Anyone else make their own toys? So you don't get the impression I was some broke kid who grew up with a dirt floor (not that there's anything wrong with that) I had the usual 80s stuff: Legos (before they were all movie marketing tie-ins), Transformers, Star Wars, etc., but I also made my own line of war toys.
They were number and letter figures about the same size as regular figures (but made of pipe cleaners) that fought each other with guns and weapons from Gi Joes or whoever and vehicles made of discarded stuff. I got the idea for the fighting "numbers" from some old cartoon with an ADD kid in math class (before they called it ADD) whose imagination starts running when called up to the black board to solve a math problem.
The main vehicles were those plastic pantyhose eggs with the clear plastic fat end. The clear end was the canopy opening and windshield and I made seats for the pilot and gunner (if it was a ground attack 2-seater that had a flexible gun sticking out the front center of the canopy, but most were single seat "fighters" with fixed external guns because I didn't have to worry about breaking the plastic when trying to drill the gun hole). The nubs on the outside of the egg were directional thrusters that allowed it to maneuver and hover in the absence of external aerodynamic surfaces and the indent at the narrow end of the egg was the outlet for the main thruster. They were powered by matter/antimatter collision engines and, if they took a direct hit, they would be completely obliterated by the uncontrolled reaction (I used to watch Creature Double Feature and they had this movie—"The Claw", I believe—about a giant bird from outer space that attacks the earth and had an antimatter force field, so this is where I "learned" my science). Having them completely obliterate allowed me to reuse them more easily, though since they were made of discard, I felt free to destroy them in gun battles and transfer the other parts to new eggs. There were other vehicles, but I'm sure I wrote way too much already! And this is why I don't put my real name on this.
