One of the best Christmas presents I ever got in my youth (aside from the original multi-tiered Death Star playset) was this beauteous vehicle, The Green Machine.
Like most kids of the 1970s, I mauled my Big Wheel jumping ramps and staging Big Wheel demolition derbys with the neighborhood kids I grew up with. The Green Machine was the more advanced level of rolling plastic thunder. You had to pump those legs longer and harder and work those gears as if you were being groomed for a professional life in Detroit at the Ford plant.
The Green Machine's specialty was offering young riders the most bitchin' spinouts legally permitted. I must've had the look in my eyes spotting this ad in a long-ago comic book since I didn't nag my folks for it that holiday season. I had put the bug in the big man's ear during the last year I visited Santa before the bomb of reality was dropped upon me.
Thanks to some Christmas magic (I still believe, nyeh), however, I rolled like a champ on my very own Green Machine and was a madman on those spinouts. The neighbors kindly gave me berth every time I came rumbling down the sidewalk in my Kiss Destroyer t-shirt and Keds sneakers pounding those pedals with 9-year-old fury, setting up a 90-plus degree rotation with wheels grinding harder than my snarling teeth.
Ahhh, nostalgia.
