Fisher Price Great Adventure Castle

I feel like The Fisher Price Great Adventure Castle is one of those rare memories that sits in the very back of your brain waiting for you to remember it, like a long lost love or an unfortunate sexual encounter. I'm 32, and I guarantee basically anyone my age or a bit older played with this thing, and if you showed it to them they'd get memory whiplash. Memory Whiplash is a great band name, for the record, if any aspiring artists out there need a name. Just be sure to send me my royalty checks (Hah! royalty. Cause it's a castle. Hilarious).

That being said, despite easily being one of the most owned toys of my generation, it also is one of the few nobody knows the goddamned name of because, and let's face it, Fisher Price Great Adventure Castle doesn't roll casually off the tongue the way Mighty Max did. So let's show some love and appreciation to this forgotten favorite, shall we?

Released by Fisher Price in 1994, it remained largely unchanged aside from a few minor aesthetic differences in its variants, including mostly color changes for the knights it came with. The toy featured a fold down drawbridge, a boulder chute, a catapult (which, let's be honest, we're all friends here after aren't we, we ALL tried to launch a knight out of this thing right?), a hidden cannon within the wall, hidden doors and a ton more honestly. It also came with the extremely recognizable knights, 10 in total: 4 good knights in gold armor, 4 evil knights in black armor, and two kings for the respective armies. It was, and I'd argue, still remains one of Fisher Price's most easily recognizable pieces ever released.

It was, and continues to be, one of the coolest toy sets ever released, and I don't say that just because my judgement is heavily clouded by nostalgia.

Like, just visually design wise, this thing is pleasing as hell to the eye, and the texture of everything felt good in your hands. It wasn't too smooth, it wasn't too rough, and it came with quite a hell of a lot considering! Sadly, this is yet another toy I never actually owned one of myself, but I played with it a ton at friends houses when I was a very little girl and still had people willing to try and be my friends. It was also - and somewhat unusual for the time - a rather large playset.

I mean, this thing was meant for small children, generally between the ages of 3 or 4, but this thing was the size of a small child! And every piece was fully functional, which was really cool. Not only did the design work, or did the colors pop, but the cannons actually shot and the drawbridge and gates actually opened and allowed access to the interior, which many people may not remember but yes in fact there WAS an interior!

Owning this toy was sort of the crown jewel on your toy chest, honestly. It's what separated the rich kids from the poor kids, especially considering the goddamned thing ran for quite a bit, understandably, but even more surprisingly perhaps is the fact that they made even more toys in the "Great Adventures" lineup that I promise we'll cover at a later date. Nowawdays, however, attempting to acquire one of these bad boys can run you up to 100 dollars or more on eBay, so that's food for thought. Of course, prices are often jacked up on vintage things, but even then.

But here's a look at the interior of the castle, which really is way cooler than one might have expected or that we may have even deserved. This thing even came with a roundtable, decals for the interior walls and even ledges for the knights to fight to the death on! This thing is beyond cool, man. If I recall correctly, however, it was slightly chintzy because pieces would often pop off rather easily. It wouldn't break, just...you know...fall apart. You could easily snap them back together though, which was nice, again especially coming from an era where if something broke it was broken for good. They really didn't make toys to last back then, man. The color combination of the sewer green mixed with the grey of the castle was always an odd choice to me, but you can't argue it isn't eye catching, and you especially can't argue that the knight colors - black and gold - weren't iconic. If anyone sees one of those, they immediately remember it. That's how burned into our collective memories this fucking thing is. But apparently the Fisher Price Great Adventures was an entire line of playsets (something I was unaware of until writing this entry) and I think that's pretty awesome honestly. Makes sense too. Be kind of weird to have only one toy in said line. Don't know why that never occurred to me before, but whatever. Sadly there isn't a whole lot of information in regards to the lines history, so I can't give you a detailed run down of how this toy line came into being, but I can assure you, as someone who was there at the front line, that this thing was everywhere.

But if we're being honest, color wise, it's that red door that really catches the eye. The drawbridge, I suppose, is what it actually is. Because in between the weird sewer green land mass and the light grey castle stone, there sits this extremely bright red drawbridge, and next to the knights coloring, that drawbridge is the thing that really pops out at you. Sometimes quite literally, with how often these things fell apart, too.

As I said, this Great Adventures thing was apparently a whole concept for Fisher Price who went on to make many other playsets under the same name, though I guarantee nobody knows any of the others because this was the only one any of us ever saw. Unless you're some sort of toy aficionada (you know, like, maybe someone who writes a blog about toys or something, not me, just some other loser who does the same thing), I can assure you that you've never not only ever seen one of the other sets from this franchise but also likely never knew they existed outright.

And that's okay, because frankly, even though we'll be covering the others in later posts, the Castle is where it's at. It's the end all be all. Hell, it's likely even possible this toy is why so many kids grew up being so into fantasy stories. You bunch of dorks.

Seriously though, I wish I had owned one of these, and perhaps one day, when I'm flush with cash (you know, from getting rich off all these niche blogs, cause that happens) I'll pick one up.

And then it'll immediately fall apart.

But that's par for the course.