Yard Sale Find: Star Wars Land of the Jawas

This past Saturday, I went yard saling and scored some great finds. One of the best was this hard-to-find vintage Star Wars playset, Land of the Jawas, from the first movie. No one I knew as a child had this set; I didn't even know it existed until I was a grown-up toy collector. It's a relatively scarce piece because half of it, the sandcrawler backdrop, is made of fragile cardboard.

Vintage Vending Machine Prize Cards

I love, love, love vending machine toys: to this day I can't go to the grocery store without checking out the machines by the door and feeding them fist fulls of quarters.

For me, the holy grails of vending toy collecting are the original display cards that were placed in the front of the machines to tempt little shoppers. Here are some of my favorites. Dating from the 1960s and 70s, these cards are chock-full of the tiny treasures we all hoped to get from these coin-eating machines, but usually didn't. False advertising abounded in these display cards, although that doesn't seem to be the case so much today: maybe some consortium of disappointed little kids sued in the 1980s or something...

Game Cupboard

Here's a peek into one of my game cupboards. So much to play, so little time...

BASH! Game

Mere words cannot describe how incredibly satisfying this toy is. Dating from 1965, BASH! was one of the hardest-to-find games on my wish list. Now that I have it, I can't get enough of it. Game play is simple: stack up the yellow and red plastic slices that comprise the BASH man's body. Then, using the special hammer, take a WHACK at the slices, trying to smack one the heck out of there! If you do it right, it's like that old gag where someone yanks a tablecloth off a crowded table without any of the dishes falling: BASH's head will simply plop down onto the remaining slices. But if you do it wrong, the whole thing crashes apart in a magnificent cascade of clattering plastic. It took me a few days to get the technique down, but now I can BASH happily away, thinking all the while of things that are stressing me out. A few WHACKS and the stress is gone! Loads cheaper than therapy, I highly recommend a few sessions of BASH for all your troubles.

Vintage Colorforms Set: Twisto - Change-O

I loved Colorforms as a child, and still do today: they're a great calming, soothing stress-reliever. (Try it, you'll see!) This set, Twisto - Change-O, was introduced in 1972, and featured an innovation for the Colorforms line. After suiting up the little boy, you turn the red knob on the Twisto - Change-O machine, and different faces appear where the boy's head is, courtesy of a cardboard wheel under the picture featuring several different faces that revolve into view. Simple yet ingenious and lots of fun to play with, this device was used again in Colorforms' Tricky Mickey Magic set (which I'll try to post soon. It's way cool...).