Your personal list of outdated toys etc you got.

[Mikey]

Your ma or pop ever bring you home an older marked-down toy because they got it for cheap ?

Back in the day there was a farmers market my ma would go to every week.

Everytime she went you can be sure I would get a brand new toy that would test my ability to lie about how much I like it

I remember one year getting a brand spanking new Ludwig Von Drake lunchbox ... Too bad it was over 15 years out of date at the time .... I remember a few kids asking me, who's Ludwig Von Drake ?

If I could only get those days back ... some of that "junk" she brought home would be worth a pretty penny today.

It how I got my second Remco Lost in Space robot in the early 70's for almost nothing --- but, even at that time I would have rather had something new and current

[toys2cool]

I got stuff from the thrift shops all the time and my aunt always got me cheap old toys from kmart

[El Hombre Nuclear]

Well, I've probably mentioned this several times here, but in the late '70s my college-aged next door neighbor gave me his entire '60s action figure collection after seeing me playing with my Adventure Team guys in the front yard, which was kind of mind-blowing. I got several good years of play out of those, before they were cast into the closet abyss. I wish I had been able to hold on to some of those over the years, as I know a few pieces ended up becoming quite sought after. He gave me a fat stack of '60s comics as well. I still remember this two-part thing with the Flash fighting a giant samurai...

My mother was pretty hip to the new toy trends, so aside from a little freelancing, she generally got me whatever I was obsessed with at the time. It should be noted that, at least where I grew up (Northern NJ/NYC), many discontinued toy lines would still be available for quite a while. For instance, I remember that most of the mid '70s stuff wasn't fully wiped from the shelves until around '82/'83, when the new wave (no pun intended) of '80s toy lines really hit. Maybe we had a lot of extra stock there, due to it being such a large population center with so many shopping outlets? In any case, perhaps because of that (and doing more research on toy history as an adult), I've always sort of categorized the classic action figure market into three separate eras, which with a few major exceptions were fairly distinct from one another, and notably quite in sync with the general cultural/aesthetic zeitgeist shifts as well:

The '60s - 1964-1972
The '70s - 1973-1981
The '80s - 1982-1990

The upshot of all this is that, if you somehow got sot some toys from a previous era during that general timeframe, they might have indeed seemed outdated or "old" as a kid, whereas most of the "within era" stuff, even if it was from a few years apart, would have blended together well and seemed contemporary. I hope that all made some kind of sense...