...Just Visiting...: Toy of Christmas Past - Part 19 - Crossfire / Gunfight at O.K. Corral

Crossfire / Gunfight at O.K. Corral - Ideal - Early 1970's

These two toys were very similar in game play and equipment, and were part of IDEAL toys "golden era" of ball bearing toys.

The Golden Era of Ball Bearing Toys

I have a theory. In the early 1970's IDEAL toys must have purchased or inherited a ball bearing factory with a million or so ball bearings. Not knowing what to do with them, some pitch man came up with the idea, "Let's incorporate them in as many toys as possible !". "What about SAFETY" someone asked. "You're fired" proclaimed his or her manager ..... or so my version of history goes.

In that era there were at least 4 toys with major components being ball bearings, They were:

Crossfire
Gunfight at the OK Corral
Rebound
Bing Bang Boing

Imagine the lawsuits today, the choking hazards. What did we know back then. Our biggest problem was picking up after ourselves and trying to avoid having some of the ball bearings being vacuumed up by the vacuum cleaner. ..... and now back to our story, already in progress .....

Crossfire

Crossfire was the first of the two toys to come out, probably around 1970 or 1971. This game was HUGE and it was HEAVY. The board was about 4 feet long. The bottom of the playing surface was like the same material as "pegboard" it made of, and that made this game heavy.

This was a "hockey like" game. You had a puck (also made from a ball bearing) which was placed in the center of the playing surface. Each of the 2 players had guns attached at the center end of the boards behind the "goals". The object was to shoot your ball bearings at the puck and try to knock it across the other goal.

While you were shooting your opponent was also shooting. You could also run out of ammo at a critical time as you had to manually load the chamber of the gun with the ball bearings, though it had a capacity of at least a half a dozen "bullets". Occasionally, a ball bearing or two would fly off the table onto the floor or carpet, awaiting to get vacuumed up, thus as time went on the amount of ammunition that the game had would start to dwindle.

Here is the game in "action".

Gunfight at O.K. Corral

This was also a ball bearing shooting game. Instead of shooting at a puck however, you would shoot at your opponent. Attached to the front of the "gun" was a plastic figurine of a gun fighter from the old west. The object was to hit your opponents figurine and make him "pop off" the gun, thus "killing" him.

Unlike crossfire, where the guns were fixed in one location and could only rotate, here the guns could also slide the entire length of the side of the board. Thus you could "hide" behind plastic cactus or rocks. You would need to "expose" yourself in order to fire a shot at your opponent.