Reading – Rack Toys

If you’re not reading Plaid Stallions (website, Twitter) then you’re missing out on some serious fun. The site’s deep — careful, you may fall in! — and no matter how often I go back I continue to find fun from the seventies and eighties and soon lose track of the time. Seriously, it’s a fantastic site and blog and must be one you read regularly.

And now there’s a book. Rack Toys, subtitled “Cheap, Crazed Playthings,” is devoted to the cheapest of the cheap toys of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. For a description and page samples see the Rack Toys page at Plaid Stallions and then just go ahead and order the book (at the Plaid Stallions store, at Amazon.com*). Trust me, if you were a child of the seventies and eighties and you have already read this far then you need this book.

144-Pages of Bad Toys

Rack Toys is devoted to the cheap toys that the book identifies as, as Jason Lenzi writes in the introduction:

They’re the licensed, and often unlicensed, toys that inhabit that nether world between the serious output of Kenner, Mattel, Hasbro, and their ilk, and the generic drug store toys that are meant to satisfy he least discerning kid on the block.

Basically, to tackle the definition a bit more crudely, the toys are pure garbage. They’re the cheap toys you can find today that are pirate coin sets, bubbles and wands, and whatever other junk the local dollar store or grocery store pegs next to the few decent toys they carry. But what made these toys so special before — because the ones you can buy today are merely junk — was that many of them were licensed. Why sell handcuffs when you can sell Spider-Man Handcuffs?

The Rack Toys book is loaded with photos of this glorious, silly junk.

Seven Chapters Leave You Wanting More

From superheroes to bootlegs, television to horror, and even a section on just random toys the Rack Toys book (at the Plaid Stallions store, at Amazon.com*) doesn’t fail to entertain and amaze. The world’s ugliest Batman toy? Check! Star Trek putty, complete with “As Seen on TV” bug? Check. Cylon sunglasses? You better believe that’s a big check! Page after page after page . . . and each time I think I’ve absorbed it all some other bit of strangeness makes me stop and chuckle.

Wonderfully Fun!

You really do want this book. See the Flickr set I created for more pics, visit the Rack Toys page at Plaid Stallions, and then just go ahead and order yourself a copy: at the Plaid Stallions store, at Amazon.com*. The book’s full-color throughout all 144-pages — which it had to be to let us really enjoy the photos — and at $20 you’re gonna get your money’s worth . . . and that’s before you start sharing the book with your friends.

After all, who could resist sharing the Woody Woodpecker Submarine & Diver Set with their friends?

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