I had a lot of cap guns growing up. I had a lot of squirt guns, too. I even had a couple of camera guns (from various spy playsets). But the best guns of all were the Star Trek Tracer Guns.
Sure, they looked nothing like the phasers from the show and shot little plastic disks instead of coherent light beams. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that you could load these babies up with a ton of ammo and go on insane rampages against anything: parents, siblings, friends, pets; nothing was spared getting shot by these things. And, unlike cap guns and squirt guns, you could generally use these indoors without getting in trouble from Mom. There was also a rifle version of the gun, but we never had one. We did have about six of the pistols, though.
We discovered that the size of the ammo was very close to the size of a penny, so we attempted to load up with those instead. It worked, but the penny would only go about two or three inches: the firing mechanism was just too flimsy to fling coins. We had so much ammo that I would imagine you’d still find some deep in the cushions of my parents’ couch.
I remember getting hit in the eyeball with one of the disks, and having it hurt like hell. Sometimes, brothers are mean mean bastards.
My lifelong love of Star Trek was greatly increased by these toys, despite their lack of resemblance to anything on that show.
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Responses to “Toys I Wish I Still Had #6: The Star Trek Tracer Gun”
[...] Spandex Justice’s “Toys I Wish I Still Had” series rules. This idea should become a meme. Check out The Star Trek Tracer Gun. I remember being a kid and seeing those tracer discs in every nook and cranny of every playground, park and backyard. [...]
January 28th, 2006 at 8:27 pm |
[...] http://spandexjustice.com/2006/01/26/68 [...]
June 25th, 2007 at 8:53 am |
[...] the Star Trek Tracer gun. Shoot little plastic discs and even pennies. From: Spandex Justice.com Digg This [?] Share This Sphere: Related [...]
September 9th, 2007 at 6:36 am |
I had one of these when I was a kid! It met it’s demise when the neighborhood bully chased us away from our playground then broke all our toys… asshole!
May 15th, 2008 at 10:23 am |
I found one of the tracer gun disks while I was retrieving a coin target while metal detecting in a park (you find quite a bit of non-metallic minutae in your retrieval holes, things like marbles, pipe stems, etc…). I knew what it was right off the bat as I had one too, brought back the memories. It was cool finding your page with the shots of it!
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:00 pm |
What are you, my freakin’ brother or something? Did we somehow have all the same toys?
I’ve recently found originals of the SSPs I’ve had and I’ve bought some Sizzlers as well.
We still have a couple of the original Star Trek tracer guns.
Did you ever notice that you could shoot the tracer guns at your brother in a mirror and it
would perfectly richochet and hit him?
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:48 pm |