I was given a moment of reflection via minecraft/terraria: my construction and destruction roots. As a child I was lucky enough to spend summers in rural Wisconsin where firecrackers are as common as beer. Add to that I spent these summers on a beach with many toy soldiers and you can imagine the many Omaha Beaches I recreated. I also made sandcastles/forts, like many children, but I built fireworks into them to create maximum destruction as the plastic men battled for control. Do any of you folks have similar experiences that you can pin-point to your love of explosions and building via toys n such?
I actually did this as a competitive game with my half brother during a couple summers. Bags of generic army men from the dollar store, divvied up, and placed on each half of the sandbox. firecrackers had to be lit or thrown from the opposite side of the sandbox. Firecrackers broken in half to achieve the melty-spark effect could be thrown from the edge sides due to only doing damage directionally. First to kill 5 guys wins or whoever has the most kills when the firecrackers run out. Sometimes we'd allow special weapon allotments of jumping jacks or the little cardboard tanks. Maybe it's a wonder we still have all of our fingers.
Set up a bunch of plastic dudes in a battle scene. Take a plastic garbage bag and roll it up tight lengthwise. Tie some knots in it like a climbing rope. Hang it from a wire hanger or something over the plastic dudes, ideally in a way so that it will swing back and forth like a pendulum a bit. Light the bottom of this plastic 'rope' on fire. Little balls of melting plastic will drip off, hit your plastic dudes and melt through them. WWII meets cosmic acid rain!
I used to take modelling clay and make dozens of dudes. Then I'd take those dudes and set up elaborate battle scenes in the backyard (or in the barn if it was raining or cold outside.) Then I'd take my badass Daisy pump-action pellet rifle and shoot the crap out of them. I would spend entire weekends doing this. It was much better than shooting action figures (which I also did) because the clay would show the damage, like when you'd blow some dude's head into a U shape. I can think of few things better than blowing some dude's head into a U shape. We tried strapping bottlerockets to the tops of Matchbox cars and dragracing them down the street, but that didn't work out. We used a piece of PVC tube and bottlerockets like we were a bazooka team. One kid would get down on a knee with the tube on his shoulder, and the teammate would load the rocket. We thought this was pretty great. We would also blow up sandcastles with firecrackers. Pieces of styrofoam were also great for exploding. G.I. Joe guys were really good to blow up, because you could wedge the firecracker right into that hole in the bottom of the torso. Baking Soda + Vinegar + 2-Liter bottle was fun for blowing holes in the snow. When we got older, we'd go to the grocery store and buy dozens of eggs and bags full of tomatoes and squishy fruits, set up strategic piles of them around the yard, and then spend an hour running around and throwing them at each other. Ha! I can still remember a pear exploding off the side of my friend Jon's head, and him picking produce out of his hair for the rest of the afternoon. Awesome.
That sounds so wonderful. I did that kind of thing with friends on a beach, though we were throwing clumps of wet sand. We stopped when I got a spoonful of sand behind my eyeball.
Definitely shot many GI-Joes and green plastic soldiers with BB guns. It was a natural evolution, before BB guns we'd just setup these lines of soldiers firing at each other. When our parents found out they decided that they weren't going to buy us anymore GI Joes since we were so intent on destroying them. With fireworks, we'd always get the little tanks that shoot a firecracker and spark and such. We started with tank wars, by pointing them right at each other, but then one year we setup a battlefield with plastic soldiers, and then had a series of these tanks assault the entrenched soldiers. I think we must have dumped some of the fireworks into their earth-works because I remember at one point lots of things catching on fire and tanks turning around and shooting at us. And we filmed it too, and then set the entire thing to Ride of the Valkyries to cover up the "oh shit" moment caught on camera as the fireworks started shooting at us. I should totally facebook that neighbor and see if he still has the video.
