Somehow the guy in Halfords had disregarded the fact that I had magazine cuttings and pictures of the Raleigh Bomber in Raleigh colours on my bedroom walls... and that I had wished for it every night and dreamed about it and that I had pretty much spraffed my kecks about the Bomber for at least 2 years..
and somehow this Halfrauds bozo had convinced my naieve mother that no young boy would choose a mean and tough functional Bomber over the effete and flimsy and in my eyes completely pointless road race replica..
being the kindhearted and thoroughly grief stricken but dutiful little boy that I was.. I passed off the choking and the burning tears that sprang to my eyes as gratitude.. I sobbed a ridiculously melodramatic thankyou and promptly turned the ridiculous drop handlebars upside down and literally rode the wheels off it time and time again for the next 5 years until my first after school job enabled me to replace it with something more suitable...
The melodramatic and tearful thankyou went down in family history as a sign of my all round goodness.. and I have perpetuated the myth until the truth slipped out during some friendly banter with the old crow a few years ago!
Let's get serious now. Introducing...the Action Man Assault Tower...
serious - LOL, THIS is serious
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johnny Seven - wicked, and the white bullets really hurt as well, as my wee brother would testify
Action Force Headquarters.
Made of card and slotted together, but still amazing.
Shortly after my parents twigged that Action Force was all about men with guns and I didn't get any action force or military related gifts ever again.
"mmmm a book on the wildlife of the serengetti, let's see if it can make an effective helipad for the action force helicopter!"
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holy crap, is that legal? (the big gun thing above) I do also have good memories of spud guns and my mate's sister (no, not like that)
I don't know how old I was, but I couldn't get to sleep at the end of christmas day knowing I could still be playing with this instead:
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yunki - Member
being the kindhearted and thoroughly grief stricken but dutiful little boy that I was.. I passed off the choking and the burning tears that sprang to my eyes as gratitude.. I sobbed a ridiculously melodramatic thankyou and promptly turned the ridiculous drop handlebars upside down and literally rode the wheels off it time and time again for the next 5 years until my first after school job enabled me to replace it with something more suitable...The melodramatic and tearful thankyou went down in family history as a sign of my all round goodness.. and I have perpetuated the myth until the truth slipped out during some friendly banter with the old crow a few years ago!
😆
pedalhead
[url= http://www.stuffwelove.co.uk/johnny_seven.htm ]Johnny Seven - OMA One Man Army[/url]
oh and this
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except mines was silver, much cooler
about a dozen men for the ejector seat, all gone by boxing day IIRC
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Loved that machine!
http://www.tamiyaclub.com/car.asp?id=67
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Mine also had the uprated independent front suspension kit.
Still looks awesome today!
Vertibird. It was brilliant!
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This was pretty damn ace too.
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But the toy I never got that I always wanted, the one that yearned for with all my heart, was this one.
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That my parents didn't get me that toy is almost certainly the reason I'm a social cripple with some very dark thoughts about people.
OP - that Seiko is great, do you still have it? My bestest ever present was this bad boy:
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One year I got a pair of boxing gloves and my brother got some roller skates.....we shared them half a pair each.
They were taken off us by lunchtime
Samurai beat me to it with the Evel Kneivel - it was a great toy, I had one.
My mum wouldn't get me a bmx or grifter though 🙁
This
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The first thing I did was barrel roll it racing my cousins and rip the mirrors off 🙁
and [url= http://www.flickr.com/photos/gadgetfreak2000/3539979983/ ]This[/url]
Which i do rebuild periodically 🙂
Mine was the ZX81 also. Fantastic.
10 PRINT "I AM A PROGRAMMER"
20 GOTO 10
30 END
Has programming moved on much since then? Just wondered as I'm thinking of a career change and it would be good to get into software.
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I don't think there are words to adequately describe how cool this was when aged 8. All the kids in the road where outside showing their news toys and I'll never forget the gasps of amazement when I rolled out of the garage on one of these.
I had one of those flight deck thingies where you could launch a plane off the deck of an aircraft carrier, I think I probably broke the catapult mechanism.
After that it was probably one of the first ever Sony Walkmans with Orange headphone covers.
Scalextric, all my rellies scoured the ads in the back of papers & bought me 2nd hand kits ... I went from no kit to 150 bits of track & 10 cars in a day.... oh the excitement... then the stress when I was in bed & could hear my Dad & Grandfathers playing it.
Luckily Mum stopped them 🙂
Samurai, did you steal my toys?
I loved that helicopter and Evel K.
The other thing I loved was one of these. '84 Pistol Pete. My dad gave it away when I was at uni 😥 Now as rare as the proverbial.
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@ Gingerbloke (and anyone else interested)
Bigtrak is back in production (along with Stylophone).
0 guesses who knows the bloke who owns/runs Dubreq Ltd. 😉
</blatant advertising> 😉
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I had the Capture Copter (the one on the left). Looking on the web these were from 1978 so that would mean i was 3 when i got it.....all i know is that it was bloody big and hard for me to pick up. Lasted ages too
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http://www.landoslocker.com/range_rotj/images/ewok_village/ewok_vil_boxed.jp g"/> [/img]
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+1 for the ZX81.Enjoyed equally a few years later when I got a Spectrum 48k.
Another remembered ZX81 pressie here as well.
I also moved onto a Spectrum later. I built my own though - I worked at the weekends in my uncles garage which had a plastics re-cycling place behind it. They got a pile of junk in from Timex in Dundee (who assembled Sinclair kit) and the manager asked if I could do anything with it. I managed to build about half a dozen working Spectrums from all the crap they got, gave one to the manager, one to my uncle, kept one for myself and sold the remainder. Quite a lot of cash back in the days I was a teenager.
Still got the ZX81 and a Spectum up in my loft, along with a couple of BBC Micros.
http://www.skatehut.co.uk/acatalog/Bigtrak.html?gclid=CKegzrW4p6ICFUcA4wodWUdRSQ
The price now is pretty much what it cost back in the late 70s. If they are selling them again, I'm getting one!
Next best was probably an Atari console, but that was a "shared" present between me & my brothers.
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thought this was v cool compared to the stunt bike that everyone else had
Action man tank sticks in my memory. I also had a cracking go-cart as a pre-cursor to bikes.
This was a cracker (but a birthday present):
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My father dressing up ineffectively as Santa Claus, to put presents at the end of the bed.
Early realisation that it was all just a fairy-tale.
Best present ever. 😉
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my folks will recall this as the quietest chrimbo ever
My Raleigh Grifter thirty something years later and I still use grip shift 😉
Then my GT pro race BMX
This was a cracker (but a birthday present):
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Did they buy it for you to grow into?
Christmas 1968..Johnny seven (one man army)
grifter, best pressie by a mile!
Gameboy Color + GB Camera with printer 😀
Raleigh Medale circa xmas 1981
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Raleigh Bomber in Raleigh colours on my bedroom walls... and that I had wished for it every night and dreamed about it and that I had pretty much spraffed my kecks about the Bomber for at least 2 years..
I got one of those and loved it. Best pressie ever was a Sony separates system as a shared present with my brother - he still has it now some 28 years later.
and I've still got this somewhere, in its box with the instructions and the little silver "pen" to operate those tiny buttons
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+1 (or should at be +2?) for ZX Spectrums and Commodore Amigas.
I also had a Raleigh Winner too, complete with a whole five gears - although only four ever worked.
This:
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"Did they buy it for you to grow into?"
Oh yes. They couldn't afford to get a new one every year. I recall it was a struggle initially but you grow like a weed at that age and it wasn't that long before it was too small.
Don't know what happened to the cute kid though.
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Four lane scalextric set....being one of four sons (the youngest) that was it for christmas and boxing day and then some. Fantastic set and disposed of when I thought I knew better for minimal money. Now buying peices afresh for my lad!!!
Best and worse were the same. It was this dead good remote control helicoper thing. As soon as it was opened my dad and grandad had to "test" it for a few hours before my sister got her hands on it and wrecked it. I didnt get a go. My parents couldnt get it replaced so i ended up with more bloody meccano. ****s.
Can't find a picture on line but Christmas '75 - A brand new Raleigh Olympus road bike. Red frame, blue "ultra light" mudgaurds (which I later cut down to "mini racing mudgaurds" 😯 ), 5 gears. Beautiful. And I also got front and rear lights. Front light was grey and slid onto the Raliegh light bracket on the headset and had a big black switch on top, rear light was samew as one on bike a few posts up - took the "stuck together double battery pack" IIRC.
🙂
My first new bike when I was about 8 was pretty cool but by far the most memorable was when I was about 10 I was given a Panasonic radio. For some reason this present has stuck in my mind for the last 30 odd years!
I can still remember the new 'electronic something' smell and the squeak of the polystyrene packing as I unwrapped it. That radio stayed with me for years and it was used pretty much every day, usually listening to Radio Luxemburg in bed as I fell asleep 8)
Many other pressies have been and gone, mostly more expensive, but that radio will stick with me as my favourite for a long time!
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It was the 48K one too... none of your 16K shite.
Let's get serious now. Introducing...the Action Man Assault Tower...
I had one of those too. It was left a bit too close to the gas fire one day and melted a bit but was still usable. I had the Meccaono army kit and a Spectrum 48k as well.
When I was 12 I got one of these for Xmas
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Feinwerkbau Sport 124 - cost £90 in 1981 - I loved plinking with it in the garden.
sharkbait - I got a cassette tape recorder when I was 15 (1978) which I used for years and still remember clearly. It was a black Toshiba, single speaker, top loading and it had a "counter" (tiny dial numbers that didn't always turn) and took 6 batteries.
I used to put it on loud in my haversack so I could listen to music while cycling to the shops!
That pneumatic lego above reminded me of this (I had a pneumatic set too but can't remember exactly what it was).:
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Also tuned into a space shuttle. 🙂
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Spectrum +2. I remembered I had been asking for it for ages but deep down knew it was too expensive so had given up on getting it.
Went mental when I tore off the paper! Mum had to keep saying "it's for your birthday too!"
Looking back i was spoilt rotten as a kid...
Evel Knievel stunt bike
Action Man Assault Tower
" " Scorpion Tank
" " Helicopter/Plane/Boat/Car convertible thingy
" " 125mm Howitzer
" " Jeep
" " six-wheeled thing with crane on back
" " Submarine
Plus about 15 actual Action Men - i was better equipped than the bloody army!
Scalextric Formula 1 set in ooh about 1981 (i was 10). It came with a yellow Renault Elf and a March Ford six wheeler. My dad came home half cut from the pub late xmas eve, let me open it early and we stayed up and played it all night.
1972 or so - Scalextric, keep getting one every so often just for a bit of fun.