There are certain things that are synonymous with being a child born in the 70s or early 80s:
You burnt your legs at least once while sliding down a metal slide in the summer.
Seatbelts were just a suggestion.
A knee scrap was fixed with mercurochrome, Band-Aids and a Freezie
You played with a Fisher Price toy at some point.
It’s time to take a walk down the Fisher Price memory lane. How many of these playsets and toys did you play with (and secretly wish you could play with today)?
This baby activity centre had all the bells and whistles. Well, not the whistle (choking hazard!) but it had a bell you could ring, you could make the three men in a tub wobble back and forth, spin a ball, dial the phone, and watch the cow jump over the moon.
Toss ‘em, stack ‘em, float them in the bathrub. It was such a simple toy yet we could spend hours playing with these brightly coloured rings. Bonus points if you have photos of you chewing on one while you were teething.
Raise your hand if you pulled the chatter phone while running to see how fast you could make its eyes roll up and down or interrupted adult conversations because they had a “phone call.”
From the bell ringing on each floor as you turned the elevator crank, to the automatic stop signs and the ramp that pushed the car out so it would roll back down to the bottom, we’ll just file this under: OMG I STILL WANT TO PLAY WITH THIS CATEGORY.
The best thing about the family camper, hands down, was the toilet at the back of the camper that fit the Fisher Price people perfectly. This was followed by the sink (to wash up after you used the toilet, of course), a ladder that took you up to the bunk beds, and a boat that actually floated so you could play with it in the bathtub.
Plus there was always food ready and waiting on the grill.
If you didn’t experience the joy of ringing the doorbell on the Fisher Price Family Play House, you missed out. But what truly made this one of the best toys ever was the detachable staircase with a faux wood sticker on one side and a secret door on the other side. You had forgotten about that, didn’t you?
Back in the 70s kids took playing doctor pretty seriously and Fisher Price seemed to know that. This kit contained a pretend needle to give meds, a blood pressure cuff that inflated, and a thermometer you could adjust to make the temperature rise and fall, but the icing on the medical cake was the stethoscope that actually worked.
We defy you to try to find a better play medical kit that’s been made since then.
A movie in the palm of your hand long before Netflix and phones, the best thing about the Fisher Price viewer set wasn’t that you could watch movies without a television, it was how you could turn the crank backwards and watch them all in reverse.
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