You Are What You Were. Celebrate Retro Pop Culture At Retroland.
Jenga is a game that required steady hands and nerves of steel. Forget Operation, forget The Game of Jaws - these were child’s play by comparison. You were going to need some serious intestinal fortitude to make it through a game of Jenga, where one wrong move, one unintended twitch of the wrist would bring the game crashing down around you much to the delight of your nerve-rattled opponents.
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Anyone who has ever been a child – yes, that includes you – is no stranger to the terror of playing catch. Some hard substance stitched up in animal skin blazing toward your face. Never mind that in most cases the fear was easy to eventually overcome, it was no fun to face it the first time, especially with pre-adolescent motor skills. Enter the Koosh Ball...
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Lazer Tag was all the rage when it was introduced in 1986. It was the cops and robbers of the future, the ability to shoot light beams at each other and score points for direct hits. With a Starlyte gun, StarBelt, StarVest, and even a StarHelmet, players were well equipped to battle each other in 23rd century fashion - in playgrounds, backyards, or even better - in giant futuristic arenas, complete with space-age obstacles and concert light shows. If you were a kid in the late 80s, you certainly remember Lazer Tag and the extensive marketing campaign on television and in comic books that accompanied it.
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Perhaps the most foremost and beloved building blocks of all times, Lego is known the world over for their constructive and colorful bricks that can build most anything - from an airplane to an x-wing fighter, from an airport to a pirate ship to just about anything you can dream of. Today, we take a look at the history of the Lego company and their legacy of toys, video games and theme parks.
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They say that good things come in small packages, and in the world of Toys, perhaps none have ever been smaller than Micro Machines – those tiny vehicles that made Matchbox cars look like a giant movie prop by comparison. And in the eyes of kids throughout the 90s, Micro Machines were must-have toys, beloved by car collectors, young and old alike.
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Take a collection of robots, add some strange monsters to the mix and throw in a healthy helping of Kung Fu, and you have the attention of just about every red-blooded kid in existence. Just such a recipe of entertainment was offered up in the mega hit series of the 90s, a surreal offering known as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. And like any respectable robot show, the onslaught of toys would follow close behind, making the Power Rangers an overwhelming success of the decade.
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Let’s face it - most of us are never going to be filthy rich. Most of us are never going to wheel and deal and build a gigantic real estate empire filled with hotels, railroads and entire city blocks. And yet, just about every person in the civilized world has an inkling into what it might feel like for there are few among us who have never spent a few hours feeling like a big shot.
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Amusing small fries for over fifty years, Mr. Potato Head has been made from a variety of materials. But whether his stout stature was comprised of Styrofoam, plastic, or even the common solanum tuberosum (that's MISTER Solanum Tuberosum to you), this master of disguise has become more than just a toy: he's a movie star, a spokespud, and an American icon.
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Once you mastered the pogo stick and the Hoppity Hop, there was a new challenge on the horizon - a planetary-shaped projectile that could have you soaring towards the stars or, just as easily, dusting yourself off from an earthly collision with the unforgiving ground. It took some major balancing talent to propel yourself with the Pogo Ball, but if you possessed the right stuff, the sky was the limit.
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There isn’t a child of the 90s that doesn’t remember the pog craze that swept the nation. But while most might assume that the game was nothing more than a fad, dreamed up by advertising executives who wanted every kid to collect an assortment of advertisements and movie-tie ins, the history of these little disc is far more colorful and extensive than one might suspect.
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