In Continuum.

Play Things

What came with Wednesday's Straits Times this week was a brochure of the toys on sale at Toys'R'Us this holiday season,and because the end of army life is synonymous with with a life of boredom.That is to say,when you have four army boys sitting in an air-conditioned office,with tonnes of reading materials at hand,you are going to expect us reading just about anything,and commenting on everything.

Everybody mustve known the 7% GST hike,accounced by our then-beloved(Then,because i dont think he is very well celebrated right now)PM,claiming that part of the reason why he decided to raise the GST was to help the lower income group in Singapore,closing the economical gap between the rich and the poor.Well,our dear PM/Finance Minister clearly never read the book by John Sloman very well.I cant claim that i was very good at Economics,but i know what the hell GST is.Goods and Service Tax is a form of Progressive Tax,which means that the higher the tax,the lower the tax burden is on the higher income group.So if you decide to raise the GST,wouldnt it affect the lower income group instead of aiding them?Sure,you lowered the Corporate Tax to compete with Hong Kong(They dont even have GST!),but let's face it.You can do all you want with the economy,with the financing of the country's funds.But at the very end you wont need to wipe your own ass,we have to.

Anyway,back to the point.Aside from the badly vandalised picture of our PM,with money signs written on his forehead,pointed teeth and horns on top of his head,and in his fingers,pinched a hundred dollar note,there was a little booklet in the Life! section of the papers,with the adverts of toys from Toys'R'Us.The four of us crowded around the office table,and we found ourselves forgetting the badly vandalised face of our Prime Minister,but rather the toys displayed in the catalogue,as well as the ones we remembered,in boxes under our beds and in closets,our old play things.

Mighty Max was one of my favourite toys.In fact,it still remains one of my favourite toys of all time.I remember Poly Pocket came out first,and the idea of having little plastic characters ruling worlds the size of a box no bigger than your palm was rather fascinating.Poly Pocket i remember,had small plastic dolls in hair saloons,restaurants,holiday chalets and stuff like that.They grew bigger with time,and they are no longer Poly Pocket,because the houses grew so big they hardly was able to fit into an average child's palms.

Mighty Max came afterwards.And instead of nice settlements like a restaurant,holiday resort or swimming pool,those were replaced by Egyptian snake pits with a killer Mummy,laboratory of a made scientist who was halfway through the creation of Frankenstein,and of course the Spider Doctor,who had a giant spider in his own laboratory.And of course,Mighty Max's companions grew with the size of the toys as well.

From palm sized worlds,it grew to full sized islands,and his companion included the warrior with a big ass sword in his back,and the wise bird dude in a maroon robe,i remember.I used to love these toys,especially the bigger ones because they had so many more monsters and hidden areas.I remember the Haunted Mountain,and you could turn one of the balconies when Max is standing on it,and he will fall through into a dark pit inside the mountain.Also the hidden rock monster of the hills,as well as the killer crab and of course the evil lord of the mountain.The whole mountain was made of plastic really,and the entrance to it was actually the mouth of a monster head,while the eyeballs were actually balls of plastic fire mounted on catapults.There were of course other islands,like the one with the dragon head.That dragon was awesome,and the monsters had laser guns too.The beacons inside the island actually lights up with a switch underneath the island,and i remember with the turn of a knob,a snake-like monster will come out from under a pile of plastic rocks.

Next came the Hot Wheels.I wasnt very nice to my Hot Wheels cars.I remember making them run down my corridors at full speed,with them smashing into the sides and scraping off the paint.There was a pair of cars that i loved,that actually changed colours once you tipped them in different temperatured water.It was fascinating.

I remember making tracks with my blanket,with walls and a track for the cars to follow.My favourite car was a white one with much of its original paint gone,revealing the dull grey metal below.But i loved the car for the shape of it,and i remember making him win every single time i race the cars down the tracks.Yeah,i was rather biased.

I loved Monsters in my Pocket.I remember them selling at Toys"R"Us at a little over twenty dollars,for a set of twenty four monsters made from synthetic rubber.They all had different poses,and some were cooler than the others.In Kindergarten it was such a in toy,that in class boys would be playing with them.So much so that my teacher actually threw a handful of those away,and there i was staring at the colourful monsters in the bottom of the bin,so tempted to grab them and go home.

I used to have tornaments with them,favouring the orange monsters over any other colours.I think i disliked the green ones the most,and remember the other colours eventually ganging up with the orange to battle the green ones.Oh,there was the one with the dragon which i loved,and he was always the hero.Every single time.

But my favourite toy of all time is: Lego.

I am/was obsessed with Lego.Those colourful Lego bricks,the way they formed so many different buildings and cars,planes and futurtic behicles was beyond my wildest imagination.My very first Lego set was a pirate island,then followed by a holiday resort.I remember buying a set of police station next,then it followed on to the series of Aquanauts.The Aquanauts series was the very best of all the Lego series,save for the unbeatable castle series which i didnt like all that much.The Aquanauts were a bunch of divers underwater,living in a subterranean habitat,searching for three crystals with this claws equipped submarine.I even had a storyline written for the Lego sets to come together.

In the not-so-distant future,a team of Aquanauts were sent to live in an underwater habitat,in search of the three crystals that has the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction.They find it after much of the 'movie',and then found that they were betrayed.Using the crystals,the bad guys mounted them onto a giant laser gun in outer space,then creating waves of tsunami that swallowed the oceanic cities.Of course,the courageous Lego men banded together and saved the day at the very end.

Somehow.

The toy boxes were the buildings in the city,and i remember the scene building up to the tsunami one.I used the Hot Wheels for this one,and the carpet in my room was actually the cartoon map of a city,with roads running here and there too.So i lined the cars up on one edge of the carpet where there was a long straight road,and everything outside was the ocean.Wave comes in,washes the buildings and cars away and the world comes to an end.Well,almost.

I loved Legos.I loved them.I even built a mini version of Titanice and broke it into half on purpose,to mimick the scene from the movies.I made speed boats and haunted castles myself,with death traps and doors.Those speed boats were great.They even had movable back engines for easy escape.Multi-Turbo-Powered engines firing powerful jets of fire,projecting the Lego ships forward into battle,crashing into one another into a scatter of bricks!Brilliant,brilliant!

Honorable Mentions:
1)Creepy Crawlers
2)The Crash Dummies
3)Play-Do!
4)The Tub of Cavemen,Dinosaurs and US Army soldiers.
5)G.I. Joes
6)Other anonymous action figures