Newspaper circulars for toy stores are a tough thing to find, often thrown out immediately it’s a shame when you realize what a wonderful window into our world they truly are. Take this one for a store called “Hagensick’s Playroom” (great name) in Wisconsin, which features a veritable “who’s who” of hot items for the […]
Hasbro was pretty adept at marketing the G.I. Joe line to kids as evidenced by this 1974 newsletter sent to members of “The Adventure Team”. For a $1.50 you got all kinds of cool swag plus this newsletter, which was filled with stories and a pile of material lifted from the Hasbro catalog. Seeing this […]
After dominating Toy aisles with their Evel Knievel Stunt cycles for the majority of the 1970s Ideal toys needed to do something clever after Evel fell out of favour with the general population. The stunt cycle itself was still a great concept and in 1979 Ideal attempted to mix them with Monsters, thus giving birth […]
It’s hard to imagine with all the decapitated looking monstrosities currently at Toys R Us but was downright crazy of Kenner to make toys based on the R Rated Ridley Scott film “Alien’. It’s obvious that Kenner, high off the fumes from the model glue that is the Star Wars franchise decided to not let […]
Manglors were a pretty interesting concept from Ideal and one you remembered seeing, first, everybody in the line was a monster, which is cool in itself. Secondly, the concept was that you hatched the figures from their eggs and then you could stretch, squeeze and even rip the body parts off the figures and attach […]
After the Adventure Team closed up shop in 1976 and Superjoe said Goodbye in 1978, the G.I. Joe name reemerged in 1982, a good deal shorter but fueled by a renewed surge in patriotism. G.I. Joe was no longer a man but a team name, a covert group that protected the world, as we would […]
1978 saw the return of Mattel’s Pulsar the Ultimate Man od Adventure returned to I guess fight crime with his nondescript powers. This year he would be joined by his new foe Hypnos. While Pulsar sold well for a toy with no TV other than his TV commercials, things were starting to fall flat for […]
It’s hard to believe that toymakers thought the next merchandising blitz would come from a David Lynch film but that’s exactly what happened in 1984. Dune got the full treatment with colouring books, bed sheets and of course a selection of action figures produced by LJN. The movie wasn’t particularly kid (or for that matter […]
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, which means Ideal Toys was very fond of George Lucas when they hobbled together these spacey toys and rushed them off to market. Lucas in turn sued Ideal but lost because everything including the S.T.A.R (which stands for Space Travel And Reconnaissance Team) Team name had […]
In the mid-seventies, UK Toy Maker (and the inventor of Spiro Graph) Denys Fisher took a Japanese Toy called Henshin Cyborg which was an off shoot of Captain Action (and the father of the Micronauts) and made it a 9″ series of figures. The back story was told in a series of beautifully illustrated comics […]
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