December 12, 1977- “Star Wars” is gone, but don’t think it’s forgotten. Though the movie closed out a 20-week run in Traverse City last week, sales of spinoff merchandise still are expected to run strong this Christmas gift-buying season. The “Star Wars” collector can startwith authorized editions of paperback books, comics, calendars and iron-on transfers […]
By 1980, Stretch Armstrong’s popularity had begun to decline, his roster of characters had dwindled down to two Gone were favorites such as Stretch Monster and Stretch Octopus, it was now just Stretch and his alien enemy X-Ray. Boxed Stretch X Ray courtesy of Bill Frost More Kenner Goodness:
Before becoming a true 70’s juggernaut with licensed lines like “Star Wars” and the “Six Million Dollar Man”, Kenner was more experimental with their action figure branding, often creating fun generic lines such as Steve Scout and Duke The Dog. Duke truly was an original concept, never had a toy line such as this been […]
In 1975, Kenner produced a doll that was the brain child of special effects artist/director/writer Alan Ormsby who directed the film “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” and authored the classic scolastic book Movie Monsters which probably spawned a legion of Monster kids by itself. Hugo was a great concept, a puppet version of Lon […]
Glamour Gals seemed to be Kenner trying to mix the popularity of the Star Wars format with the fashion doll. Even though I wasn’t in the demographic, I recall these being heavily TV advertised during “Battle of the Planets” reruns. I’m not sure how well they did however, I seem to recall seeing a massive […]
Another US series done in UK fromat from the pages of “Look In” weekly. I think Charlton had the rights to Bionic Woman stateside and I’ll blog about that sometime in the future. One of the things about Look In is that you get an idea of what was the hit feature in the book […]
Finally a bop bag that makes sense, I never understood trying to punch out the Hulk or Mr. Spock (what the hell did he ever do to anybody?) but I totally get wanting to hit a Jawa. They seems to be kind of annoying in the Star Wars universe, they dicker, sell shoddy merchandise, have […]
With the double whammy of Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman on each week, Kenner pulled out all the stops in 1977 in terms of product, with over 24 pages of products to choose from this is truly the spike in the Bionic Craze. It’s interesting to note that despite her show being action […]
In the late seventies, Kenner released a line of action figures based on the Western film “Butch and Sundance : The early Years” which was a commercial failure. Kenner had done such a nice job on the toys that they attempted to repackage the line as “The Real West” in 1980. The Real West would […]
It’s hard to imagine with all the decapitated looking McFarlane monstrosities currently at Toys R Us but it was downright crazy of Kenner to make toys based on the R Rated Ridely Scott film “Alien’. It’s obvious that Kenner, high off the fumes from the model glue that is the Star Wars franchise decided to […]
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