I've been buying some vintage stuff off ebay recently, not just Gi Joe but the Black Hole figures, some Buck Rogers, Micronauts and MASH. I am fairly surprised as to how delicate they feel in hand. When I move their joints I literally feel like the arm will snap off at any second... This can't be due to aging of plastic either, majority of the figures I bought were still in their boxes and in great condition. Were kids back in the day a lot more careful? I cannot imagine any of these figures holding up to more than a day of play. I also get this feeling with joes up until around 1985.

I was born in 79 and I destroyed all my toys. I put my matchbox cars in a vice. I used hair spray as a blowtorch to melt my GI Joes. I blew many a toy up with firecrackers. I took a maul to my Tonka trucks, Indestructible my a$$. I definitely wasn't any gentler.

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The plastics are aging badly. When I was a kid, you didn't have a prayer of harming a MOTU figure. It just wouldn't happen. You could chew their hands off maybe, but it was WORK.

Also, one of my favorite Joes I got from a friend at school - a super loose version of Wild Weasel. He looked so cool when he landed because he was floppy - physics took over and it looked like a real dude landing. We threw him again and again and again. He lived through countless "explosions". No busted crotch, had his thumbs, just loose.

80's toys were built tough, but not built to last. The plasticizers in the toys are leaching out, and making a brittle product. I sold my Flagg and my Terrordrome, somewhat feeling like a used car salesman, because if they were this brittle since 1985, I can only imagine what they'd be like in 2020. These things are NOT going to last - especially where there's pressure points holding things together, like T-drome hinges and such.

So in short, they were built tougher, but they are decaying.

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just like me. and Chief.

hi Chief.

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You're telling me DarkJedi. It costs me a fortune to replace those meaningful toys I destroyed in my youth.

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When I was a kid, I was the only one I knew who played with my GIJoes. Everyone else blew them up with firecrackers. I still have mine, and people still come over, say, wow, you still have this stuff?" and immediately break them and laugh about it.

I don't have a lot of visitors anymore.

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When I got to a certain age, I had one last final battle. I set up a large battlefield in my backyard, and even made a castle out of cardboard. I then wired key points and figures with Black Cats, and one long line of black cats strung all around the castle. The carnage was unimaginable.

Toys nowadays are made with cheaper parts/plastics, and when you factor in the more articulation, you get toys that will wear out faster. Yes, Joes were made to be tough, but everything degrades over time.

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Toys weren't made to last 30 years.
Toy companies sure didn't predict that the children who played with their products would turn into collectors and still want the same toys 20 plus years later. They expected that the kids would enjoy the products for a few years, grow up and forget about them.

I was always gentle with my toys. I didn't smash them together during fights or whatever. That's why the few childhood Joes that I still have are in amazing shape except for a few broken thumbs and been customized with unmatching parts.

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Me and my Joes had some good times where I gently played with them and spent hours building forts and digging trenches. And some things remained untouched like the Tomahawk, the Tiger Fly, the Thunder Machine, and a few others. But when I hit 9 or 10 years old, I got real destructive and those toys I saw as "nonessential" were quickly dispatched........with extreme prejudice.

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Wow you are evil.

OB

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A favorite game one summer was sending figures down a set of concrete steps in a tonka metal race car. I had a ESB Han Solo with half his face scraped off and a Clutch-

Actually Clutch makes for a great story. I must have sent him down those steps a dozen times and while my friends were replacing their drivers as they got busted, my Clutch held strong until the end. I'm playing inside later and a bad LBC custom round house kicked Clutch's head, straight off his body. For a split second I looked at the custom figure in my hand with eyes wide open thinking I had pieced together the baddest karate dude on the planet. Turns out Clutch broke his neck post but his torso's collar had held it in place. I glued the head back on and gave him a helmet. He did not do well on the stairs the next day.

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I think he meant the visitors were the ones breaking the toys and laughing

I was all over the place with my toys. I seemed to be rougher on them playing with my brother than on my own, though.
Micronauts were pretty fragile, and all fell to the power of the Imperail army. My only surviving Micronaught is a Time Traveller sarcophogus.

I remember a few Leias, Hans and 3POs gettign beheaded by some means. I remembe one Leia fatality, she was riding shotgun in the landspeeder and smashed into a huge wall of building blocks, and the force of the impact beheaded her. I still have that Landspeeder, It looks about as beat up as the film version.
Our X-wing and TIE fighter got destroyed in the Dagobah swamp, er duck pool, whatever.
By the time I got into GI Joe, Robotech and Transformers, my brother was in Highschool and I mosly just played by myself, and wasn't rough on them.

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I played with my figures, but understood their limits. They had some broken thumbs and suffered some broken crotches and O-rings. Stuff that as a kid in the 80's , I had no resources to consult on repairs. I did my best with my 'technology" and they survived relatively intact until the internet was created by Al Gore in 1994 and I was able to repair them correctly.

I think nowadays kids really do not play with their toys as much as they used to. I see a lot of kids ranging 7-14 playing video games over figures. Why play with Gijoes when you can play Call of Duty? It's just the generation we livein