Yea, we had all the fun toys back then.<p>Creepy Crawlers, where you poured Goop(tm) in to metal molds, and cooked them into bugs and lizards and skulls and what not.<p>The Mattel Vacuform, which you could use to make plastic models. You heated up styrene sheets and folded them over molds. I think we had some army missile truck mold set. I think this toy was a bit advanced for us. Molding was easy, assembly -- not so much.<p>We also had the Hot Wheels Factory, which was an injection mold system to make rubber cars. It was nice because you could carve up the cars you made and feed them back in the machine and melt them back down.<p>Then there were the Erector Sets, Toggles, Legos, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs. We also had a zillion feet of Hot Wheels track. It didn't hurt living in El Segundo, with the Mattel factory store very nearby in Hawthorne.<p>My brother and I managed to make through our 5-10 years while maintaining all of our fingers, toes, limbs, and avoiding skin grafts. I think we did little damage to the floor (we always played on the floor, never on a table). We may have scorched a carpet here to there.<p>Yup, good times indeed!<p>All that said, kids changes, toys change. I remember buying some castle toy set for some friends young boys (4-6) for Christmas. It was a step up of from "Fisher Price" detail. Had horses and soldiers, and big castle.<p>I honestly have never seen anyone so excited to receive something (well, maybe my wife when I gave her that ring thing). They were just bouncing up and down. This was a hot ticket toy and I bumbled into. As a kid, I might have enjoyed something like that. We had our GI Joes and Major Matt Mason stuff. But, I don't think these kids were missing out much on not having toys that had open heating elements.