6 Amazing Rich Kid Versions of the Toys You Grew Up With
We all had that one rich kid in class growing up -- he was the first to get the new video game systems when they arrived, and he didn't have to make a "fortress" for his action figures out of a cardboard box and old egg cartons -- he had the real thing.
It's hard not to wish you could, just once, relive childhood as that rich kid who had everything. If by some sorcery that should ever occur, we already have our shopping list made out:
A BB Gun That Could Kill a Predator ($3,500)
This might be the only airsoft gun you could actually stop a home invasion with.
The Echo1 (CAW) M134 Minigun is possibly the most expensive toy gun on the planet (and if it isn't, we'll be extremely depressed for the human race). At a retail price of $3,500, its only practical purpose seems to be giving its owner the ability to boast about it on YouTube. Speaking of which, watch what it does to this perfectly good laptop:
"OK, now let's put it on YouTube ... wait, shit."
The Echo1 is powered by an actual motorcycle battery and the kinetic energy produced by the boner of the guy shooting it. It can fire anywhere between 3,000 and 6,000 rounds per minute, which gun aficionados refer to as "a shitload of dead squirrels." For added realism, it comes packaged in an actual weapons crate and can be hooked up to a backpack "similar to the one seen in Predator with Jesse 'The Body' Ventura." That is an actual quote from the website that sells them, which also states that it was made by "totally wicked awesome ninjas in Japan."
Yeah, we didn't need to be told that. Some things are just a given.
Now, even though this is basically an overgrown BB gun, we're not saying anyone would actually hand one to a child ...
"Now go back up to the house and gather the servants. I have an idea for a game."
OK, so what would a kid, or overgrown kid, shoot with this thing? How about ...
Life-Size Action Figures ($1,000 to $12,000)
There are lots of insanely expensive action figures out there, but they're mostly just rare collector's items that you wouldn't actually want to play with -- stuff like an original edition of the butt-chin guy who appears in the Star Wars cantina for two seconds. If we were to spend thousands of dollars on an action figure, we'd like something you can actually get into a physical fight with -- like the $3,000 "Mini" Giant Gundam released by Bandai ("Gundam" translates to "Awesome Fucking Robot"), which is 5 feet tall and boasts 14 movable body parts, including its finger joints.
More importantly, it also comes packed with several interchangeable guns, one of which is a freaking light saber.
The coffin of a child adorns his other arm.
Other bonus features include rocket-launching sound effects and the frightening ability to blink on remote control (known by future historians as the moment we doomed our race). Of course, this thing is completely worthless if you can't use it to stage massive backyard fights against something, and we're guessing your old TMNT villains aren't gonna cut it anymore. So how about some ride-on dinosaurs for about $1,000 a piece?
Whoever that kid is, he just won the "having a childhood" game.
Toy manufacturer Hansa specializes in enormous, fully poseable plush toys for rich people with giant babies, apparently. Besides the usual giant horses, giraffes and bears, they've also branched out into extinct or fictional creatures, like this woolly mammoth or this huge, impossibly cool $12,000 dragon:
Seriously, we would betray our own species to have that.
Oh, and for a few extra dollars, you can make these fuckers move. Shit, at this point your Gundam's gonna need some help to take care of these things -- a perfect excuse to shell out $6,000 more on your own life-size Terminator.
Nerd sold separately.
It features glowing red eye action, two guns and movable arms, but sadly, the legs are fixed to the base, meaning that, no, you can't make it ride on top of the dragon.
Luxury Cars for Kids ($29,000 to $97,000)
It's never too early to learn how to compensate.
This isn't just some useless room decoration that rich people buy their kids simply to prove how rich they are -- it has a working engine. It's an actual miniature car, and it's probably better than yours.
The Ferrari Testarossa Two Seater Car for Kids is currently priced at $97,395 and has a top speed of 17 mph. It features fancy-looking upholstery, retractable headlights and even a tape player, as if your kid even knows what a tape is. Turns out that junior Ferraris are pretty popular in Europe: Check out this footage of a little kid driving an Italian model down the street.
"Don't stop at the light -- they'll try to clean your windshield and expect some money."
He's like 8, and this already makes him a more accomplished adult than us. We're guessing that the lady beside him is his trophy wife. On the other hand, if you're concerned less with luxury and more with performance (and blatant parental negligence), for only $29,000 you can get this:
Years of therapy and social detachment.
The LeMans Junior Race Car has a top speed of 30 mph. That could get your kid arrested for speeding in some residential areas. The specifications page lists a number of impressive features, none of which are seat belts.
But maybe your only aim is getting your kid the hell out of your house. In that case, we recommend the Junior Off Roader, which, in addition to being prepared for dirt roads, comes with an optional camper trailer attachment for a combined total of only $66,000. The trailer itself could comfortably house a family of dwarfs.
Or one adorable meth lab.
And it's not just these three models -- Mobileation.com's Luxury Car Lot section has a whole bunch of fully functional cars for kids available for anyone with too much money and not enough common sense. What this really means is that when the moment comes for these kids to do the inevitable "I'm leaving home" routine, by the time they get scared and decide to turn back, they'll probably be in another state.
"Fuck, I knew I heard a helicopter! Quick, ditch the coke!"
Man, what happened to the simpler days, when all a kid needed was a bunch of G.I. Joes? Yeah, about that ...
The Biggest G.I. Joe Play Sets Ever Made ($900 to $1,400)
The Achilles' heel for every action figure play set in history has always been scale -- it wouldn't be practical or cost effective to produce a Technodrome that was 50 times bigger than the Ninja Turtles, for example, or a Castle Grayskull your He-Man toy could actually get lost inside. The G.I. Joe toy line, however, predates common sense ... and that's probably why, in 1985, it produced what is still the biggest play set ever, the legendary U.S.S. Flagg aircraft carrier.
It was discontinued in 1987 because actual jets kept landing on it.
The U.S.S. Flagg is the holy grail of toy collecting, not just for G.I. Joe fans, but for anyone who ever played or will play with action figures. We're pretty sure there's some sort of child safety law that prevents anything like this from ever being produced again. Originally priced at $89, it currently goes for at least 10 times that in mint condition and as high as $1,400, if you managed not to lose or swallow any of the pieces. At 7 feet 6 inches in length, it was so big that the old TV commercial that showed a bunch of kids running on top of it didn't seem like that much of an exaggeration.
Possibly even cooler is the Defiant space shuttle, which was actually three play sets in one: the control station, the huge wheeled crawler and the actual shuttle on top of it. Also, the box art made it seem like one ship was humping another.
As good an excuse as any to explain to kids about space fucking.
Ironically, Hasbro flew too close to the sun with this one, which retailed at a prohibitive $120 and thus wasn't as popular as the other play sets. As a result of its rarity and sheer awesomeness, it's currently going for $900 on eBay. We ... we have a hard time arguing with that price.
We're almost certain that there are children trapped inside that monster.
Insanely Detailed Official Star Wars Lego Replicas ($1,200 to $2,950)
At some point in the last decade and a half, Lego's target audience went from "mainly kids" to "mainly adults compensating for the fact that their parents didn't buy them the pirate ship set when they were kids" (which is admittedly a far more lucrative market). The prime example of this trend is the insanely huge Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon, which is so big that you'd have to be a to lift or let alone play with it.
The great thing is that after you build it, you can live inside the box.
The price? Right now, it's going for $2,950, which incidentally is $2,950 more than Han Solo paid Lando Calrissian for the original Falcon. The box contains more than 5,000 Lego pieces, and if you ever wondered what that looks like, here it is:
Honestly, we'd probably get six pieces put together before passing out from exhaustion.
It takes roughly one week to assemble, and the end result weighs more than 25 pounds. Oh, and check out Amazon's "Frequently Bought Together" suggestion:
This might be why the economy collapsed.
Apparently, enough people have cleared their bank accounts on the Falcon, the $2,000 Lego Star Destroyer and the $1,200 Lego Death Star (so accurate that they even left it unfinished) that Amazon now bundles them together. You'd probably need to clear the garage to store all three, but that's no problem, because you just sold your car to buy them.
There was a globe there, just seconds before the photo was taken.
The Most Expensive Video Games in the World ($20,000 to $29,000)
When you think about "rare" toys, you're thinking in terms of the G.I. Joe set up there, where thousands were produced, but not many were sold or survived the decades since. What separates the Gold Edition of the 1990 Nintendo World Championships NES cartridge from every other collectible, however, is that there are only 26 in the world.
And they come with servants who blow into the ends so they'll start up.
The story is that back in 1990, Nintendo hosted a video game tournament in the U.S. called Powerfest, which was basically a real-life version of the Video Armageddon from The Wizard, except without all those embarrassing Power Gloves. Instead, Nintendo created a special NES cartridge programmed with modified versions of Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer and Tetris on it -- contestants had exactly six minutes and 21 seconds to complete these trials, most of which was spent waiting for that fucking long piece in the Tetris portion.
Nerd flashbacks look a lot like this.
Afterward, 90 of these gray cartridges were awarded to championship finalists, but another 26 were mailed out by Nintendo Power in a fancy, The Legend of Zelda-esque gold cartridge. Now rated at a price exceeding $20,000, these gold editions of 1990 Nintendo World Championships give you the unique opportunity of attempting to beat NWC champion Thor Aackerlund's top score of 2,800,000 points, which ... probably won't get you laid, but will earn you the scorn of every Nintendo nerd on the planet (which is almost as satisfying).
And if an expensive retro game that looks like gold isn't good enough for you, luxury watch dealer Swiss Supply also offers a one-of-a-kind original Game Boy console made out of actual 18K gold with solid diamond buttons -- and yes, it's playable.
Finally, scientists have reduced tackiness down to its elemental form.
For the $29,500 it costs, they'll even throw in some actual Game Boy cartridges and original cables, although we'll admit that their game selection leaves something to be desired.
Monopoly, Golf and Super Mario Land. Wait, no Shaq Fu? Pfffft.
Jacopo della Quercia was recently interviewed by Ripley's Believe It or Not! to discuss the great Andrew Jackson Cheese Party of 1837, so please make sure to check that out, along with his Facebook and Twitter feeds for more information about how to attend via history!
For more playthings you don't need but we advocate owning, check out 7 Great Products for Telling the World You're a Rich Dick and 14 'Luxury' Sex Toys for the Extremely Rich and Creepy.
