This week's assignment:
Summer Vacation.
Whenever possible I like to make my LoEB posts toy-related, it is 3B's Toy Hive, afterall, and today I wanted to share a Summer/toy-related anecdote from my youth.
As a kid (approx 10-12 years old), my brother and I didn't really have an allowance. Obviously our mom and dad would buy our clothes, feed us and treat us to a trip to the arcade or park, but most toy-related purchases were reserved for Christmas and birthdays. Summer vacation offered us a chance to go to work with our grandfather (on our mother's side) and earn some cash landscaping.
Now, I wasn't crazy about mowing lawns and trimming trees and all that, but I was sitting around at home not doing much anyway, so maybe once a week I'd go. What does all this have to do with toys? Well, Summer is blockbuster movie season and with big movies came big toy lines.
In the Summer of 1995, Batman Forever was probably the biggest movie out and had a massive toy line supporting it with all-new figures (as opposed to the previous Batman Returns line which rehashed a lot of The Dark Knight Collection toys). As a pre-teen, Bat-fan I was very excited about the new film and the new toys. At that point I never owned an action-figure sized Batmobile, so I desperately wanted the new one.
I spent a lot of my free days that Summer working for my grandfather and eventually picked up the crazy-ass Batmobile along with the Batboat, Batplane and all the main characters in the film. In retrospect the film and the toys were massively goofy, but boy did I enjoy them back then. The Batmobile featured a light-up chassis, pop-put rear fender guns (!) and a splitting center fin (still don't know what the purpose of that was).
For me, Summer vacation was an oppurtunity to pick-up the toys that weren't around until after my birthday (February) and probably wouldn't be available during Christmas. I spent a lot of hours under the hot Florida sun, pushing a lawnmower or lugging sacks of mulch or walking through Home Depot during those long Summer months just to be able to walk into the toy aisle and be able to grab cool new toys.
Well worth the time.
From around the League!
• Stunt Zombies
• Pop Rewind
• Diary of a Dorkette
• Fortune and Glory (Days)
• Team Hellions
