You Are What You Were. Celebrate Retro Pop Culture At Retroland.
The considerable plush toy market, for better or worse, tends to market their wares towards the female youngsters. One of the few exceptions was My Pet Monster, released in 1986, which aimed to pick up the slack in the boy's market. It didn't really matter though - kids of both genders couldn’t help but take a liking to this furry and fanged friend, simply because he was too cool to ignore.
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There once was a playing card company in Japan that decided to get their feet wet in the world of arcade games. One day, they introduced an addicting little video game about a plumber battling with an ape and within five years, the name Nintendo would become synonymous with home video game systems. Perhaps every family in America didn’t have a deck of Nintendo playing cards in their living room but millions would eventually have one of their Game Systems. And if you were a kid during this era, it was simply the only game to have. Let's take a look at the history of this iconic toy.
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Thankfully, most artists don’t have to draw their masterpiece in under a minute. For Pictionary players, however, artistic talent was only half the battle. The other half was having team members who could decipher your scribbles fast enough to guess what they were, making this 80s board game an instant hit among the masses.
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Each of us seems to have a number of scents stored within our brain, just waiting to unleash memories of the past the moment we catch a whiff. Whether it be a freshly cut lawn before a baseball game, an oven full of piping hot-cookies, or simply a can of colored wallpaper paste, these fragrances instantly return us to a better time, a simpler time. Wallpaper paste?
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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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It sounds like a story right out of Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and it probably contains more fiction than fact - but it’s still too good not to repeat for old time’s sake. In Burma, there lived a poor little shoeless girl named Pogo. Her bare feet made it too difficult to make her daily trek, along the muddy roads filled with jagged rocks, so she could pray at the local temple. Her father finally came upon a solution to her dilemma and fashioned a jumping stick so that she could propel herself over these various obstacles and strengthen her soul without sacrificing her soles. A worldly traveler named George Hansburg happened to witness this miraculous jumping stick in action during one of his trips and decided that the rest of the world could also benefit from Pogo’s jumping stick.
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You can’t really blame someone employed as an assembly line worker from letting their mind wander on occasion - thinking that there must be a better way to make a buck. Such was the case with a man named Mike Bowling. He couldn’t help but notice that Cabbage Patch Kids were about the hottest collectable ever to hit the market and decided that if people liked collecting dolls, maybe they would have an even bigger soft spot in their heart for man’s best friend. His curiosity led to a line of plush canine critters called Pound Puppies - and his little Rovers would rescue him from the auto assembly line forever.
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In the world of 70s kid-friendly transportation, there was the Big Wheel and the Green Machine, both of which relied on plenty of pedal-power to from here to there. In the decades that followed, kids expended a few less calories, thanks to the far more plush, battery-powered vehicles known as Power Wheels. The streets would never be the same.
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Few would argue that toys were far simpler back in the day. Build something colorful that made a lot of noise, and maybe had a few flickering lights, market it to a large audience, and sales were practically assured. And while Romper Stompers had no illumination to speak of, they sure made up for it by making the loudest, clompiest sound ever heard since horses started wearing metal shoes. And that was enough to etch them into the memories of millions of former kids who still fondly remember these simple toys. Let's take a look back.
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Few toys are as equally fascinating and frustrating as the Rubik's Cube. They lure the unsuspecting populace in with their bright colors and mysterious mechanical workings, never giving a hint of the addictive properties just waiting to be unleashed with a few simple twists and turns. Through much of the 80s, the world twisted and turned, their minds in overdrive as they tried to solve the complex computations that once again right the cube to its original form - an aligned form that some of us only saw on the first day we opened the package, then never again. Today, we take a look back at this iconic toy that the world worked so tirelessly to solve.
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