• " Mick said: When I was a child I brought my action figures into the bathtub with me. I also didn't know what "masturbating" was at that age. Hindsight's 20/20 and looking back, I realized that exactly what I was doing. Every girl wants her first sexual experience to be with a man she loves...mine was with a GI Joe knock off." I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "Now that's just Plain Damn Wierd"

• For a while i dismembered various toys in a clearly surgical fashion, then carefully superglued the bits back together to form the most horrifying mutants i possibly could. Ever play the 360game Prey? your character's girlfriend gets her upper torso merged onto a giant monster, and screams for you to kill her. My mutant toys would've given HER nightmares.

• I know this has been over for a long time, and chances are no one will ever read this. But I have to throw this out into the ether: I was about four when I saw Poltergeist on HBO. The part with the clown traumatized the living shit out of me. I happened to have a porcelain clown bank at the time. I woke up from a horrible nightmare and saw the clown looking at me. I tried hiding under the covers, but I knew it was still there. So I grabbed my wiffle bat and smashed it into little porcelain pieces. I kicked it. I punched it. I smashed that antique heirloom into tiny bits of white pointy shit. My mom was PISSED that I destroyed part of her childhood, and even more pissed at my grandfather(her dad, who lived with us at the time) for letting me watch that movie. He said, "It was PG, I figured it would be okay." So yeah, I obliterated that thing with all the fury a little kid could possibly possess.

• 1988: Six professional toy designers n LA did the unthinkable to a bunch of $8 Radio Shack "Thunder Wagon" tether-controlled vehicles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmyhjwfJZII

• One of my little sister's and my favorite games when we were young was something we liked to call "Giants." This game involved us being giants and hurling our Barbies around into trees and on the roof. When I was 11, we moved into a house in the woods at the end of a dead end road. There was a stream near the road where we liked to play, and yes, I'll admit it: I still played with Barbies. WTF else was I supposed to do in the fucking woods with only my little brother and sister to play with? Anyway, my sister and I were playing Giants when somehow we came up with the idea that all of the Barbies should be hung from the trees. Between the two of us, we probably had 25 dolls, which we hung from the trees by the stream (by the side of the road), and then got bored and went home. Well, this is where the story gets more traumatic for my poor brother. The neighbors, a nice elderly couple, were going home and were horrified by the sight of 25 Barbies (I should mention they were all naked, of course) hanging by the road, and went straight to our house to report their findings to my dad. Of course everyone thought my brother did it, because what normal little girl would ever think to torture a doll that way? No one ever believed he didn't do it, and since my sister I figured out from the fallout that what we'd done was in some way wrong and didn't confess, he totally got grounded. AND he had to go and take all of the dolls down.

• I didn't see this until after the prize had already been awarded (and rightfully so) to Arsenal. His story reminded me of one of the pinnacles of big-brother-jerkdom I attained in my youth, and had to share. My little sister would always get home from school before I did, so she'd come into my room and rearrange my Transformers on my shelves, essentially forcing me in my kid-OCD to rearrange them back the way I had them. "RODIMUS PRIME GOES NEXT TO OPTIMUS PRIME, NOT HOT ROD, GODDAMMIT!" Ahem, I digress. So after about a month of this, I got home one day and amazingly, she was over a friend's house, so I decided it was time for payback. She had this shelf near her bedroom door that ran the entire length of the room, and had her entire Barbie doll collection on it, all bent so as to be sitting down, legs straight out forward, arms out, pretty clear mental image here, I'm hoping. At the time, these Barbie dolls had their heads held on by a white clip thing that plugged into the neck, and into the head. Remove this clip, and the head was just sitting on the neck, without any means of it staying on. So I removed all these clips, there were about 35 dolls in all, all sitting lined up in a row. Then I went to wait. She comes in, goes to her room, and I hear her putzing around, so I knock on her door, and she calls for me to come in. I open the door, and yell "FEEL MY FURIOUS ANGER!" and banged my fist against the side of her shelf. Doll heads went everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Then I booked it out of there as she started screaming. I remember getting a stern lecture from my mother, and a high-five for my deviousness from my father. Man, those were the days.

• I would always take my transformers apart and try to splice them, making horrible monsters of their former forms, kind of like the movie transformers.

• uh..wait...Where are all the girls that supposedly used the harry potter quidditch broom with real vibrating action for purposes other than an imaginary world of flying through the air trying to catch the golden snitch, and instead used it to..well..scream like they were flying through the air, while trying to reach their golden snitch?

• Once upon a time in the dark dim past, I used to have a lot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures. As an eight year old I had a very disturbing affinity, dare I say it, love for the small plastic version of April O'Neil. Perhaps it was the bulbous plastic hips, or the trendy yellow jumpsuit...maybe it was the hint of plastic cleavage that showed just above the cut of the jumpsuit, igniting the sexual awakening that I so longed to have. Whatever it was, I was truly in love with this in-animate piece of plastic. So much in love that April would accompany me wherever I went. She took baths with me, she would help me with my homework, she would walk with me to school (tucked safely away in the pocket of my DuckTales back pack, of course), and she would help me with my homework. I even showed her my genitalia and attempted figure out why she had breasts and I didn't. We had a very CLOSE relationship. Weirdness and sexual identity crises aside, she would accompany me to school every day. She would sit on my desk and watch me do my daily work, and at recess she would accompany me in my adventures along the creek behind Clays Mill Elementary. One fine day, as I was escorting her around the school in my pocket, I was approached by another child of my age named Dave. He expressed interest my April O neil, being very protective of her, I was loathe to give her up for someone else to play with. To pique my interest, he showed me the mother of all action figures, a toy that my parents were not going to invest the money in, Optimus Prime. I literally shit my pants right there. I had always wanted to play with the OP. So I heartily handed over my April Oneil and went off with a huge Optimus prime toy to my corner of the playground. Those were a very productive forty minutes. I figured out how to transform him, and invented several scenarios where he saved the school from a fiery destruction. It was a good 45 minutes. Alas the recess bell rang, and I sought out Dave to give him back his toy, and retrieve my April O'neil. We found each other and traded, and I put April safely back in my pocket. Later in the day, on my walk home, I removed April from my pocket to look longingly into her plastic cleavage, when I noticed that something was not quite right about her....her left leg was out of joint, and the plastic was slightly scarred as if her leg had been forced back into place. What did this mean? Who would do such a thing? Then it hit me: she had been violated. At some point during her stay with Dave, she had transferred some of her loving affection to him. she was sullied. Dirtied. She had to pay. (Why I reasoned it this way in my childish head, I don't know...) I thought I would teach her a lesson, so I hung her by her neck over night. The next day, she walked with me to school attached to the same noose, but she was dragged behind me. She was drowned in the creek bed we had amiably explored together hundreds of times. She was ripped apart and put back together several times. I even went so far as to scar her bosom up so no one else would enjoy the plastic cleavage. But she was still not the same to me. She never returned to normalcy. So I did the only thing a scorned 8 year old lover could do...and that was to fling her repeatedly into the air attached to a string until she broke into tiny pieces. I triumphantly gathered up the pieces and buried her arms and legs in the back yard, but hung on to her torso. That would remain on my dresser well into my high school years to serve as a warning to any woman who would scorn me. I am sure there are several different psychoanalytical reasons for me doing this, but as I look back on it now...I still think she cheated on me and stopped loving me that day I swapped her with Dave for the afternoon. That plastic whore. I just realized that this is past the deadline, but I had to share anyway. (honorable mention?)

• Wow. This thread is highly disturbing.

• When I was younger I had an awesome electronic orange zappy gun, the ones that used to require D batteries to operate. There was a clear piece of plastic over the barrel of the gun to show off the lights as if actually firing the gun. One night I bestowed the greatest honor to my toys/stuffed animals by bringing it to bed with me and allowing it to sleep by my side. Unfortunately on this night, I wet the bed....big time. The sheets were soaked, I was soaked, and the zappy gun was soaked. I had urinated so much, that some urine found its way into the clear plastic and was visible underneath my gun. In my urine soaked pajamas I pulled the trigger to hear a faint, dying 'beep', and the zappy gun had to be thrown away.

• When I was 4, a "friend" of mine buried three of my Star Wars guys. I pooped on a Snarf toy and threw it at him. Worst thing I ever did to a toy and a person.

• wow. . . this topic really takes me back. My best friend in elementary school had a twin sister, and toy wise, it was all GI JOE for him and all Barbie for her. We'd play all the time at his house and, being crazy little boys on the verge of puberty, we thought anything and everything to do about sex was hilarious. So it didn't take long for me and my friend to decide to have GI JOE do an attack run on Barbie's mansion- a mission that had terrible, terrible consequences. I must have been a really Fucked up little kid because I thought it'd be a great coup de' grace to put Cobra La's GLOBULOUS in bed with the platinum blonde herself. It was terrible. I mean, the whole bottom half of GLOBULOUS' is practically giant damn phallus! Not to mention that the rest of his body is totally fugly. Just imagine it though. . . Barbie's long golden locks draped gently over her pointed breasts. GLOBULOUS crusty crab like fingers invading her virgin form. Their bodies entwined under a pink satin bedspread; Barbie's sanctuary mansion becoming just as violated as her womb. What was once a place of little girls fantasies and pleasant dreams has now become a writhing pit of forbidden lust and unholy unification. . . Anyhow, it was a brutal and scarring coitus of the damned that landed me and my friend in a lot of hot water when his sister saw what we had done. His sister said in tears that her Barbie would never be the same- but you know, I think the bitch kinda liked it.

• Wait, what happened with the whitest kids you know?

• I'm the older of a pair of sisters. We're about 3 1/2 years apart. This resulted in about ten straight years of Barbie Extravaganza birthdays. You know, when you're young enough that everyone in your class gets invited and none of them know what to get you so they get you barbie after barbie after barbie... Now, as a child I was very anti-girly-things. My sister followed my lead, and we tortured Barbies on a near-daily basis. This was facilitated by our seemingly infinite supply of Barbies and their accessories. We liked the Kelly dolls and the other younger ones, but had an inherent mistrust of Barbie, her "friends," and Ken. We constructed elaborate scenarios where the adult toys were oppressing the child toys and holding them hostage and whatnot. We would meticulously set up scenes, carefully placing all the little tables and pizza boxes and pets and salt shakers (of COURSE we had a Barbie salt shaker) and then smash them down to "rescue" the kids. We buried Barbies and cut their hair off and crashed their little car down the slide. I tied rope around their necks and spun them around until the heads came off. We threw then on the sidewalk until they broke. I fed one to the cat, who mangled her arm. We were pretty well supervised and didn't have access to knives or plastic-melting heat, but we did what we could. I believe one had a run-in with the safety scissors. I didn't really have one spectacular case of sadistic toy carnage, but I made some of it up in volume--over a hundred counts of Barbie-related carnage on no fewer than twenty seperate dolls. Which is weird, because I was really emotionally attatched to all my other toys. I "shared" my snacks with them. I got mad at adults who failed to talk to them. I carried one to school with me until third grade. I watched Toy Story with them and covered their eyes during the parts with Sid. But the Barbies, they must've drawn the short straw or something...

• Furbies they were evil to start with. But add being really bored to the mix and all of a sudden you have a toy that will talk to you Mom and little sister in the middle of the night about how they were going to impregnate them with the devils seed. You would honestly hear at 3 AM. BAH BAH DER DAH DAG The Darke Lords Mistress you will become. MEH MAH LE LE DADA. Bare the child of evil. LE LA DOO DI. Your Spawn will devore your flesh

• This is a story of a boy, and the boy's absolute hatred of his brother. My brother and I had these LEGO battles, where we would build epic cities and war machines, and then decide, based on the creativity of the creation, which won what. It was intense, and a lot of fun. However, the fairness was getting to me. My brother had a gift for building amazing things, and I was building the same mundane crap over and over again. Then I had an idea. My brother built the best thing I've ever seen built. It included a bunch of protrusions that were those easily snap-able rod pieces. What was my contribution to this battle? A brick. Where did the brick go? On top of his LEGOs. We never LEGO battled again.

• Don't know why I didn't use string or simply my hands, but I used chewed bubblegum to hold my Boba Fett action figure in the air to make him fly around. (Thank god he wasn't one of those "legendary" missile launching versions.) Also, I used to bury Chewbacca in my sandbox in hopes of growing a Wookiee tree. Wtf was (is?) wrong with me? (Oh, and my sister slammed my original Luke Skywalker's head in the window and it popped off. So my Dad embedded a screw in his head and body, which I could twist to extend it, like Mekanek or the Amazing Screw-On head, 'natch.)

• My friend and I used to love playing with Barbies. We would do their hair, put on the little clothes, and make up intricate, soap-opera style stories with them. We could honestly do this for hours. But then, we turned seven, and our eyes were opened to how much our Barbies were unlike the women we saw around us. And thus, the Barbie makeovers began. Step one was haircuts. My brother had assured me that Barbies could grow hair like I could, so almost every Barbie was given a buzz-cut. Those that weren't were given curls with our mother's curling irons. The only thing was, plastic hair and bodies don't mix very well with heat. Our efforts resulted in half-melted heads and scorched hair. My friend and I became terrified of the curling iron, afraid that it would melt us into piles of flesh colored mush. Step two was tattoos. Both of our mothers had at least one inking, and we wondered why our Barbies didn't. So, we went to town with a set of Sharpies. With the buzzcuts and the tattoos, our "sexy" girls ended up looking like they stepped out of Grand Theft Auto. But all of this was only child's play compared to step three. My mother had started going to a tanning salon, and I was forced to accompany her. I proposed to my friend that we tan our dolls, so that they would look less like pasty white thugs. We took the lampshade off of the lamp in my friend's bedroom and turned it on. Our first "victim" was held over the lamp, to absorb the rays and get a tan. Yeah, that didn't work out so well. Barbie's perfectly proportioned hips and chest started to sweat and melt, and fleshy plastic began to drip all over the lamp. To two naive little girls, it was like something out of a horror movie. We started screaming and our mothers came running. Needless to say, they discovered our exploits. EPILOGUE: I was never, ever given another Barbie. I never touched a curling iron until I was 15. However, the poor, mutilated Barbies were reborn as "evil killer deathbots" in a memorable home video.

• my friend owned an evil knievel figure & bike, we soaked it in fuel over night & let that bad boy loose. its was possibly the greatest stunt the legend ever did as when he was released he flew into the lake he was supposed to clear & set the lake on fire. awseome!!!

• I would have to say the worst thing I've done is basically summed up to Will it Blend? with various lego minifigs (though this was before the internet so the idea was purely me being fucked up and curious)

• @Remodeled Citizen: The "Jump My Bones" line is hilarious, I'd have done the same thing given the circumstances.

• My friend and I would play G.I. Joe baseball with the original 3 3/4" G.I. Joes. One of us would pitch the figure and the other person would hit it with a baseball bat. I lost my Refrigerator Perry this way.

• I used to take my sisters toys and tie them to tiny chairs, with bags over their head, and then leave carefully made ransom notes, complete with letters from other magazines or newspapers pasted to the letter, demanding of all things, only five dollars for their return. Or a well made sandwich. She had a teddy ruxpin, and I discovered you could tape your own recorded message if you wanted. So all of teddy's messages of friendly cheer were erased, and replaced with teddy ruxpin detailing how much she sucked, and how all people should hail the eternal glory and greatness of me, the future emperor of the world. Dunno what happened in the teen years to change the course, but my childhood was all the makings of a future super-villain.

• While packing up at the end of a school year my two roommates and I uncovered all of the "stuff" that 3 college kids are so wont to collect over a year of living together in a small dorm room that had way too many visitors at odd hours, many of whom were bearing gifts. While sorting through the mountainous piles of junk and hundreds of empty soda cans we uncovered, among other items: A 5 foot tall glow in the dark skeleton with detachable bendy limbs, a Furby toy from McDonalds, a home "bootlegging" experiment with apple cider gone horribly wrong after months and months in the back of our closet, and a few other knick-knack toys that we had picked up along the line. The madness started when I became too sick of trying to clean the mess, so I took all the arms and legs off of the skeleton, and linked them together. Because all the joints were flexible, I effectively had an 8 or 10 foot long chain made of the poor skeleton's dismembered limbs. I promptly took this out into the lobby of the dorm and began skipping rope, and asking the girls who passed by and were staring in horror if they wanted to jump my bones. No takers, sadly, but we all had a good laugh. Next we broke out the inevitable aerosol can and lighter, and of course our poor Furby and other McDonalds toys reaped the death they so well deserved. One by one they withered under our punishing flame... After the toys had cooled we removed a panel in the wall that had a 2 foot space inside where lots of pipes ran through. We had discovered this many months back, and always thought we would leave something wonderful behind for the future residents of the dorm room. A bit of a time capsule if you will. We ended up dressing the remaining parts of the skeleton (Head & torso) in a pirate hat, eye patch, and ran a plastic sword through his ribcage (yes, all of this was on hand in the dorm), put the Furby and his little friends in with good ol' Pirate Pete, and to top it all off, just as we left we left the dorm for the last time we threw in the 1 gallon glass bottle of half consumed apple cider that had grown a 1 inch layer of fuzzy white mold on it... Uncapped of course. My girlfriend at the time worked for dorm security, and later told me that during the summer months they had to shut down that end of the dorm hall due to an "undefined odor". She told me they had to re-assign a summertime girls cheer-leading camp to a different area of the dorm because it was so bad. I always knew we would leave college a better place than we had found it. Hell, I think I even mentioned that in my entrance essay...

• Does taking all of my barbies and giving them crew cuts and forcing them into boot camp count? Poor ken . . . he never stood a chance against the pair of kitchen siccors. Oh forgot, does taking a nail and giving them battle wounds make it any worse?

• In my sophomore English class, we had to do a project for "A Separate Peace." Being schlubs we decided to make a movie (late 90s). Being all girls, we couldn't be the actors. We recreated several scenes using my friend's old Ken dolls with plenty of homoerotic overtones, exaggerated violence, and epic maneuvers. The worst was we took my cheap Spider-man figure who was the same size, and dressed him in a hot pink tracksuit of Barbie's, renamed him "Sp.Ed.-er Man" (Special Education-er?), and had him cameo in most scenes. This was then broadcasted to my class, his shame complete. We did get an A.

• back in 1998 when I was in college, I took my roomates action figure of Calysto from Xena and crucified it on my wall. I had it on the floor in my house until the other day when my sister asked if she could have it. We also used to love to decorate things. we drew on pilsbury dough boys so they would look like Mr F and Mr Fuck from jonny the homicidal maniac. and of course there was the bondage frog, which i won in one of those crane games and we spent all night at the diner 'tattooing and piercing' the frog before i hog tied it. I still have that in my kitchen now with like 30 earrings in it... fun times...

• Wow, this brings back memories. I remember when I was around ten, my friend and I went on an action figure killing spree. At one point we selected a Luke Skywalker action figure from a box in my closet. To begin we took a hammer to his feet, Misery style. Once his feet were thoroughly crushed, we used him for batting practice. Then we nailed him to a tree and stoned him. It was sunny that day, so we used a large magnifying glass to melt off his eyes, crotch, and through his legs. This was no easy feat. After a least an hour the legs weren't completely melted through, so I took a kitchen knife to sever what was left. While I was at it I felt it was necessary to chop off a hand too. While this was all standard procedure, the highlight of Luke's torture came at the end. We'd frequently take figures, wrap their arms around the handles of a plastic grocery bag and throw them up in the air. If it was caught up in the wind, they'd fly away. Then we'd use a BB gun to shoot at them. The same was done for Luke. After a few short flights there was a large gust of wind and he flew quite a ways up. We chased it to the houses behind the apartment complex we lived at. This is where one of the handles came out from under Luke's arm, and he took a straight drop into someone's backyard. Now, there was a BBQ going on in this particular backyard. After a few seconds, we heard some guy yelling "What the hell? Something fell into the grill!" So there you have it. Hobbled, beaten, stoned, melted, cut, and grilled. I have no idea what happened to him after that, but that was deemed ample punishment for that whiny farmboy.

• My Sister and I had an abusive relationship growing up involving a mutual hatred for eachother and the frequent weaponization of Star Wars toys. I know that in the course of our childhood I threw more than one Tie Fighter at her and probably shot my fair share of ewoks at her with the help of my slingshot. (Hey it was the 80's most of the kids on my block had air rifles, my parents thought they were being safe) But anyway, the one that always stands out in my mind was Christmas of 1984. I was 6 years old, and my Sister had just recently turned into a stereotype of a 1980's teenage bitch. That year I had recieved a B-Wing fighter from the Kenner Star Wars toy lineup. Sure it wasn't the most well known ship, but it was Star Wars and that's all that mattered. Now during this stage of our lives she had a rather bothersome predeliction for maliciously breaking my toys, something she was quick to do by snapping the wings off of the B-Wing and tossing the now broken mess back at me. It was pretty much then that I gave myself over to the Dark Side and cracked her across the shins with the B-Wing. Keep in mind that to a six year old, the B-wing was roughly the size and heft of a baseball bat, it had a comfortable grip at the base and a weighted tip. It was just made for retribution. In retrospect she's probably lucky I got her with the flat side of the toy, otherwise I may very well have broken her leg. Mine was not a violent household, nor was I a particularly violent kid. But anyone who grew up with siblings knows that eventually violence happens.

• Oh, and on another, unrelated level, here's a pro-tip for the day: Do not stick an ewok into an EZ Bake Oven and turn it on. Just... Don't. It makes cakes taste like burnt ewok.

• Chapter II "Adventures With Toys As An Adult" I believe the year was 1991. The place was the home of a couple friends, brother and sister, who invited the gang over for a party/barbecue/sleepover (mostly innocent, but I won't go into those details here). The time was midnight, and as we watched The Brady Bunch versus the Partridge Family on that night's episode of Saturday Night Live, someone in the group found our friend's old dolls and playsets. The dolls? Barbie, Skipper, Sonny & Cher, The Six-Million-Dollar Man, Bionic Bigfoot, and a G.I Joe. The playset? A Barbie hot tub. OK, so we were all drinking a bit, and it was late, and we'd been doing Jell-O shots. We were all young adults and as such, incredibly horny and filthy-minded. It didn't take long for the dolls to become proxies for the people in the room. What followed was a Barbie Hot Tub orgy, but we didn't fill that hot tub with water. That was too tame! We filled it with Jell-O, stripped down the dolls, and thus began the frolic in the lime-green goo. Barbie, completely naked and towering over the others, scissored with Cher. Sonny was busy on the other side of the hot tub being buggered by Bigfoot. G.I. Joe and Steve Austin double-teamed Skipper in the middle of the hot tub, as green Jell-O became lodged in all her orifices and gobbed in her hair. It got a bit messy. Someone in the group introduced a smurf into the mix, and it wasn't long before the smurf was giving Sonny Bono the BJ of his life (a joke about blue balls was inserted here). Skipper and G.I. Joe snuck off to the other side of the playset, where they shagged in a patio chair until Bigfoot came in and introduced his (imaginary) big hairy package to G.I. Joe's firm military butt. Teen Skipper, nonplussed by this, sat back in a spread-leg pose so G.I. Joe could bury his face in her blossoming womanhood while he was rogered from behind. Upstairs, the few party-goers who weren't part of this bizarre orgy must have been perplexed and amused when they heard Bigfoot's puppeteer howl like the mighty sasquatch himself. And then things got really weird. Limbs were removed, and sockets were fucked by other dolls. Heads ended up floating in the hot tub filled with liquified lime green Jell-O, while bodies continued their orgy on the patio. Clothes were traded and tried on, and then limbs and heads were traded, as well. Sonny Bono suffered an unfortunate demise when he was thrown into the basement wall, causing his head to pop off and his chest to crack (an eerie foreshadowing of the real Sonny's eventual fate a few years later). At the end of the night, Teen Skipper, thoroughly deflowered, was missing a leg (it was literally lost). Sonny was declared dead. Bigfoot was declared gay (again, an eerie foreshadowing, this time for a Venture Bros episode that wouldn't be written for another decade or so). G.I. Joe came out of it intact. Barbie surely felt dirty and would never get those Jell-O stains out of her hot tub. The smurf was tied to the ceiling fan, rotating around and around all night. Steve Austin was stuck head-first in a heating vent in the ceiling, green liquid dripping from his exposed backside as if to say, "Bigfoot was here." Were Sigmund Freud alive to observe the actions of our group that night, he would have been fascinated at the repressed sexual tension that came bursting out during that wild doll romp. Indeed, each doll's actions betrayed something about the person controlling it. Bigfoot's user actually did come out of the closet years later. Skipper's owner later lost her virginity to one person there, and within 24 hours was having sex with yet another member of the group (separately, at least). Sonny's user married Cher's user, and was subsequently physically battered by her in early confrontations. Barbie's user was, indeed, romantically involved with Cher's owner for a brief time (as was Skipper's). One shudders to think what would have happened that night if those dolls hadn't been there to vent the tension in the room... At the very least, there would be Jell-O EVERYWHERE. At worst, Bigfoot might have tried to bugger me. ~fin~

• Oh man my brother and I one year decided that our GI-JOES should look like they have battle damage. So We took a white hot needle and riddled bullet holes into a couple cobra troops and a few of the old vehicles we had. Then we covered them in red model paint to make it all the more gruesome.

• When I was a little kid I absolutely loved Roger Rabbit, I would watch the movie over and over again and I had this plush toy of Roger that I would take everywhere. I don't even remember how I got him, to me he had always been there. I loved him to bits but would do things like throw him out our second story window or tie him to the back of a RC car and take him for a ride into a tree, but since he was soft and cuddly the worst damage he would get is scratches on his plastic eyes. But then on one sunny vacation day, I had stuck Roger in the freezer for about half an hour, when I got him out he was very cold so naturally I decided to put him in the microwave, I meant to set it to 10 seconds but not having ever really used a microwave before, I had set it for 10 minutes. I had just pressed the start button when my Sister called for me so I went to see what she wanted. I couldn't have been more than 3 minutes and when I came back I was horrified to see flames inside the microwave. Of course I freaked out and ran to my parents, my Dad was able to put out the fire but couldn't save Roger. Apparently he had some wire inside his ears, which made them stand up and bendable. The happy roger with a smile and his tongue sticking out was now a burn victim. He now lives under my bed, probably plotting his revenge against the boy who took away his face.

• 'The Cybertronian Graveyard' I must have been about 11. I was in awe of the whole Transformers craze. I praised the cartoon and the the movie and had a butt load of action figures. My parents were sepperated by this point, so every weekend me and my sister would be dropped at my Dad's. We would head over to the local Blockbuster and we would both choose a movie. My sister would always choose Fern Gully, and I, Transformers the Movie. The same movie every week. Heaven. Around this time, I had been making friends with Andrew, the older brother of a girl across the street. She was my age, and he maybe 2/3 years older. He had also accumulated a hoard of Transformers figures and would regulary cart them over to my house on a little trailer. Within this collection was a few gems, such as the orginal Ultra Magnus (a pained white Optimus) and Megatron, which I had never witnessed in the flesh. I was in awe of this collection. Being a younger kid, this older kids trailer full of bots represented years of collecting and playing. The sight of all these rare robots that I had never seen before filled me with glee and excitement. This collection was also made up of broken robots. Half a Sunstreaker here, pieces of a Jazz there. Even a collection of forgotton Go-Bots. Missing windshields. Odd hands. Mysterious guns. Everything. After a while, it became clear that all these broken robots were bringing down the quality of our collection. They had to be removed, but in a fitting and respectful way. They were still Transformers and deserved to be treated so. At the end of my garden was a row of trees. And behind them, a small area running along-side the back fence. Just enough room for one of us to pass through at a time. In the darkest corner we started digging a shallow grave. In went all those half robot carcasses. In went Megatron, who was by now less a complete figure, more a collection of parts. In went Sunstreaker. In went a mangled Seaspray, a crushed Beachcomber, a legless Snarl. And Kup. Why Kup? One of those figures from the original line that I had never seen before. His heavy body portraying importance among the lowly plastic figures from Woolworths. For the life of me, I can't remember there being anything wrong with him. Maybe a mis-aligned sticker on his legs... No. There was nothing wrong with him. Yet he went in too. Was this some self enforced torcher? The grave was swiftly covered in dirt and then with pieces of concrete found in a skip. Gone. But not forgotton. We would sometimes return to the grave to add the latest victim of wear and tear. And glance at those trees from afar with knowing stares. Believing they were in a better place. I moved from that house a few years later. By then we had grown up, and Andrew had even given me all of his Transformers. Most of which I still have to this day somewhere. I never moved any of those transformers from that shallow grave before we moved. They may even still be there today. I'd like to imagine that some 11 year old, a son of the new tenants, discovered some shallow grave at the end of their new garden. And While peering in and searching past all the odd servered arms and legs, he would find a well kept transformer in full working order. I'd like to think that Kup was not buried for nothing. - Jason

• Well let's see, let me take you to the summer of 1978... when I was six, my friend and I were playing a healthy game of "Who can pull Stretch Armstrong the most" when all of sudden... a tear. A tear that would leak a fluid that my older brother would tell me was the most delious tasting treat I'd ever have. Well upon first taste it was bitter and nasty but with enough egging I did what any six year old would do I finished that sunofabitch off like a filipino ladyboy whore!!! MY mom was so happy with me she introduced to me to another "delicious tasting treat"... ipocate! FUCK YEA- and knowing is half the battle!

• Huh. I really have nothing worse than Christmas of about '88 or '89. I got a present that year; one of those cool sciencey things that consisted of two glass bulbs linked by glass tubing, with colored water inside. When I held it, the heat of my hand was enough to boil the water (worked through pressure laws, I know now). I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and it clearly trumped all of my previous Christmas presents. It snapped in my hands before I managed to put it down for the first time. It didn't get replaced, and I didn't get another present to equal it for at least five more years.

• Remember those old hard rubber WWE wrestlers back in the 80s? Well my cousin and I both about 8 years old thought it would be fun to interrogate/torture the Hotrod himself Rowdy Roddy Piper. My cousin got on one those old stationary bikes in his basement and started peddling. Once he got a good speed going I took Roddys face and put it on the tire of the bike. The hard rubber of the wheel started cutting into Roddys face. There was quite a smell emanating from the wheel at this point. We took turns on the bike because it took a lot of energy to build up enough speed to cut into his face. Also he would get extremely hot. Once we were done Roddy had 4 grooves cut into his face about an inch deep. Only the words "Hot Rod" on his shirt could give a CSI a positive ID. Dental records at this point were useless. Later that night Hulk Hogan would a have match with Roddy but it just wasn't the same.

• POWER-XTREME!!! Well I had several incidences with action figures. First and foremost I played with my Masters of the Universe figures until I was actually using their weapons to re-calibrate their balance after a limb or two fell off. For some reason, after watching an episode of the old "The Incredible Hulk Cartoon" I took a pair of scissors to Prince Adam's purple/velvetine jacket and put it on Kobra Khan. Etc... But perhaps what popped my action figure bubble of suspended disbelief was the following incident: I had been collecting those awesome Centurions action figures (that came along with the equally awesome Centurion's cartoon, best animated explosions of the 1980s I believe). There was of course: Max Raye: Brilliant Sea Operations Comander, Jake Rockwell: Rugged Land Operations Specialist and Ace McCloud Daring Air Operations Expert. Well my Jake Rockwell handled very well on land. Max Ray worked great in the bathtub and other associated swimming pools and small bodies of water (and incidently was the first toy I owned wher my mother said "you'll shoot somebody's eye out with that thing!" referring to his orange rocket pack). However, Ace, Ace McCloud was a fucker... He came with awesome "pop out" wings and rockets that shot from his arms. I figured, being the tender age that I was, he could fly just as well as Rockwell coud roll on the hard dirt and just as well as Max could float in the water. I threw Ace into the air and he came tumbling down. This wasn't simply a chip, or a limb falling off upon impact. The entire figure SHATTERED. The odd thing was the body, arms, legs etc.. shatterd around the head and flew off in different directions. Ace's head, however was still smiling at me in the driveway. It took almost an hour to find all the missing pieces, and I was never able to connect them well enough to re-form the action figure (kind of ironic for a line of action figures who were based on dis and re assembly). That's the day I realized Ace McCloud couldn't fly.

• POWER-XTREME!!! Well I had several incidences with action figures. First and foremost I played with my Masters of the Universe figures until I was actually using their weapons to re-calibrate their balance after a limb or two fell off. For some reason, after watching an episode of the old "The Incredible Hulk Cartoon" I took a pair of scissors to Prince Adam's purple/velvetine jacket and put it on Kobra Khan. Etc... But perhaps what popped my action figure bubble of suspended disbelief was the following incident: I had been collecting those awesome Centurions action figures (that came along with the equally awesome Centurion's cartoon, best animated explosions of the 1980s I believe). There was of course: Max Raye: Brilliant Sea Operations Comander, Jake Rockwell: Rugged Land Operations Specialist and Ace McCloud Daring Air Operations Expert. Well my Jake Rockwell handled very well on land. Max Ray worked great in the bathtub and other associated swimming pools and small bodies of water (and incidently was the first toy I owned wher my mother said "you'll shoot somebody's eye out with that thing!" referring to his orange rocket pack). However, Ace, Ace McCloud was a fucker... He came with awesome "pop out" wings and rockets that shot from his arms. I figured, being the tender age that I was, he could fly just as well as Rockwell coud roll on the hard dirt and just as well as Max could float in the water. I threw Ace into the air and he came tumbling down. This wasn't simply a chip, or a limb falling off upon impact. The entire figure SHATTERED. The odd thing was the body, arms, legs etc.. shatterd around the head and flew off in different directions. Ace's head, however was still smiling at me in the driveway. It took almost an hour to find all the missing pieces, and I was never able to connect them well enough to re-form the action figure (kind of ironic for a line of action figures who were based on dis and re assembly). That's the day I realized Ace McCloud couldn't fly.

• I was good to my toys.....TOO GOOD. I was playing with my Thundercats Lion-o. Reinacting an episode I put Lion-o on the back of a toy wind up bird I had that could fly. Obviously Lion-o was not attached well enough....he fell and broke in several pieces. My bad repaired him. I must say Lion-o was like my favourite toy and due too to much play he broke again. Lion-o was discarded at the bottom of a box. A few months later I pulled the broken pieces out but could not find one leg. My dad carved a wooden leg for him. Me wanting both legs even got another wooden leg carved. Now he had two fake legs. How fucking crueler could you be to a toy as cool as Lion-o Lord of the Thundercats. I did not put it out of it's misery and burn it or throw it in the bin,I still have it with the wooden legs....even though I have to good Lion-o toys.

• I used to drag my plastic horse--the aptly-named Old Brown Horsie--around making him gallop, through dirt, over rocks, tumbling down the stairs. Owing to this treatment most of his face has rubbed off, and his mane is no longer black. At one point my dog chewed his foreleg off, so I carefully dug through my crayon box for a crayon of the appropriate color, broke it to proper lenth, and performed emergency surgery with Scotch tape. He still has that red-brown prosthesis.

• cc, you are my hero

• Basically, when I got tired of playing with my Barbie Dolls, I would shave their heads and give them swirlies in the really gross rusty toilet in the kids' room of my house. Also, I put a few of them in a table vice so that their boobs would have flat tops. I did the same basic thing to a My Size Barbie too, but me and my sister drew all over her with marker, too. Whatta bummer! Also, unrelated, we would build torture chambers with our wood blocks and we'd generally torture Batman and all the other McDonalds toys we would get in our Happy Meals.

• I worked at McDonald's when I was in high school. We would torture the happy meal figures in our down time. We would toast them up between the clamshell grills and then send them swimming in the deep fryers. As a finale we would serve what was left up between the sandwiches of our fellow co-workers shift meals. Yum!

• I think Eddie Murphy wins this one for sticking a G.I. Joe up his brother's butt in the bathtub.

• Ah, I was always good to my toys, but eventually I hit that age where a boy's supposed to give a shit what people think and stop playing with toys. So, I let my mom, a first grade teacher, take all my old stuff to her classroom. My Megos, my record player and superhero records, my viewmaster with the Shazam reel...twenty-some years later, when my mom finally retired, I got some back, but only Spock is in any sort of shape. I wrecked my toys by proxy. Shit.

• I went through a phase of taking a very sharp scalpel and carfully slicing a very thin sliver off action figures faces.... I should probably have seen someone about it!! But now I sit and weep over the money I could have made on e-bay if I hadn't got my jollies performing M.J style plastic surgery on Star Wars figures.......

• Back in the early 80's I had one of those Evel Knievel stunt cycles that included a figure of Evel that fit onto the bike and a winder platform that would "rev" up Evel's motorcycle as you turned the crank. Push the button and Evel would take off and do wheelies and stuff. After jumping him off a few curbs and our roof, it just lost some of its magic. By that time, I was already a big Marvel comics fan just like every other kid and one of my favorite Marvel heroes was Ghost Rider. You can already see where this is headed. Suffice it to say that by the end of the day, all of my dad's lighter fluid was gone and Evel's head was nothing but a charred, pink nub. The coup de grace for poor Evel came when I finally set his whole body and bike on fire, aimed him at my little brother, cranked that puppy to the hilt, and let him rip! I have yet to see my brother run as fast as he did that day. That memory made the beating I took from my mom extremely worth it.

• I was never too horrible to my toys, but I had a good friend back in elementary and middle school who wasn't too fond of some of her playthings. In seventh grade, her parents gave her two Sailor Scout Barbies -- Sailor Moon and Sailor Jupiter -- which was weird because my friend didn't even like the show in the first place. Anyway, with a camera we carefully documented the Sailors having lesbian sex. My friend loved Dragon Ball Z at the time, so for good measure, we threw in a Piccolo figure, as well. Frieza might have also been involved. These days I just pose my Transformers in compromising positions, but doesn't everyone do that?

• i hung my sister's life size barbie by its own hair outside her bedroom window.

• I'm old enough to have played with GI Joes back when they were big enough to date Barbie without suggesting that the blonde had a dwarf fetish. One of the Joes they came out with was clearly inspired by the Six Million Dollar Man. Artificial arm, leg and eye. I wanted one, but Dad refused to buy me such an obvious rip-off, or allow me to spend my allowance on it. I realized that the way Steve Austin got the bionics was after an accident, so i figured if one of my joes needed the prosthetics.... I took a hacksaw to one. I never thought to immobilize the patient for surgery, so the saw traveled up and down the arm, the torso, the 'healthy' leg. He really looked like a dog had chewed on him, then thrown him into a garbage compactor. I also hammered a nail into his skull to take out the eye. Then i wrapped him in gauze (with little bits of food dye dabbed at the stumps and the eye) and presented him to dad, showing that he'd been in a crash and i NEEDED the bionic joe to replace him. I ended up having to play with Crippled Joe because there was no way dad would buy a new toy for an intentionally broken one. The other Joes wanted nothing to do with him and my sister made a point of saying none of her Barbies would date, play nurse to or even be in the room with him.

• In the epic battle for house hold domination, my sister and I would torture each other vicariously through our toys. It started as most rivalries do, through petty jealously. I say it started because she got a stuffed animal when we went to see Disney on Ice, which I threw over the balcony. But she says it was when I threw her Care Bear into the pool, proving once and for all that bears can't swim. Semantics, I say. The dumbest thing I ever did was in retaliation to my Roger Rabbit doll getting a hair cut in the Barbie Salon, which my sister promised would grow back. When I discovered that inanimate objects do not regenerate hair, I popped her favorite Barbie in the counter top conventional oven and hit the broil button. Needless to say, I won the battle but lost the war, as my punishment for nearly burning the house down on Thanksgiving and smelling up the place with a burned synthetic hair smell, which lingered for most of the day, was scarring as I was sent to my room with no dinner.

• I think it comes down to the time i discovered my GI Joe's torsos were attched to their legs with nothing but an elastic band. I killed Zartov (think it was that one) by twisting him into 2 bits while his twin watched on in horror. It left me wondering for an awfully long time if I was eld together by a larger elastic band and if someone would reach down and twist me in twain. Then I buried him in some mud and poured water over and left it to bake in the sun. Ah young boys and destruction. Cobra Commander made me do it. P.s I'm dreading the movie now I've dredged up these memories, unless ofc the nod to the 80s version is Duke dying again.

• thinking back the thing that strikes me the most is this one. Back when I was a kid me and my friend had a pretty bg collection of Inhumanoids, we would often fight them in the back yeards with stones being the weapon of choice for both sides. It wasnt a uncommon event for us to end up with a figure or two of eachothers at the end of the day when we was collecting them up to go home for dinner or cos its late. one day me and my friend was playing in the back yard when he threw a perticuly big stone at one of mine a cracked the chest of it, being about 8 at the time i got quite upset, packing up my toys i went home to cry and try to fix it in my dads garage. It didnt take long to figure out that superglue wasnt the way forward and i gave into the fact he now had a big chest wound for the rest of his life, putting him back into my bag I noticed I had grabbed one of my friends toy when I packed my toys away I started to get an idea. Getting my older brother to crack apart the chest caverty along the join in his toy I quickly went to work filling it with dog poop and superglueing it back together, the next day the toy stank the garage out, returning to my friends house I slipped the toy under his bed then asked him if he wanted to goto the park so that i wasnt around when it started to smell. A few days later I went to his house again but got told he was ill in bed and couldnt play. I know its not the worst thing it have done to a toy but its the worst thing I ahve done with a toy.

• i was an odd little girl. if you remember the video for black hole sun they had a barbie on a spit and well, i thought that was the best idea ever. well, we didn't have a spit, so i decided that a pen would work just as good except i couldn't get her whole body on a pen. so, it was off with her head and in lieu of grill which i knew i would be in a lot of trouble for, i used a candle. my brothers friends came by not too long after and just kind of stared for him before trying to get my attention. took em a minute too, i was apparently so into it. the poor barbie. at least she was the one who also had her hair cut off for ken replacement purposes. i wore her head as a necklace like a trophy until i lost it (my mom probably trashed it) also, as a younger child, i committed a different sort of cruelty. i would tease the 3.75 inch gi joes sexually with my barbies, since they were so small comparatively, it wouldn't work. the barbies would always dump them for he-man and the one ken i had. my barbies were such hoes.

• When i was 11, I used to crucify my younger sister's stuffed animals using crosses made out of lego.

• covering lego minifigures with lighter fluid, sparking them alight with a magnifying glass, and then dropping bricks on them so they splattered was all I could try and do to keep my parents from getting divorced. it didn't work.

• When I was 12 or so I had a massive obsession with the movie 'Aliens'. Without the cash to buy any Aliens merch, I decided to do the next best thing. First, I grabbed all my action figures, and proceeded to tear an arm or leg or head, or a combination of each, off of all of them, then proceeded to put holes in their chests using a hammer and nail. I made up a bunch of chest-bursters with pink play-doh and placed them in the holes, and then proceeded to slather them all in blood-red paint. I grabbed my Hot Wheels loop and other assorted structures and painted them a greeny grey colour to resemble an alien nest. I sticky taped the figures to the nest and sprayed a little more red paint over the whole thing, before making a tape recording of myself doing an agonized scream to lend some atmosphere to it all. However, I'd set all this up in the lounge room, so you can imagine how totally freaked my parents were when they stumbled across this gruesome tableux. Thanks to my macbre attention to detail, I was put into therapy for a few months.

• Awesome contest. Like many of you, I've committed multiple atrocities to toys. I also had the Evel Knievel motorcycle. It took the jump from the top of a staircase many a time. Surprisingly sturdy toy. My GI Joe (the old ones where they had fuzzy beards - you know pre-Kung Fu grip) took a fall of about 10 feet onto some rocks and the elastic inside him holding his limbs together broke making him an instant quadruple amputee. The little green army men? Well, I think putting the guy with the flame thrower in the group was a bad mistake. I recreated a flamethrower in the sandbox (Yes, I was foreseeing Iraq in 1976) and melted several troops with my lighter and aerosol can. Good times. I'd kick my kids asses for doing anything remotely like this.

• I wish I could pick a single action figure atrocity, but maybe I'll just list what I've got and call it therapy: As an only child with a big basement and yard, I had the run of the place to stage whatever grand carnage came to mind, and it would typically involve massive battles royal among G.I. Joe, Star Wars, Micronauts, and sometimes even "giant" Secret Wars figs. I'd spend a few hours prepping The Pit and the Death Star and staging my X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and Skystriker Jet along with every other vehicle and fig I owned. And then I'd launch the assault one skirmish at a time and meticulously figure out who died. This usually involved the liberal application of Halloween blood. Several Joes eventually had their rubber bands disconnected to separate torsos from legs -- handy when someone would get gutted by heavy machine gun fire or bisected by the car lift in The Pit. Figures would also be tapped to pilot kamikaze missions. As in -- I'd stand about five feet away from the Death Star and throw, say, my X-Wing into it as hard as I could, then bloody up the bodies where they lay. Most of the plastic girders and/or laser cannons would pop off rather than snap off. But Krazy Glue was still a staple of those days. Star Wars bounty hunters were often buried in my back yard to stage elaborate ambushes on heroic characters. Sometimes I'd bury, um, too many bad guys or I'd take too long of a break between burying 'em and playing with 'em due to lunch or something. The end result -- two of those figs never made it back from the (literal) trenches. Maybe someday, a kid living in my old house will unearth a moldering Bossk. There were times when a few unlucky figs would need to suffer some kind of flame or radiation burns. That's when I'd break out the fireplace lighter and hairspray. I can remember at least five figs that were permanently disfigured in this fashion. That I didn't take out the whole house in the process is down to pure dumb luck. That, or God looked down on the sheer awesomeness of such verisimilitude and saw that it was good. A favorite setup was to freeze my Han Solo in "carbonite" so he could be discovered by other action fig factions. So my mother would often go to the freezer to find a clear plastic cup of water with Han frozen inside. Sometimes I'd experiment with food coloring in the ice. Once I tried to play with Han before he was completely unfrozen and ended up snapping off one of his arms at the elbow. But Han got off easy compared to Vader. To better represent his final duel with Luke, I used a box cutter to sever one of Vader's hands (though not from his saber arm. Because there's "keeping it real" and there's "cutting off Vader's flippin' light saber.") His stump was later melted into a nub with the fireplace lighter. At some point, my Vader also suffered a light saber blow to the head, resulting in me shearing off a chunk of his noggin at a 45-degree angle and flaming it to get just the right "cauterized light saber wound" look. I'd probably feel worse about ruining those figs if I still had 'em, but my folks made me give them all away to a younger cousin who never really appreciated 'em. That helped to sever most emotional ties. Too bad, though. I'd love to have photo evidence of my mutilated Vader.

• this one time i had a little collection of really crappy GIJoe ripoff toys, and i had just come home from seeing toy story for the first time. Sid inspired me to meld them all into a giant, horrific blob of arms, heads n legs.

• I gave my vintage "Star Wars" action figures to my kids. My son, being 7, just discovered the "Star Wars" movies and loved them. How could I keep the joy of my childhood away from him? So away my original toys went. AND THEN THE DIVORCE! The family moved with the new boyfriend. The toys didn't make the move. Twenty years of keeping these things lost in a second.

• @davepaters - I photographed my sisters' Barbie doll in flagrante delicto with my Action Man - no I'm not proud but I needed the money...

• One year for halloween, my friends and I decided to torture and kill Barney the (not-so) Dinosaur. Before we all got together for out halloween party, my best friend and I picked up a Barney doll from Toys R Us. Once our victim was in hand, we locked him in the trunk and took him to the party. Once there and after nightfall, a group of us (all in costumes) went outside, popped the trunk and retrieved our chosen victim. We immediately started a hacky sack game with Barney as the hackey. We dropped cinder blocks on him, beat him with baseball bats, hit him with tire irons and whipped him with a bike chain. Someone got a screwdriver and it was stabbed thru his head and left there. Barney then had a noose roped around his neck and he was attached to the bumper of the car he had been a "guest" in the trunk of. My best friend then jumped behind the wheel and drove up and down the street, dragging Barney along the pavement, by his neck, the whole way. Feeling that this wasn't visually striking enough, we had the car pull over so we could pour lighter fluid on Barney and light him on fire as he was again dragged along behind the car. This time, Barney lost a leg and most of his tail. Once we grew bored of our antics, we strung him up in the tree out front and left his smoldering corpse, with screwdriver still lodged in his head, with missing leg and tail as a warning to any other stupid children "positive role models" that they would NOT be tolerated by us anymore! His body remained hanging from the tree until Christmas, when someone finally took pity on Barney and quietly disposed of the remains...

• Huh...Teddy Ruxpin always did OK with the Marine Corps cadence tapes my family fed him, with no lasting ill effects. ("Come dream with me toniiight...[tape swap]...Gimmie that old MARINE CORPS SPIRIT (chorus)...it was good at IWO JIMA (chorus)...an' it's good enough for ME!") I don't remember how Grubby took to it, though...maybe he was an Army puke. Anyway, I, personally, was very kind to my action figures as a kid (aside from the cryonic/mummification experiments, but which all the subjects came through in PERFECT condition, and survive to this day, I assure you. I was a mad scientist, not a mad BUTCHER!), but the real horrors wouldn't come till I was a young adult, and I began my experiments with custom action figures. To wit, I crafted a movie Jean Grey and elements (including a head casting) of Mary Jane Watson into...a custom Amelie Poulin figure. Y'know, from the movie Amelie. Now, in hindsight, I can't help but wonder why...except perhaps to prove that I could. Honestly, it was not a bad job for a first attempt, I think. I had fairly few FAILURES in these projects, although there are some tragically uncompleted works. But there were more than a couple of other weirdly esoteric customs that people *might* consider cruelty to the original toy, even in their successful completion. (Well...who the hell else has a Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner figure to menace Steven Hakwing and Jack the Ripper with?) Of course, as a thorough heathen weirdo, I don't have lingering "Catholic Guilt" or "Liberal Guilt"...I got stuck with Christmas Toy/Toy Story guilt. You know, the movies where our beloved toys have a secret life of their own, at the mercy of human whims? I just...well, deep down, there's the chilling, horrific suspicion that I've become the Joseph Mengele of the toy world.

• Best. Contest. Ever.

• 1. When I was 3 I threw Superman out a window to make him fly. My then 8-year-old sister was the only witness. She screamed because we were on the freeway. I instantly regretted the decision and my dad had to stop the car and go back for it. 2. When I was 4 I used to play with my vintage (then new) Star Wars land speeder. It head wheels on the bottom. But I wasn't happy enough to see it merely 'levitate,' no I chucked it onto the hardwood floor so it--like Superman--would 'fly'. About a hundred times. Until all the roundy turbines and the spring-operated hood came off. Ya know how much those things go for intact these days? 3. When I was 10 I simulated sex with Teela (and myself) for my friends in the back of the station wagon on the way to Return of the Jedi for my birthday. 4. When I was 14 I took one of those lame crystal grow kits and mixed the ingredients with soda and cat food and dared my friend to eat it. (He didn't, and lived.) 5. When I was 15 I threw a bunch of those balsa wood gliders off our second story porch. They were kamikazee bombers, having been armed with a Black Cat under the fuselage. My test piloting ended early though when I failed to consider two important details: (1) the weight/placement of said firework would cause the glider to circle back; (2) the shortness of the fuse. All I could hear in my right ear for about a week was ringing. 6. Not satisfied by my near deafness...when I was 17 another friend and I swiped his little bro's ninja turtles, a model car, and a bunch of Disney figures, the only one I can recall being Bambi, and stuffed them with Black Cats. We slit Bambi's belly like a side of venison, lit the fuses and filmed it. My first pyrotechnic captured on film: "Bambi Goes Boom". 7. Later that winter I had one of those round, disk sleds for sledding behind my house. The hill was so enormous and terrifying that one year a kid was airlifted off of it because he broke his back (no joke). I called the sled my Captain America shield because it was one of the few made out of 1/2" metal and not plastic. My friends and I went for spin on our sleds. I took Captain America for a ride down, hit a rock, and went flying. When I recovered, I found ol' Cap: he had scrape across the entire diameter and a 4" inch dent a few inches off-center. I should be dead. 8. In college my pyro buddy and I constructed a potato gun. He was the brains behind it though and as a soon-to-be chemist decided to use a primitive hydrochloric acid/magnesium mixture as the catalyst for the explosion. We had one pair of goggles between us. I drew the long straw. The potato was obliterated before leaving the barrel, the acid splattered everywhere, and the gun was a mess dripping of HCL. My buddy spent the next 20 minutes washing his eyes and screaming into the business end of a garden hose. Realizing I'd tempted fate too many times and won, (and knowing luck DOES run out) I decided to retire a champion toy-slayer.

• Sorry, nothing twisted here. I've always treated my toys with the utmost care. Well... almost. I remember one time, some neighbor kids and I would deck out my TransFormers with all their accessories, and basically crash them into each other until they were barren. Not exactly horrible, and I don't think anything was really lost or broken, but it feels stupid, looking back. There was also the time I traded my complete set of Combaticons to a friend for an incomplete/partially broken 12" Inspector Gadget. I don't really know <em>why</em> I was compelled to do it, but it probably had something to do with TransFormers being off the air for some time by that point, while Nickelodeon was in full swing with reruns of Inspector Gadget plus Get Smart. So I guess I was on some sort of Don Adams binge. And back then, that wouldn't be an easy thing to sate. I kind of regret that a bit, too. --LBD "Nytetrayn"

• I couldn't help but have to send in this story for this contest because it so fits the topic. When I was in grade school, back when the tv show "Clueless" was popular they released a set of Barbie dolls inspired by the series and movie. I ended up begging my mom for all of the dolls just so I would be cool, that or use them as stand-ins for Storm Troopers when I decided to play "Star Wars." Anyway, one day I took them over to a friend's house because we were going to play outside with them since it was such a nice day. I was a little leery at first since they were brand new. We started to play with them for awhile before we decided to go swimming. Well being little immature kids that we were, we left the dolls out on the picnic table and went to jump in the pool. About a half hour or so later, we noticed that her big black lab was standing with her front paws on the table and we couldn't see what she was doing. So we get out and run over and we notice that the dog had started to maul one of my dolls. I tried to grab it out of her mouth but she ran. I chased the dog all over the backyard of this house trying to get back my doll and when I finally got it back, she looked like an amputee. Thinking back on it, had I tried to replace her limbs she would resemble Seamus, the pirate with all the wooden limbs from Family Guy. That day I learned my lesson, never take a doll out of my house for fear that a dog might maul it.

• I'm going to nominate my brother's horrible deeds for this contest, because I know he reads this, too, and this incident that occurred has been an ongoing source of bitterness between us for close to fifteen years. I know you're going to read this, you little demon, and I still haven't forgiven you for this, so you know. You're written out of my will for this dark doing of yours. I was but a tot when the Little Mermaid came out, and I was mezmerized by it. I also had the good luck of getting both the Ariel and Prince Eric doll. Being scarce on Ken dolls, the Prince Eric was a necessity for acting out my favorite parts of the movie. My brother was even younger, only about three or four at the time. He still knew what he was doing, though. I'm sure of it. One day I'm playing, and find myself short one Prince Eric doll. He was found by my mother, in the bottom of the trash compactor, mangled like a victim out of a Saw fim by my brother. His face looked like that of a bear-attack victim. My brother was given a pass for this act of cruelty, playing that "I'm the youngest, I don't know any better" card. I was left having to use the very non-Prince Eric looking Ken dolls as standins. It wasn't the same. How long have I held this against him? Last year he finally got me a replacement for it, for my 21st birthday, because I still bring this up with him. I know what you did. The new doll doesn't make us even. If anything, it's finally an admittance of your guilt.

• This tale isn't going where you may suspect so please bear with me, and an inflatable love doll isn't strictly under the intended subject, but it is a toy of sorts and is involved in the following mildly amusing event. So when I was about 19 my friends and I would hang around our neighborhood park late into the night doing what it was that we would do, basically drinking and goofing around. And the police would show up to kick us out so we would find somewhere else to go or just hide until they left. At about 10:30 pm on a warm Friday night, I walked my girlfriend home, and dropped her off behind her house in the alley. As I walked back to the park about 4 blocks away, I found a plastic bag with a mid sized box in it, all brand new and sitting outside someone's garage. I had noticed it passing the area about 10 minutes before and figured someone was just throwing it out. Opening the top I thought it was an inflatable raft. Cool! So I grabbed it and hurried back to the park to display my find to my friends with plans of going to a forest preserve to go rafting. When I got back and took out the box, it revealed itself to be an inflatable love doll. The head was solid plastic with realistic hair, a wide open oval mouth and the attached body was classic inflatable plastic, which had made me think it was a raft. It must have been purchased by someone and stashed in the alley until the mom/girlfriend/wife/husband was asleep so it could be snuck into the house. So my friends and I inflated the body and flung it around, pushed it on the swings, slid it on the slide, and whatever else came to mind at the time. And the body popped, leaving us with with just the head. And then the police pulled up lights a-flashing onto the grass where we were. We had just enough time to stash our beverages out of sight. One buddy of mine hid the head from view and made to vacate the park. The cops got out of their car and walked up about 150 feet to where we stood as innocent cherubs and started giving the same old lecture of "people are sleeping...the park is closing...you better not be drinking...blah blah blah." Meanwhile my buddy came back into the park with the doll's oval mouthed head and fitted it onto one of the red and blue flashing lights on top of the cop car. Man we started laughing so hard and the cops started yelling that this wasn't funny and they could arrest us for disorderly conduct and where are the drugs. Blah blah blah indeed, but we still tried to suppress our laughter just in case they decided to actually search our pockets. So we said "yes sir, no sir, we are leaving sir" and they stomped back to their car, got in, and then followed us out with the lights flashing and the life size sex doll's head firmly in place on the roof. When we vacated the area, they pulled into the street, turned off the flashing lights, and screeched down the street to emphasize authority. I have no idea why they didn't notice the head when they went back to the patrol car, and though we had a few more encounters with them throughout the rest of the summer, they never brought it up. But seeing them take off down a busy street with the oval mouth love doll embedded on their roof and hair blowing inn the wind was one of the funnest things I've seen in my life.

• I eviscerated my Jurassic Park T-rex (the big electronic one) in an attempt to fix it that went horribly, horribly wrong.

• I made the red ranger and the pink ranger have sex once.

• You people are very, <i>very</i> weird.

• When I was 4 I took my She-Ra, Teela, Sorceress of Greyskull, and even Evil-Lyn action figures and rubbed them against the side walk to remove the paint that was there clothes so that I could see them naked. Unfortunately they were not naked under the paint, just the base color of plastic. I ruined them all and then had to hide them so that my dad would not find them and get mad at me.

• Wild Bill.... One July back in the 80's Wild bill got strapped onto a bottle rocket. He rode that rocket like it was Dragon Fly which was admirable. After much searching he made it through the ride will little to no damage. That began the ... what can I attach Wild Bill to to hurt him? The pain was too much to handle. Poor Wild Bill encountered a flurry of different fire works until it was decided he would be better off being lit on fire. How does plastic smell buring?

• Well actually, I took pretty good care of my toys. Being an only child, if there was no one in my neighborhood around to play with, I'd recreate entire battles in my basement between the Transformers, G.I.Joe and Star Wars. With LEGO buildings for some terrain and the ironing board standing in for an aircraft carrier. I'm pretty sure this is why I'm a wargamer now. But I digress.. I think they only time I actually willingly destroyed one of my action figures was the day I defaced none other than the internet's golden boy, Admiral Ackbar! I honestly can't remember the reason. Boredom? Pre-teen angst? Or did I just want to see how he would look with a nail stuck through his head? Knowing me, probably the latter. I wonder what he was thinking, laying there on the cold linoleum, staring up at me with those yellow fish eyes, as I calmly produced a hammer and nail. Probably, "IT'S A TRAP!!!" I remember throwing him away after showing him off to my Mom, who's wry sense of humor appreciated the Steve Martinesque visual of Ackbar with a nail through his head. I really wish I would've kept him though. He would have made a great avatar picture.

• I was always FOND of... /Type demons BEGONE!

• Suffice to say, I did do a considerable amount of deliberate damage to my own toys when I was younger, the only one that even registers a foggy memory is taking a Panosh Place Voltron Keith action figure (which was sent to me by the company as a gift after sending them a letter declaring I was unable to find him at retail, and desperately wanted to complete my collection) and crushing him in a vice.

• I was always find of messing around in my father's workshop. The tools he had were wonderful fun; Vices, wrenches, electric drills, acetylene torches, power sanders, power saws, soldering irons... Many a toy saw it's end in my father's workshop, which could have been redubbed the Action Figure Oubliette... Toys went there to be tortured and die. Sometimes it was toys like GoBots, who were being punished for being so lame, and other times it was G.I. Joe or Star Wars figures who went there to die. Superman was quite literally crucified in the Action Figure Oubliette. I built a cross out of wood, and nailed Kal-El's naked body to it (well, this being one of the bigger MEGO-like figures, he had the blue underwear painted on underneath his cloth costume). I secured it in the large vice, and then subjected the son of Jor-El to horrible torture. He suffered the bite of the small drill bits. He endured the feel of molten metal being dripped on him courtesy of the soldering iron. His feet were melted with the torch, coagulating into one solid lump of Kal-El that was stuck to the cross. I drove nails into his torso, one by one. His molded hands were coated in epoxy. Bits of metal were poked into his head, and then he was introduced to the jigsaw; Pieces of Kal-El were cut out of his chest and legs, melted down, and poured over his head. In the end, Superman looked like more like the Toxic Avenger than the Man of Steel. Luke Skywalker met a similar fate, but in his case it was death in his X-Wing, as it was set ablaze (kerosene!) and holes were drilled into it. The fire started on his rear engines, and engulfed Artoo in moments. I watched the hero of the Rebel Alliance as he was trapped in his cockpit, flames rapidly approaching, with no hope in sight. The wings drooped as they caught fire, and then the fire reached Luke... The Force wouldn't save him! Not this time! The flames burned higher as they melted the cockpit shielding, dripping flaming molten transparisteel (well, fine: Plastic) onto the last hope for the Jedi. FWOOF! Luke's helmet was on fire. As Skywalker was enveloped by flames, his face melting from that of "A New Hope" Luke into "Empire Strikes Back" Luke, and then into nothing, the rest of the X-Wing was reduced to charred slag. Before it was completely destroyed, it made a crash-landing in the murky brown, chemical-laden waters of the Tittabawassee River. The current caught the Incom starfighter and dragged it a few yards, but the ship was no longer space-worthy, let alone sea-worthy. It gradually sank to the muddy depths; The last thing I saw was the erroneously-placed, idiotic red LED on the ship's melted nose. Not even the melted form of Skywalker was able to float free of the wreckage; He was fused to the cockpit. . . Thus ended all hope for the Rebel Alliance. No, seriously. I had tortured and sliced Leia in half only a week earlier. I gave one of my sister's Barbie dolls a sex change in that workshop. Yes, kids, I turned Malibu Barbie into Transgender Barnie. How, exactly, did I do such a thing? Do you really want to know? It's rather gruesome. . . OK. then. . . Barbie was secured, as all visitors to the oubliette were, in the large vice. First, the simple stuff: We had to get rid of that long, girly hair of hers. No problem! Snip Snip! Garden shears took care of most of it, and then the soldering iron was useful in turning the remaining chunks of hair into a molded plastic pompadour similar to Ken's (but a bit more charred-looking). Next, those tits had to go!!! "Hold still Barbie- This might hurt a bit. Say hello to the power-sander!" VZZZZZZZZZEEEEEEETTT! "Off come the breasts! Oops! Now you have holes in your chest. Let's just fix that. A little creativity with the soldering iron, and we'll have that chest filled in and smoothed over in no time!" Hm. Barbie was still looking girly. It's that hourglass figure, you know? That was easily handled, though. I warmed up her torso by roasting her over the acetylene torch (high enough not to scorch her... much) and then used a variety of tools to squish, stretch, and mold that tiny waist into a nice little man-belly. Makeup needed to be removed. Fine work with some light sandpaper took care of the lipstick and eye shadow, and a black sharpie provided the nice, thick man-brows required to pass as a dude. Stop! Penis time! This was a wonderful bit of creativity. I had shavings of plastic from Barbie's sanded-down tits laying on the workbench, and (I'm quite proud of this one) a metal mold from a Creepy Crawlers playset that was for a sort of wormy thing. So here's your mad cosmetic surgeon's Tip Of The Day™ -- Barbie's tits (and other leftover fleshy plastic) plus a worm-shaped mold and high heat equals brand new penis! I secured it on with a combination of soldering iron and epoxy, and then laid Barnie aside to cool for a while before dressing him in some nice, manly G.I. Joe army gear, and then replacing him (it) in my sister's closet. What did it look like, you ask? Ass. Complete and utter ass. It was hideous. Let me put it this way: If you were a lady hanging out in a singles bar and this "dude" walked up to you to ask if he could buy you a drink, you'd throw up, and then you'd have horrible nightmares about being accosted by something that looks like a combination of David Guest and Michael Jackson, but looking slightly more like that guy who got into the toxic waste in "Robocop" than is comfortable for a good relationship. My sister was none too pleased. Fear not! Revenge would be hers when she used a razor blade to slice up not one, but three of my comic books. I learned a hard lesson from it, because those three comic books were: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1, first printing and G.I. Joe #21, first series, first printing* and The Incredible Hulk #180 (Wolverine's first appearance) All were mint, in polybags. I wept. For years. * In case you don't understand, that issue of G.I. Joe was the famous Larry Hama "silent issue" featuring Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes. It's very valuable. Seriously, don't give sex changes to your sister's dolls. She'll get you back. . . She'll. get. you. back.

• While not my tale of destruction, I'm the victim of a younger brother and his 2 friends in this story. Picture it: Christmas, 1988. The first year of Junior High School for me, and the last year I'll be able to ask for any toys, being I'm now "growing up". I ask for the motherload: The G.I. Joe Defiant Space Station, being I knew this would be the last year it was in circulation. Needless to say, I got it, and played with it nearly every chance I got. Once the weather got a bit warmer, I decided to move the station outside to the rock garden, where I already had my Cobra Terrordome set up. The rock garden became the Theatre of War for many of my RAH battles, until one day.... ....I come home to find both complexes in RUINS, due to my brother and his idiot friends smashing EVERY LAST FIGURE with the rocks from the garden! I've since made up for it by purchasing pretty much every Joe and Cobra figure I had as a kid, including some I didn't, but I will never know the comfort of being the original owner of a Defiant again, sadly. :(

• I was at a party with my friend Jimmy, and we wanted to set stuff on fire because we had a lot of extra firecrackers and purelle (It is far more flammable than I first thought). Jimmy gave me an old toy from some kind of spider man villain toy line that looked like a scary demon with snap on wings that flapped. I don't know what it was called, but I was very cruel to it. First I tied firecrackers to it with string and blew it three feet in the air. The snap on wings were totally obliterated, and were but tiny shards of plastic shrapnel in Jimmy's backyard. Next, we put it on some pavement in his driveway and smothered it in purelle. After lighting it up and watching it burn for fifteen minutes, the crowd at the party finally dispersed when it became half of its former size and was reduced to a bubbling gooey stump. I guess that's what you get for being a bad guy. Next, I tried to break it with a shovel, but then someone had the idea of burying it in a mock funeral. So there, I blew up, torched and buried some villain to entertain people at a party.

• When I was a child I brought my action figures into the bathtub with me. I also didn't know what "masturbating" was at that age. Hindsight's 20/20 and looking back, I realized that exactly what I was doing. Every girl wants her first sexual experience to be with a man she loves...mine was with a GI Joe knock off. (Didn't know if that code got through or not)

• When I was a child I brought my action figures into the bathtub with me. I also didn't know what "masturbating" was at that age. Hindsight's 20/20 and looking back, I realized that exactly what I was doing. Every girl wants her first sexual experience to be with a man she loves...mine was with a GI Joe knock off.

• Okay, okay, okay. I think at this point we can all agree that we've melted toys, smashed toys, fed toys to dogs, decapitated toys, and had a jolly good laugh about sex toys and action figure toys going up the pooper. Congratulations to everyone. I'll tell a different tale with my entry, and maybe I'm less creative because I tortured my toys with a toy that was designed to torture toys in the first place. I'm referring to the He-Man "Slime-Pit". Basically a giant boney hand holds a He-Man figure in place, you pour some yellow-snot colored slime into a caved-out dinosaur skull, then let the skull head tip forward, slime oozes out of the skull's mouth and nostrils, covering your action figure. Okay, so technically I'm just playing with the toy exactly the way it was supposed to be played with. And for the average He-Man character, yeah, being covered in dead-dinosaur snot might be considered a bad thing. But the worst thing? Well, that'd be putting MOSS MAN into the slime pit. Trapped against his will by the giant bone claw, Moss Man was about to say goodbye forever to his mossy sheen. I interrogated him, "Where is the key to Greyskull?" Moss Man replied "I don't know!" and in true You Can't Do That on Television fashion, he gots slimed. Now, if you've ever spilled the He-Man slime on the carpet, you know it gets pretty crusty. Well, Moss Man got pretty crusty. I turned the once heroic ally into a walking booger. And that's just wrong.

• First of all, let me introduce you to Jiban: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYGhvNeSDN0 Jiban was a japanese live action tv series, a kind of tv show that infested brazilian tv for an entire decade. It's like robocop, but with less gore and far more cardboard. Like all good things japanese, Jiban had his own action figure, and like Robocop, he gets fucked really hard. I mean No lube hard (warning: lame portuguese dubbing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbSKypfBGiQ Jiban then is stabbed in the chest by that latex rubber bitch and dies. He comes back to life on the next episode, all pimped up. Now, it's a fact of life that kids are stupid, and I was a kid. I had my Jiban action figure on my hands, and I had to kill him. I had to. Tearing off his arm was hard, and stabbing his plastic chest with a screwdriver got me some bruises, but his helmet visor shattered the first time I smacked his head on the wall. When I called it done, Jiban's body lied on the floor, still. I stood there, quiet, paying tribute to that brave toy, and then I showed it to my father, because fathers now things, like bringing back action figures to life, the way they do it on TV: - It's fucked, kid. Then he walked out, and I had an ass for a face. Man, I destroyed my fucking toy. What was I thinking? I can tell you Jiban taught me a lesson that day. He gave his life to show me how to deal with the pain of loss. A couple of years later my dog died, but I didn't cry. I took it like a man. I knew somewhere in tokusatsu heaven Jiban was watching over me and smiling - or not, because he didn't have lips - and he knew his work was done. Thank you, Steel Policeman Jiban. http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/2710/jibanripcopygg7.jpg

• When I was a kid, I had an Evel Knevel doll (ahem - I mean "action figure") that rode a motorcycle that could be hand-cranked up to high-speed so that it could perform stunts like jumping over my sister's bound-and-gagged Barbie dolls using a two-by-four as a ramp. My friend and I discovered the motorcycle performed better without Evel weighing it down and throwing off its balance, so we decided to "dispose" of him. We jimmied open the wooden fence surrounding a construction site that was shut down for the winter (we wanted this stunt to take place in a "safe" location. This will become clearer later) and arranged a "jump" off the roof of an office shack using a ladder we brought with us. To sweeten the deal, we doused Evel's jumpsuit in charcoal lighter fluid and set it on fire just before launching him. Evel didn't quite make it over some stacked 12-inch water mains, bounced down them, carommed off a pile of loose excavation debris and skidded under the chain-link barrier surrounding a pit that looked like the first stage of somebody's basement. It took us several minutes to pry up enough of the barrier (getting ourselved covered in mud in the process) and climbed into the pit with our handy ladder to discover....that Evel was STILL burning. Turns out the plastics he was made of light up really well with just a little accelerant. We briefly toyed with the idea of dousing him with dirt, but truthfully, we both wanted to see how long he would burn. He finally smoldered out about ten minutes later, there was nothing left of him but a formless mass of black, foul-smelling char with a "skeleton" of wires poking out of it in a few places. Even better: Evel had become separated from his motorcycle on impact, and the motorcycle wasn't even scorched.

• When me and my little girl-friends used to play Barbie we were constantly short a Ken doll. So we took our homeliest Barbies and gave them buzz cuts so they could take the place of a missing man doll. One time we tried to melt down her breasts, but it didn't work very well and made my room reek. Instant sex change.

• Well, it looks like I'm not the only GI Joe terrorizing kid. I actually built a marvel of a death-cage (at least as I can recall). Then I made a mud pit in the garden to lower the death-cage with my favorite Joes inside. It worked great until it was yanked out of the mud too fast, causing it to fall apart. I think I commited four Joes to the dirt that day. The two saved Joes were so full of crud that they were never the same again. I watched in horror the next spring as Dad tilled the garden before planting. Bummer.

• Matt Tracker laying on a light bulb = Melted pile of grey goo.

• had about 75-80% of the RAH joes from start to about 89 or 90... whatever wasn't shot at with a bb gun with a scope was done blowd up with firecrackers. As for Tformers, had about 90-95% of the originals up until action masters(single child with yuppie parents back then) and well, the worst thing I did was sell all but 2 or 3(will NEVER get rid of my prime,which probably has lead paint). Mmmm....lead paint. Damn teenager greed.

• I'm not sure why Grunt had to have his left arm burned off just below the elbow, but I spent 6 years trying to fit a suitable prosthesis. The stupid GI Joe guns melted at a lower temp than the figs, you see...

• When I was in sixth grade, I did the worst thing ever. I had this mutagenic ooze, and I put all of my ninja turtles into the sewer playset and I had Bebop on top with the ooze. He leaned over the edge and I started making noises like hua-hua-hua and threw the mutagenic ooze over the edge. Soon all the toys in the sewer was going hua-hua-hua. It was the worst thing I ever did.

• I don't know if my entry fits the criteria since it involves vehicles instead of the action figures and were performed by my brother, but here goes - In the early 80's I had an ungodly amount of Star Wars vehicles. The Rebel Transport, the AT-AT, you name it, I had them. And I also had a twisted older brother who lived to destroy any happiness I got out of life. Big bro decided, for whatever reason, to get a philips screwdriver and dismantle each and every one of my Star Wars vehicles and playsets, then remove the battery operated noisemakers from them, then reasemble the vehicles and playsets minus the noisemakers AND screws that held them together. Then he did the unthinkable. He used his solder iron and MELTED the seams of the vehicles together. Ugly smelly plastic scars now adorned my Star Wars toys, and most would fall apart with the smallest amount of handling. To add insult to injugy he used the solder gun to melt off Chewbacca's head. I still cry inside when I think about it.

• As a child of the seventies Star Wars figures played a major role in my play. For some reason sadistic experimenting did as well. The two converged the day I started freezing my action figures in the ice tray. This was not enough to sate my need to test the durability of plastic. One day Darth Vader was taunting me from the toy shelf with his vinyl cape/vest. I proceeded to grab him and hold him against the lit lamp in the family room. After a few minutes I began to smell noxious fumes and melted plastic began to drip on the shag carpeting. I pulled him away from the light bulb and tried to cover up the evidence by burying the lord of the sith in the backyard. To this day I can't look at a vintage Darth Vader figure without thinking of that awful burnt plastic smell and having pangs of guilt.

• Do you guys remember the old flex action Spider Man figures? They had a join mid-abdomen and the arms and legs would make a yoga master jealous. Well, back when I still had mine, I would repeatedly mummify Spidey using wet paper towels. After encasing him in towel, I would then toss him around to see if the cocoon would protect him. Eventually I got bored with it and burned the arms and legs off, then thew it of the freeway overpass... I miss that thing. Also, I climbed a tree with my imperial shuttle that I had bought the year before, proceeded to light it on fire and threw it out of the tree. It was totally worth it though.

• Microwaveable Barbie.

• I love toys, as most anyone that visits this site can claim. Sure, I had my stretch during my teen years where I stuck a smoke bomb's flame into a G.I. Joe's crotch and watched him burn, or played baseball with the original TMNT foursome and Battle-damaged Armor He-Man as the ball, but I grew out of that phase after my collection dwindled. I rediscovered toys with the advent of the '96 "buff" Star Wars lines, and proceeded to tack all the orange carded figures on my basement wall, then the green carded figures...variants and all! Then, disaster struck: The plastic line on the toilet upstairs ruptured, spewing (clean, thankfully) water downstairs onto my amassed collection of figures. Soaked were the long-lightsaber variant of Obiwan Kenobi, drenched the half-circle Boba Fett. Insurance paid almost $15,000 to repair the damage, but no more would I gaze upon those small plastic faces. Now for the worst thing I have done to a toy...Fast forward six years, the basement redone in beautiful red and graham cracker colors, a nice Japanese pattern border running around the room, couch, television, computer rounding out the recreation room. My leftover figures and any that I had purchased since then (hey, SW fans are like smack addicts with their toys) sitting in my laundry room boxed on pallets (Ha ha! Won't get wet again!). I get a call from my wife that the basement is flooding. I rush home and notice nasty water pouring out of the drain. We ended up with a foot and a half of sewage water downstairs due to tree roots blocking the main line in the street. Turns out it was the neighbor's tree, and we're the last house on the line: all the waste water from 2 blocks ended up in our basement. We had to call the fire department out because it was touching the outlets and sparking, call a cleaning company out to get rid of poo and drywall, and spent about 2 months logging everything for insurance puposes. Unfortunately, insurance doesn't cover tree roots blocking sewer lines. We spent close to $20,000 out-of-pocket for the clean-up and in damages, and my basement is still only half-finished 6 years later. As for the toys, they were still boxed up, and I couldn't part witht them. I put them in the garage. This is the worst thing you can do to a toy: Stick damp packaged figures in a garage that gets about 90 degrees in the summer. The first time I opened a box I was assailed by the smell of rancid mold, and I looked over my once proud collection. Remember in "Creepshow" when Jordy Verrill finds the meteorite and blows his head off because he gets covered in alien moss? Yeah, that's what my toys looked like: moldy packaging with figures trapped in plastic coffins that had condensation on them. Box after box contained poor dead once-mint/near-mint playthings that I had left to rot in the summer heat. I fianlly ended up opening them all and giving them a bleach bath so that I could keep them, but I haven't bought a toy to keep in the packaging since...

• Me and my cousin used to take action figures (whichever ones we had gotten tired of at the moment) and tied them to little wooden crosses we made out of popsicle sticks/twigs/whatever was handy. Then we set the crosses on fire. Fuuuucked up. I miss those days.

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