Toys just used to be a little dude you could pull on with your buddy’s

One of my most vivid early memories involves the Stretch Armstrong dog, which according to the internet was named Fetch Armstrong. The year this particular toy came out was 1993, and I was four years old. I like to share this story as a way to help adults remember what little kids’ trains of thoughts are like - magical thinking rules when you don’t have a logical understanding of how the world works yet.

It was my older brother’s birthday party and he got the Fetch Armstrong as a gift. I’m one of the youngest in my generation in my family. My older brothers and (male) cousins did what rowdy young boys do and pulled this thing to its limits.

Eventually they got bored of it and moved on, which meant I finally got a chance to play with it. Thing is, they’d already broken it. I didn’t know until I touched it, but part of it was torn and the liquid from inside it leaked out onto my hands.

And I. flipped. the. fuck. out.

In my little kid brain, I thought the liquid would make my hands as stretchy at the toy. I immediately pictured my brothers and cousins pulling my hands, twisting my fingers, abusing the newfound stretching abilities in my hands until they snapped, just as they did with the toy. I was absolutely terrified and couldn’t stop crying.

The adults around me didn’t have a clue what I was upset about. They thought I was sad because the toy was broken, and tried to console me with stuff like, “It’s just a toy, we can get a new one.” But I didn’t have the ability to coherently explain what I thought was going to happen to me, being a little kid with a limited ability to explain my thoughts. So they all thought I was overreacting while I was in a full-blown panic.

Only after time passed, I’d washed my hands, and I saw that they didn’t become stretchy, was I finally able to calm down. To this day, I think about this event whenever a little kid seems to be “upset over nothing.” We don’t know what they’re picturing in their heads. We don’t know what magical thinking they’re going through to make the mundane seem terrifying. They could be imagining a vivid nightmare scenario that they can’t explain, and that we’re too stuck in “adult brain” to even fathom.

Anyway, that’s my Stretch Armstrong story. Thank you for your time.

I had one of these. I put it in the freezer to see what would happen. Took it out the next day, and its limbs all broke off.

I murdered Stretch Armstrong.

Cool a Sean Bean from the movie Black Death action figure!