I grew up with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on TV, along with Gene Autrey, Hoppalong Cassidy and others. I had toys like the ones in the following vintage ad. I'd also bet many of you my age did. Boys were allowed to be boys then. And by the way, girls were allowed to be girls, playing with their dolls.

All in fun and innocent games. Then something changed. Dolls had to be anatomically correct and toy guns were bad. What happened to the innocence? It's sad.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/mNWr9eF2Huk

My parents never let us have toy guns. We could have real ones, but not toy ones.

Good for your parents!

I don't think I'm as old as many here, but we had that kind of childhood. Running around in the Idaho mountains trying to ping snakes with .22s and BB guns, riding mini-bikes and motorcycles. Mowing 10 acres with a push-mower... I think it was in the late 90s that things really started to change. One big school shooting and everyone panicked. I remember the turnaround in my school. Suddenly they started confiscating our pocket knives and talking about whether it was safe to have forks in the Caféteria.

Obviously what happened was you ruined it for everyone else.

Boys are allowed to be boys nor girls allowed to be girls not in the new world order of the one, the UN. No one is allowed to be old or you or rich or poor, short or tall, Chinese or Irish, animal or avertible nor anything but one.

K.

D

Lang

Ha-ha!!!

Call me cynical, but what I saw in the clip had nothing to do with being boys or girls or kids or whatever. It had my earliest hero--Roy Rogers (and I am not kidding: he was the first hero I can remember ever having)--pushing a stupid product that would last about less than a day of enjoyment. What was $5.98 back then? For a day's pleasure?

My old hero, Roy Rogers.

Pushing doo-doo for some extra cash.

Sad.

Not sure when it happened. FWIW, I was born in 1976. As a kid, friends and I would have the usual assortment of mischief-enhancing projectile toys... BB guns, sling shots, etc. One kid even had a bunch of throwing stars from the martial arts supply store across town. I guess this was all in the mid-80s.

Then at some point in the late 90s, for some (probably stupid) reason I needed to get a toy sword. Didn't have to be anything super realistic or special... just a plastic sword. I went all over town to toy store after toy store, and literally could not find a single one.

Growing up in NYC, in the late 50s and early 60s, I had toy cap guns, retractable knives, and most kids including myself carried pocket knives. And our forefingers made for some fearsome guns. The one no-no from my mom was playing with broken tree branches as swords because "You crazy kids are going to poke each other's eyes out!!" Which only happened once in a while.

To add to MB's comment above: I was in a play two nights ago, kind of on very short notice, where my character gets stabbed. I went all around the city where the theatre was (Patchogue, Long Island) and could not find either a rubber knife or a retractable knife (although there were lots of toy guns available). We finally just had to mime it.

That said, I think along with the power of play, parents should teach kids how to resolve real conflicts as non-violently as possible.

I was thinking the same thing Stone mentioned. I can imagine how many kids might have given up on old Roy, being disappointed in the toy. Sort of like Ralphie and Orphan Annie in the Christmas Story movie.

But I'd kind of like to have one of those hats with a real .22 or .25 in it to work that way. Just for fun of course.

Around here there's a halloween shop that sets up for a month in a local mall. They have plastic swords and rubber knives and such. But that's about the only place and time I've seen such stuff available here.

What I miss, is not the violence, but the imagination. My huge argument with computer games is that there is no imagination. You wil do what the programming says and that is all.

I remember being 8 or 9 years old in the mid 70's. I took my "Captain Action" action figure. (don't call him a doll) I took my Tonka circus truck and my Kodak Instamatic camera.

I took a series of photos that showed Captain Action on a mission to recapture an escaped circus tiger. The photos sucked but that isn't the point. Kids of my generation had the imagination to pull off stuff like that. I would not be surprised in some modern day movie directors got started doing things like that.

Long live play!

Put two young kids in an adults bedroom with no toys. Watch how fast the blankets become tents and the socks become puppets.

That's an over/under derringer style gun in the hat. My favorites of those are the ones that can shoot either .45s or .410s. I like the side x sides better though.

My kid does that now. [granted, he's an adult now, but he's been doing this for years] He puts his stuff on deviantart. One had spider man next to [for him] a huge package of Oreos. When he opens it, it's empty except that the Hulk is inside saying; ''Hulk not feel so good.''

He actually went out and bought a Sigmund Freud action figure so he could do a couple of strips about Spiderman and The Hulk being psychoanalyzed. [It doesn't go so well for ''Siggy'' in regards to the Hulk.]

That'll work too.

Let's see...My brother and I made bombs out of black powder...or if we wanted really big bangs, we'd head to the pharmacy for some sulpher, then to the foundry for some zinc dust. We had BB gun fights with the neighborhood kids (no eyes lost, lucky for us) and I was an expert on the trapese and monkeybars by the age of 11. We climbed trees and slid down ropes (burning the skin off my palms in the process), played with matches and razor blades and knives and vanished on our bikes for 8 hours at a time.

We swam in creeks, snagged watersnakes, chased possums and shot the dumprats with our .22's when we were bored, until chased out of the dump by Old Pedro.

I also was the town's best shoplifter for a brief time, before I weighed the ethics of it all against the accolades of my peers.

Later we solicited quarts of beer fromm the town drunk, stole gas from farmers so we could ram around...

Oh yeah, we also played Cowboys and Indians with play rifles and 6-shooters and pretended to shot each other...realizing it was more fun to die dramitacally than shoot the other guy. We could fall of rocks, out of trees and down hills. Roy helped us by showing us how cool it was, and everybody would have wanted that snazzy hat with the derringer.

Times have changed, and now a kid gets in trouble for pointing his finger? We are growing a generation of wussies who can't read, never learned cursive, but can play Computer like champs.

So it goes.

...times change. There are freedoms lost that can only make good historical stories.