Surviving the 70’s

They could do all kinds of horrible things to you, but toys of my childhood, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

There were a lot of poisonous toys.

There was something called a bubble jet, which was this crazy little squirt gun, but it fired a stream of bubbles.

You put a little cyanide tablet in a chamber and it would create these gaseous bubbles.

And of course, the best thing we could think of to do with these chemical bubbles was to squirt them into each other's mouths.

So if you got tired of that, you could smoke your fake cigarettes.

One of our favorite toys growing up was called super elastic bubble plastic.

And this was basically plastic goo.

You'd put it on this little short straw and you'd blow these psychedelic plastic bubbles.

And I mean, I'm sure we killed some brain cells sniffing the fumes from that stuff.

And then every kid in my generation had a chemistry set.

I don't know what our parents were thinking.

Of course, you had little experiments that you could do per the instructions, but that got boring pretty quick.

So after a while, you just started mixing all kinds of chemicals together to see if you could get an explosion or a fire or fumes or some other kind of crazy reaction.