Yesterday, BoingBoing linked to a cool entry at Secret Fun Blog about the Galaxy Laser Team, a collection of nifty plastic spacemen sold beginning somewhere in the 1970s, shortly after the Battle of Yavin changed everything for me and other little nerdlings.

Amazingly, you can still buy these guys–an entire collection for about $12 on Amazon.

It got me to thinking that some of my favorite toys growing up were (aside from my Kenner Star Wars toys, of course) like the Galaxy Laser Team and generic plastic army guys.

On Tuesday, I stopped by Walmart to look for seam sealer for the tent (couldn’t find any) and, since I had Ben with me, we went through the toy section. I saw something that warmed the very essence of my soul. Ben, like every four year-old boy in America is sweet on superheroes, particularly Marvel, so it thrilled me to no end to see plastic army guy-versions of Marvel Superheroes. (They were in fact, very much throwbacks to these toys, which I remembered seeing on the inter webs years ago.)

They’re called Handful of Heroes and they come eight to a pack. They are almost everything you could want in a set of toys for a four year-old. No parts, excellent variety, and no inherent storylines that come toys that talk or have countless accessories. These are playthings. Wonderful playthings. Highly-detailed playthings modeled on Marvel heroes, both famous and non-, they could easily scratch Ben’s itch for Marvel minutiae.

I was all set to buy a pack on these general principles, so I stopped to scan the price at a nearby price-scanner-thingy. They wanted $8 for these things. That’s **does math** almost, like a buck each. Uncool. W, as the kids say, TF?

Currently, the bane of store shopping with kids is the recent trend in collectible single packs in the $1-3 range. These are cheap, individually-wrapped plastic toys of pretty decent quality. Some, like the little LEGO minifigs and My Little Pony toys, are quite awesome. Others, like the Hot Wheels single packs, are quite pointless, considering that they’re priced about the same as a regular Hot Wheel car. Worst encounter yet–and compounding the Marvel-licensed uncool–were the little $1 plastic eggs (yes, vending machine toys) of Marvel figures. Admittedly, they’re colorful and interesting, but they’re only about an inch tall. Its an easy way to waste a dollar on disappointing your son.

So what did we learn? Even when they make ’em like they used to, they don’t make ’em like they used to.