Friends, this news report from what I believe was a series entitled Today’s Business – gives us a glimpse at what was predicted to be the hot toys for the 1986 Holiday season. You will see the likes of the Castle Grayskull and Eternia playsets from Mattel’s Masters of the Universe toy line and even some ThunderCats toys from LJN. Although the focus of the report by Betsy Ashton is that kids in ’86 were going to be more impressed with the high tech toys that Worlds of Wonder, Playmates Toys, and Galoob were offering – focusing on two dolls in particular, Cricket and Baby Talk, as well as Lazer Tag.
There is a lot to love about these vintage TV reports – I’m definitely grateful that they are being saved and uploaded for us all to share. You might be interested to know that Allison-Venezio Preston has some stories to share about Cricket – she had previously written about the doll over on the Retroist – but perhaps we can convince her to write a new article about it?
Although the success of Lazer Tag might have ended up being rather short-lived, it is pretty awesome to hear from the Worlds of Wonder representative in that 1986 report, on how well the ‘Sport of the Future’ was selling at the time. For what it might be worth I can tell you that back in ’86 – I was most definitely pestering my Family for a Lazer Tag set. Dreaming about how awesome it would be to enter one of the futuristic stadiums as depicted in the TV commercials!
While we might not have had the pleasure of seeing Lazer Tag become the future sport that it was promised to be in the television commercials and comic book ads – I have to admit that there were a handful of games in the local park with friends that were quite epic. Although to be fair we never stepped up our game to include skateboards and quad bikes – I’m pretty sure that would have been frowned upon by the park staff.
+ There are no comments
Add yours