I get newsletters from a lot of places, and admittedly I mostly just skim through them, only really clicking through if I find something especially interesting – like the other day! In my Fisher Price newsletter was a link to their 50th Anniversary toys, toys from my childhood.
If you grew up with Fisher Price toys like I did, I urge you to visit this page, I honestly got incredibly excited remembering the beloved toys my sister and I once played with for many happy hours. One thing I wasn’t aware of was how the “Little People” toys of today evolved from the ones we played with in the 70’s. My kids have the Christmas sets, which they love playing with, but the characters just don’t have the same appeal. They look too much like cartoons in my opinion (which I admit is completely biased!).
The first “house” I had was this yellow house you see above. I still have it in storage in my Mom’s house but sadly it’s pretty war torn with the pieces all disappeared – boo hoo. Fisher Price now has a “50th Birthday” version, which is just a few “retro” figures in a tin which vaguely looks like the original. A poor substitute, I think! They could have at least made replicas of the original people.
Other favourites which tug at my childhood heartstrings are the Sesame Street “street”, pictured at the top of the post and the airport just above. I could go on, and go the extra mile by actually purchasing these toys on Ebay (tempting, if it weren’t for the exorbitant prices), but for now I’ll just have to be content to look wistfully at these online photos.
For more memory tripping, check out this 1977 Fisher Price catalog, which I think is meant to be a bit of a joke, but for a seventies kid like me, is another lovely walk done memory lane.
Originally posted on April 18, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
