A continuation from below…
Stacy: Okay, I totally wanted this doll, and I can’t think of what she was called, but basically you would make this food for her (packets were included I think, probably some scary red powder that had to be mixed with water or something) and feed her, and then she would develop diaper rash. The television commercial showed the red-dot rash emerging from pin holes in her bottom! I thought this was the coolest doll ever! But then my mom heard from other moms that much of the food stuff gets stuck inside the doll and the doll starts stinking up a storm in no time. My mom refused to have two (if I got one my little sister would want one too!) smelly dolls in the house, so she instructed Grandma to get Baby-Crawl-Away for us instead. Here comes the story of the doll that blew. Baby Crawl Away was only coordinated enough to crawl on the first two seconds of her battery. (You had to take her plastic ass apart constantly to put new batteries in.) After that she was a mess of arms and legs and fell flat on her face every time. Sometimes my sister and I would race our Baby Crawl Aways and bet on which one would bite it first. And to make a doll that (so-called) crawled, she was all hard plastic with mechanical joints and stuff–the least cuddly doll ever. So when she fell on her face, it didn’t really occur to anyone to pick her up and hold her, so everyone just left her there in her battery-induced seizure. Sad. And no match for diaper rash on command…. Chad: The year was 1984 (I think) I asked for the 8-bit Nintendo game Commando from Santa – I also told my mom that she could buy it at Toys R Us. She proceeded to tell me that Santa doesn’t buy his toys from Toys R Us. I then explained to her that I knew she and my dad were "Santa," and that there was no real fucking Santa.So Christmas rolled around and under the tree was a box for me from "Santa" that was roughly the shape of a nintendo game. I opened it up and found a god-damned piece of black coal. My mom told me that kids who don’t beleive in Santa get coal. That was my christmas present for the year. And yeah… it sucked. Jennie: Since I was lucky enough not to need to ask for my two front teeth, I got to concentrate on other stuff. I totally bought the advertisements that Maniac was a cool game, and it sucked. That was my school of hard knocks education on advertising. One year my brother and I asked for a Coleco Vision game system, and it rocked. The graphics were way better than the Atari systems my friends had, and we spent hours playing Donkey Kong, Ladybug, and Xaxon David DB: When I was in high school I wanted a subscription to Playboy and my mom wouldn’t get it for me. When I was in grammar school, the kids across the street from me got these really cool new transistor portable radios, leather covered, they could hold in their palms up to their ears. I asked my dad for a portable radio and he got me a big pink one with tubes. Try taking that to school in your bookbag, or pulling out a pink radio in front of the local Pacoima gangs. Ned: The six foot long GI JOE aircraft carrier…$100 from Kay-Bee Toys with multiple levels for all your GI Joe action…pretty sure "Shipwreck" was the action figure that came with it. That or Optimus Prime from the Transformers. I can remember countless annoying sweaters or other boring clothing items instead. Then there were the pillow cases we got from our babysitter, Mrs.Cooper. Way boring!Of course, probably the worst Christmas I had, which I don’t even remember,came when I was all of 20 months old and was pounding on our piano in the living room. The lid came down and lopped off the tip of my left index finger. We hurried to the emergency room and the doctor decided to sew it back on. Country wisdom being we can always take it back off again if it wasn’t going to set. Dr. Rodawig knew what he was doing and I have the tip to my index finger to this day…albeit a little misshapen. Clair: I never got the EZ Bake oven and I always asked for it. I also never got the Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop. Instead, my twin sister and I got the Play-Doh Monster Mold set, which was totally lame. It had a pump — sort of — through which you squeezed Play-Doh into these monster molds. Then you pried the two halves of the mold apart, and you were supposed to get cool-looking monster figurines. Instead, you got big lumps of Play-Doh with lines in them that might have looked like monsters if you were astigmatic. Plus, when we tried to create multi-colored figurines, as shown on the box, we just wound up squishing together all our different colors of Play-Doh so it could never be used for anything else again. Then again, we were four, so maybe it would have worked better if we’d had better motor skills. But I’m sure we would not have had these problems with the Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop.