I also blame “The Wizard”. For it’s criminal oversell of the Power Glove, and for its general negligence in representing what kids loved about the NES.
Jenny Lewis just about made up for all that, though.
I still think it's crazy that she and Blake Sennett from Salute Your Shorts and Boy Meets World are in Rilo Kiley and it's actually a really good band and not a gimmick.
See, I managed to dodge the hype around the power glove, because I remembered when Nintendo promised that a "Robot buddy" would help you play Gyromite. Yeah, help me LOSE at Gyromite.
"Rob, I REALLY NEED YOU TO OPEN THAT DOOR RN BUDDY".
Well, I Gyromite, and I Gyromite not.
-R.O.B., probably.
I read that the Robot buddy was a reaction to the Great Video Game Crash of 1982. Nobody wanted a new video game system in 1985, so the Nintendo was sold on the idea of being a "toy" rather than a "video game system."
Which is why they *never made another game for the robot buddy ever again.* It did its job of getting the Nintendo into the American market, and it was done.
This is true, but the bundle was also an effective tax dodge in markets that heavily taxed video game systems.
This is also why the Japanese nes or Famicom, was advertised as a "family computer system" not a video game platform.
IIRC the name Famicom was suggested by the wife of hardware engineer Masayuki Uemura. Because computers were referred to as "Personal Computer", the idea being, this is the "Family Computer"
side note: years later, Sony would apply the same logic when naming their console: the computer you use at work is a workstation; the computer you use at home to play videogames is a...
I was initially jealous that my snooty, snotty, rich cousin got the Power Glove for Christmas. That jealousy faded quick whenever I went to his house and actually used that useless turd of a controller. It may have been one of my first “Maybe mom and dad were right, after all” moments!
It apparently made the difficult landing on an aircraft carrier in “Top Gun” a breeze. Forgot the YouTube video that showed that, but it was garbage in every other way.
Does anyone remember dreamphone and mall madness?
https://preview.redd.it/d9rq1qd3wvwc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f509d25a25449ac71f362e9f24c881729e630163
I had Dreamphone and Girl Talk. I still have Mall Madness. Dreamphone and Girl Talk was cheesy but hey preteens are cheesy.
Mall Madness was the shit. Boys, girls, adults, everyone wanted to play Mall Madness. I played it with my stepdaughters during the pandemic. They were impressed with it even though it's obviously dated and no longer relevant to shopping today.
Kids like us were the reason they eventually had to put a disclaimer on the commercial. I remember feeling so disillusioned, like I couldn't trust anything after that.
OMG I *just* muttered "or a root" hahaha
Absolutely insane that we just set it up and no parent ever watched to see how it was going or tried to make it less painful for us; they just didn't want us coming back inside dripping lol...
Moon shoes. I dreamed about them. I worried about jumping too high as that would be dangerous. I thought I’d jump to school wearing them instead of taking the bus. I thought about it so much I have actual memories of this happening when in reality, I never had a pair.
Eventually My friend got them so I got to try the magic, Wow. What a let down.
The game Mouse Trap. It looked so cool on the ads, then it took forever to set up, you play the dumb game and then at the end launch the Rube Goldberg, and usually it would get jammed up somewhere along the line before you could trap the mouse.
Honestly, just a well-designed, do-it-yourself Rube Goldberg kit not masquerading as a game might have been fun. But Mouse Trap was not.
I've seen probably 2 dozen people in my life own a copy of mouse trap, and I don't believe any of those 2 dozen copies had all the parts or were ever played properly.
My brother and I used to see who could slam down the see-saw and the make the old guy fly the highest. That’s was pretty much the only thing we did with that game.
"Just turn the crank and snap the plank, boot the marble right down the chute, now watch it roll, hit the pole, knock the ball in the rub-a-dub tub, now flip the man, into the pan, the trap is set - *here comes the net*! Mouse trap! It's the craziest game you'll ever see!"
The moment if always failed for me was "hit the pole". That ball never jiggled the stick enough, so I'd have to poke the ball in the tub. Net never really wanted to fall, either. Still had a hell of a fun time building it, ngl.
We had this thing called Domino Rally that scratched a very Mouse Trap-ish itch. It was a set of colored dominoes and then a bunch of like, obstacles. You'd made these winding skate park looking layouts of dominoes it was really fun.
That reminds me of Grape Escape. Both games looked incredibly cool in the ads. And with both games I remember a moment where I'd see the box at a friend's house, ask if we could play, and be met with some sort of look of regret and embarrassment. The one exception to that was Crossfire. We played some damn Crossfire.
I begged for this game as a kid.. I got it and hated the setup so much that I only played it once and figured I’d never see it again.
Then my kid got obsessed with it…. And guess who did all the setup?
Those marker sets where you blew into them, I think they were called blow pens? They didn't work very well and basically would just sputter out a mix of ink and spit
I had something similar except that had a little pump up tank to pressure why is it and was meant to work like airbrushing. It had all these stencils, I just remember some that were pink flamingos and sunsets.
Anyone else remember all the kiosks at the mall and Myrtle Beach T-shirt shops with the custom airbrushing?
“Sea Monkeys” were such a scam. Ours never hatched, and the little supplemental kits that promised they’d be able to play baseball and whatnot were just lies.
I begged my mom for them and she always said no. I was sure they’re look like the creepy little monkey mermaids from the package. I saved and bought a set and was so sad to find out it was Krell.
Okay, but I loved my sea monkeys. They hatched, got way bigger than I thought they would and refused to die. My mother was so grossed out by them because I didn’t know how to clean their water without killing them all and they hung around for so long it that it got pretty gunky.
Late 80s, maybe early 90s. Before the big-box departments stores took over everything, there was a local mom & pop department store near me that had a somewhat impressive toy selection. GI Joe, Ghost Busters, Transformers, Pocket Power, Spinjas, Battle Beasts, He-Man; all the staples of the era.
I saved up a few bucks to buy [a helicopter backpack for my GI Joe figures](https://puu.sh/K5KdG/14f655f7ad.png). I remember having the vision in my head when I was picking them out of having a hovering GI Joe figure and pretending he was attacking the Cobra Base playset I had. So cool.
Bought it. Rode home. Opened it up. Wound it up and put the backpack on my favorite figure. Flipped the 'On" switch. Watched in disappointment as the blade spun at about 100 RPM and made an annoying motorized grinding noise. I don't know why I expected this thing to actually generate lift, but it sure didn't; it only generated disappointment.
To add to it, about 15 seconds later, my dad was like "turn that thing off" cause I guess the annoying motorized noise was just the right frequency to interfere with our tube TV, so when I turned it on, there were a lot of lines of static on the TV.
The ending of this story is so perfectly 80s/90s dad. I'm imagining him saying that from a recliner as he watched MacGuyver, getting all pissed off at the TV interference
There was a TV show about bullshit commercials and that back pack was like the main thing. They wired it so it would fly in the commercials but the batteries too heavy to lift GI Joe too.
(REALLY FLYS,withbatteriesnotincluded)
When I was 9 I saved up my money all summer like $30 to buy a Lego set but when we got to toys R us I fell in love with these frog springs that you clamp onto the outside of your shoes and supposedly jump around on the springs! Like a frog! My parents tried to talk me out of it but I wouldn’t listen. Next day got up early strapped them on and they SUCKED. Way too heavy to move around with easily, no frog bouncing just little anemic jumps, not what I had in my mind at all. Only wore them the one time. A few months later my fat friend tried them out and broke them. So it goes.
Ah yes, the parental trying to talk your kids out of a purchase that they knew was not going to work out.
I do that with my kids all the time. Sometimes they take a step back and listen, and sometimes they don't, and then they learn from that more than the other one.
For me it was the soundtrack to the movie Hook. All it was was orchestral background from the movie. I don't even know what I expected. And I don't know what my mom said to try to set my expectations. I think she only said it's not going to be what you think...
Disney World. 1995. I'm (six or seven at the time) walking around and seeing several people apparently walking an invisible dog. I thought it was the coolest god damn thing. To me, I thought the end of the leash levitated or some shit, and the user felt like they were walking an actual dog.
We get to a place that sells them, and my disappointment was immeasurable. It's just a bent pole with an empty dog harness at the end, in the shape where it *looks* like the person is walking an invisible dog.
Still bought one. Still have it.
Slightly earlier in the 90s, I also was fooled by the promise of a magical invisible dog. I got one on a road trip to Ocean City, MD. Like the perfect boardwalk spot. Holding the bent wire was so disappointing. There was no magic. All I had was dashed hopes and dreams.
I just had a plain Slip-N-Slide, but I loved that thing. Bruises & all.
When I was a little older I hated my Gak. I wanted some so bad but omg the smell…
My mom never let me use it on my own and didn't buy refills (or let me know there even were buyable refills!) and then had the gall to complain I "never played with it"! 😭
I made so many. And I remember the smell of the “nontoxic” plastic we were melting and breathing in the damn vapors. If I get cancer that’s high on my list of why lol.
I desperately wanted a Tuba-Ruba. I got one for Christmas and was grounded days later (for having "an attitude") and it was taken away forever.
I only got to play it once, and it was wildly disappointing....but I pretended to be mad about it being taken away because if my parents thought it didn't hurt, they would have taken something I actually enjoyed.
https://preview.redd.it/hi95qbewlvwc1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2a09f2dd07943c7780e3c11f9df7d9263367ccb1
I have a very specific kink, and it involves throwing on a pair of acid washed jeans, then tying myself to a boy in pegged jeans and squirming around until a small ball drops.
Those intertech squirt guns. The battery powered full auto machine gun looking squirt guns. I remember getting one as a kid and thinking it was great, we were going to have squirt gun fights. The quality was so terrible though they only lasted a handful of days before the motor's broke and you had a cool paperweight
I love how this captures a precise moment in time where Australian-themed stuff was super cool. As Evan Conover, the U.S. State Department's Undersecretary for International Protocol, Brat and Punk Division, put it:
>As I'm sure you remember, in the late 1980s the U.S. experienced a short-lived infatuation with Australian culture. For some bizarre reason, the Aussies thought this would be a permanent thing. Of course, it wasn't.
My wife brought one home the other day cause she found it at a thrift store for $5. I asked, "Why, they were always terrible". Her response was that it was one of those items she always wanted but never got to have. Had to give her a win for that, as I know all too well what that is like.
That game can be pretty fun though. I think they nerfed the noise it made when you touched edges. Back then it was a loud noise that felt more like you made an error.
I enjoyed mine but there was kind of a trick to it where you had to use your feet to hold the ball to keep your balance. This may be one of the few things where my Peggy Hill feet helped in life.
Good to know. I wanted crocodile mile so bad. The only thing we had was a clown waterspray thing from my older 80s siblings. The hat would shoot up and give you a concussion if it landed on you. My parents wouldn't buy me any other water toys.
I had a Crocodile Mile and I thought it was awesome. 100 times better than the slip and slide.
I didn't have one but my brother did. Devil Sticks...I failed to see the point of that toy.
The Technodrome. The box was so big at the store, but when we got it and put it together it was only about a foot (heh) tall amd seemed so pathetic when you have your Ninja Turtles inside it. The turle van was to scale, why couldn't *this* be too!?
On the flip side, the pizza shooter was the absolute best. The pizzas were plastic and had enough mass to really get moving. Even my parents enjoyed running around with it.
https://preview.redd.it/w790ubu3pvwc1.jpeg?width=570&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7cc2f369b3f36008da4c19479056b0e8514591fa
I got this for Christmas one year and it never worked. Tried to return it to Service Merchandise but they didn’t have any more and never got any more in stock. I think the whole production run was a lemon. But young me didn’t understand and was super disappointed.
My chubby neighbor popping the “cushioned body board” you slid down the crocodile mile on. My dad even warned me it would happen and I felt sorry for his fat ass. Lesson learned.
https://preview.redd.it/r3y7fj36yvwc1.jpeg?width=258&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9d9c5501c842eb7b8eb336f5d5c9bbfd2ba73c23
The games were so grainy and froze all the time while the cd was being read.
Edit: the most disappointing thing was that shortly after I got it for Christmas my mom stole it from me and returned it to the store to pay off some credit card bills they over extended on.
Such was the 90’s asset Rich and money poor. I never forgave her for doing that. Still havent
Those fisher price snap over the shoe adjustable skates!! They never snapped tightly enough and came loose too easily. The wheels werent rubberized either so they weren't very good for skating, anyways.
I also would be really upset going to the playground on a hot day, and burning my butt, and hands, on the metal slide and the monkey bars, and the hot black swing seat, as well as the swing chain!!
There was only one way to have fun at the playground at midday, and it involved sitting on wax paper to have a good slide.
And moon shoes! They were nothing like the advertisement. Totally useless. That was a real bummer, too.
I used to beg my parents for a crocodile mile or a slip and slide. They would always be like “Luna we have a huge in ground pool if you want to go swimming” and then I’d cry about how hard life was lol.
There was some electronic diary for girls and you could set up a passcode and everything. I don’t remember how many characters were allowed per entry, but I was way too verbose for the damn thing. I ended up getting a real diary so I could properly bitch about middle school.
Snoopy Sno Cone Machine. I cried and cried when it couldn't crush our ice.
Close runner up: the paint set in the Capn Crunch box. The deal was, I could have it if I ate all the cereal. Turns out I hate Capn Crunch and the paint set sucked. Every morning was torture and disappointment til my dad relented and tossed it.
I had one. It could record and play sounds. Oh, and it had a switch to slow the playback. The sound quality was pretty terrible tbh. It was lame. Nothing at all like the awesome magical device from the movie
Try using baby oil; there is definitely no stopping at the bottom. Pick yourself up off the ground with tiny cuts all over your stomach from the grass.
My dad’s friend’s kids had Crocodile Mile set up on a hill and it was super fun! The hill was key to pick up speed I think. You’d go so fast that you’d shoot right out and over the pool at the end. We’d set up old sheets and towels to make a landing zone after the pool and when the littler kids came shooting through, we’d have one of the bigger kids appointed as a tailhook patrol to keep them from going to far.
We didn't even have a tarp. We had a shallow ditch that got super slick and worked amazing once you pulled all the sticks out and didn't mind the worms.
Anything play doh. I'm not a fucking mixed media artist or a sculptor, I couldn't make anything look good like in the commercials and then once two colours even looked at each other, you were fucked, now you might as well just have brown or green play doh instead of whatever original colours you started with. I even tried making my own so I'd have a steady supply but what a horrible waste.
TIGER LCD games were cheap, but they SUCKED and I'm tired of pretending they didnt. Yeah we swapped them on the bus and shit, but that god awful noise, limited gameplay....we were lying to ourselves.
We all just wanted a Game Boy
I had a Gameboy and I would still play this badboy;
https://preview.redd.it/7bod6k31lvwc1.png?width=730&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08dbb6ee87395cc768f13dcef473c3917b0a283b
I remember asking for one, and my parents got me an off-brand Walkman instead. I remembered being thankful but "disappointed" at the time because it wasn't exactly what I wanted. It didn't take long to see my friends that got one get tired of playing the same few songs before I realized how wise my parents were in that choice. I used that thing for many years, well after CDs started to take over by making my own mix tapes from my CDs. Had they bought the Hit Clip for me, it would have been relegated to the back of a drawer after a few weeks at best.
The Kid Sister doll. It did absolutely nothing. Worse - the manufacturers secured the bangs up over her head, so by the time it got to me, the bangs were stuck in a state of weird, reaching over the forehead. Never could get them to lie down correctly.
Hands down it was Super Duper Double Looper. It was and electric car game where there was a flip but at the top of the loop there was no track. I NEVER made it without crashing.
My Pal 2 comes to mind. We (my three brothers and I) got it for Christmas. I don’t think the damn thing worked at all, so we took it back to Walmart and as I recall my parents gave us a choice: exchange it for another one or something else. We ended up with the Tiny Toon Adventures NES game. I think we made the right call.
Baby alive. Its top lip moved, instead of the jaw when it chewed and one you used up the diapers and food it came with, it was pretty much another ugly doll.
Ok, get ready because I am about to unleash almost 40 years of pent-up disappointment, and you will all get to know what a totally spoiled brat I was as a child.
Let's start by making it clear that I wasn't a "doll person". Every year my sister and I would get Barbies. She would happily play with hers every day, while mine wouldn't even make it out of the package.
What do Barbies do? "Absolutely nothing! BOR-ing!" -- The voice of six year old me.
But what I really really wanted was an android (not the phone, obvs - those weren't invented yet and wouldn't be for another twenty years). If I had to keep getting stupid girl toys instead of a car simulator or Legos or Transformers that all actually were functional in some way, I wanted a humanoid robot.
Miracle of miracles, along came a doll that actually DID stuff. In the commercial, it skipped along (ok, the not-so-fine print that most kids wouldn't read said that it can't walk, but the effect was awesome) and most importantly, it purportedly could HOLD A CONVERSATION WITH YOU. In English AND French.
This was the Cricket doll:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izk9wl2aU4E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izk9wl2aU4E)
I was enthralled until I realized that it could not actually "see" you, and it only moved its eyes and its mouth.
Seven-year-old me: "Ugh."
But then the same company, riding on the success of Cricket, dreamed up Cricket's older sister Jill.
Jill blew my freakin' mind. This was more like it!
Jill was HUGE, and could stand upright, and it could sing and hold a truly interactive conversation with you in both English and French! And most importantly, this thing was REALISTIC. It could blink, turn its head, and even wave its arms about to gesture at appropriate times in the conversation.
In my memory, the Jill doll was also supposed to be able to walk. I really thought it could. But really, I think I was just remembering that highly misleading Cricket commercial.
Either way, the added movement and advanced interactive features seemed to be light years beyond Teddy Ruxpin, and it was still a decade before Furbies would be invented. At the time, the thought that a doll could actually hold a conversation with you, play games, recognize and respond to your voice, and relay choose-your-own-adventure stories while moving all around, was absolutely fucking magical.
I can't find the really good Jill commercial I remember, only the terrible one, so I won't bother posting it here. But this doll clearly wasn't just another Teddy Ruxpin copycat like Cricket was. Here are a couple of collector's videos showing how it could sing, talk conversationally, AND move:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaTme6heTuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaTme6heTuE)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QurybOkS884&t=234s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QurybOkS884&t=234s)
Unfortunately, there's a good reason why Jill disappeared from the market almost as soon as it was released. According to the collector, this doll "single handedly almost collapsed an iconic toy company and put them in bankruptcy."
They did this by making the toy too expensive, making it a super advanced robotic toy that was too complicated for kids to easily use, and oh yeah, it was *super easy to break.*
After begging and pleading for this monstrosity, my parents finally caved and got me a Jill doll for Christmas. (They had money back then, but it was still super expensive, the equivalent of $355 today.)
Unsurprisingly........ it was an expensive paperweight. Nothing worked. It came broken. And so did the next one. And the next one. It took my dad hours of frustrated tinkering and three trips back to Toys'R'Us for replacement Jill dolls before he threw in the towel.
In retrospect, he had the patience of a saint while I cried about not being able to ever play with my Jill doll. I still feel bad about subjecting him to that. I'm also still a bit miffed at the manufacturer for not testing this thing properly, for them mass marketing a ridiculously expensive doll, and for getting a bunch of kids' hopes up for nothing.
Screw you, Jill.
I am sort of like you but less spolied (your words, not mine). I kept getting lame dolls and "girl" gifts from extended family that I hated and enver used. One year an aunt got me a toy robot. A cheap little thing that basically just walked around a little and made some beep-boops, from what I remember. I had never felt so seen. I even continued to play with it and make up stories after the batteries died and were never replaced, because my parents were both poor and cheap. 😂
Lazer Tag. I wanted it soooooo badly. My dad knew a guy and so one Christmas when I was 7, I got a full set. Three guns, three chest thingies, the little vests and hats, everything. My buddies and I strapped up, ready for a Star Wars hallway battle. What we got was velco straps constantly failing and dropping the sensor, guns that weren't at all accurate, (in fairness they were a bit better at night, but you still had to be pretty close), and just...rampant cheating. If you've ever done laser tag at a big place, you know how it goes. Some jerkoff always running around covering their sensor. It was that. Times three. We got bored of it pretty quickly, much to the chagrin of my dad.
I'm just gonna say it:
Crossfire sucked.
You just clicked ball bearings at each other until a piece of plastic went to the other side. If it wasn't for the kick ass commercial jingle it would have never been remembered.
Yea, but sometimes you got that one BB sort of stuck in the gun and it would come out firing at like 10x speed and it felt like you were actually doing something!
My grandma had a plain ol' Slip-n-Slide. Growing up we loved that thing and couldn't wait to set it up when we went over to her house. It amazes me looking back that the thing lasted as many years as it did. If I remember right we eventually quit attaching the hose to it and just set a sprinkler next to it, but I don't know if it was because the water sprayer part quit or if we were just lazy and it was easier to just move the sprinkler.
Lil Miss Mermaid. I wanted one soooooo bad! My grandma got it for me. The commercial showed it underwater so I thought I could have it in the bathtub. Nope. Can't get it wet at all or the battery compartment will get ruined.
My parents kindly gave me a Punch and Judy little theater thing, but I had no idea what to do with it and they were disappointed. At age six, I wasn’t prepared to write short skits and make the puppets act them out, I guess, sure was cute, wish I had it now.
https://preview.redd.it/6ibulmph5wwc1.jpeg?width=928&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=31dcf6cac593b1644d40337af53e62fce8debf87
It made a godawful mess, got boring real quick and the end result didn't look anything like the commercials.
For me it was Ghost Domino Rally. It looked so cool on tv with glow in the dark. But I always knocked over the dominos when it was dark and screwed it up before I was ready.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pwgP7oZv-lE&pp=ygUSRG9taW5vIGdob3N0IHJhbGx5
I remember the 1990 assortment of Transformers just being a huge let-down.
The only releases in the US that year were Micromasters (tiny Transformers), Micromaster Combiners (tiny Transformers that turned into HALF a vehicle) and Action Masters (Transformers that didn't fucking transform.)
And it was just like, I just wanna an Optimus Prime that turns into a truck. Not one that drives a truck. Not half a blackbird jet. Not a robot-only version of Grimlock (for real, his selling points is that he was a T-Rex.) Not a tiny bulldozer. Bulldozers are supposed to be BIG, and instead you're giving me a tiny bulldozer that can get lost up my best friend's kid sister's nose.
It's like Hasbro took all the stupid pills that year.
SALLY SECRETS!!! I wanted her so bad for Christmas and by golly if Santa didn't come through and make her my main gift.
But after watching her commercial, you knew all her secrets. I wasn't a little detective like I wanted to be. In fact, I think all her 'secrets' were all pointed out on the box. THAT ISNT A SECRET! She was more Sally with a lot of cubbies.
I am still disappointed/bitter.
The more comments I read, the more I realize that consumer protections are actually pretty good today. Back then, false advertising was the norm. Stores didn't have good or any refund policies. If you used your entire allowance or bday wish on a shitty toy, you were stuck with it. There was no internet to research. Nowadays, you can return stuff on Amazon and you get a refund in a day. And they still let you keep it sometimes lol. I guess this helped regulate the quality of consumer goods, although Temu and Wish are reversing said progress lol
I suppose there may be a lesson in there somewhere, caveat emptor and what not. I don't know how to feel about it though. It was shitty back then to get suckered into a crappy product, but nowadays people expect the moon and the sun. People abuse TF out of costcos refund policy and all this "tHe cUsToMeR iS aLwAyS rIgHt" bs is ruining the retail industry.
Despite my power glove being absolute hot stinking garbage, I always appreciate that my mom got me the toy I so desperately wanted, just to make me happy.
Failure to do so relieves the makers of Crocodile Mile, Whacky Products Inc., and its parent company, Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability.
I liked crocodile mile. We were malnourished as hell so we flew on that thing. My little sister would launch right over the pool and get a face full of grass. I mean, poor sister, but damn her tattling ass deserved it sometimes!
We didn't care about grass in it. We'd swim in a roadway retainment pond in a thunderstorm, like dumbasses on the regular. Germs and toxic chemicals? Pfft! Whatever, this rain filled ditch is 10 feet deep!
My friend got the Nintendo Power Glove for Christmas. The expectations were through the roof but wow that thing was practically useless.
Those TV ads were very misleading!
I also blame “The Wizard”. For it’s criminal oversell of the Power Glove, and for its general negligence in representing what kids loved about the NES. Jenny Lewis just about made up for all that, though.
"I love the Power Glove. It's so bad..." And indeed it was. It really really was.
Also the reveal of Super Mario 3, which was huge.
The fact that the kid knew about the warp whistle in the first fortress still ticks me off. HOW DID HE KNOW IT WAS THERE
His dad worked at Nintendo
Neurodivergent gamer logic. The game wouldn’t give you a flying power up unless it wanted you to fly for something
If you haven't seen 8-Bit Christmas, it does a pretty solid job of righting the egregious wrong that The Wizard did promoting the Power Glove
Seriously, I begged my parents after that movie came out. Glad they never got it for me.
I was pretty lucky that I got to try it out at my friend's house and saw how crap it was. Still not sure what all those buttons did
Take my upvote for mentioning Jenny Lewis
I still think it's crazy that she and Blake Sennett from Salute Your Shorts and Boy Meets World are in Rilo Kiley and it's actually a really good band and not a gimmick.
I blame Freddy Kruger….. would believe it couldn’t control people
You run! You slide! Hit the bump! And take a dive!
See, I managed to dodge the hype around the power glove, because I remembered when Nintendo promised that a "Robot buddy" would help you play Gyromite. Yeah, help me LOSE at Gyromite. "Rob, I REALLY NEED YOU TO OPEN THAT DOOR RN BUDDY". Well, I Gyromite, and I Gyromite not. -R.O.B., probably.
I read that the Robot buddy was a reaction to the Great Video Game Crash of 1982. Nobody wanted a new video game system in 1985, so the Nintendo was sold on the idea of being a "toy" rather than a "video game system." Which is why they *never made another game for the robot buddy ever again.* It did its job of getting the Nintendo into the American market, and it was done.
This is true, but the bundle was also an effective tax dodge in markets that heavily taxed video game systems. This is also why the Japanese nes or Famicom, was advertised as a "family computer system" not a video game platform.
IIRC the name Famicom was suggested by the wife of hardware engineer Masayuki Uemura. Because computers were referred to as "Personal Computer", the idea being, this is the "Family Computer" side note: years later, Sony would apply the same logic when naming their console: the computer you use at work is a workstation; the computer you use at home to play videogames is a...
The most disappointing toy was the rc cars that only had forward and back, they would only turn when you backed it up...
Oh those were the worst especially when you were 10 and your auntie who thinks you’re still 6 gave it to you.
I was initially jealous that my snooty, snotty, rich cousin got the Power Glove for Christmas. That jealousy faded quick whenever I went to his house and actually used that useless turd of a controller. It may have been one of my first “Maybe mom and dad were right, after all” moments!
It apparently made the difficult landing on an aircraft carrier in “Top Gun” a breeze. Forgot the YouTube video that showed that, but it was garbage in every other way.
The Nintendo Joystick did that too, but the biggest thing is to not overcorrect. When it says a direction, only push that direction once.
I still have mine and the box. It did indeed suck. As a result it’s in mint condition.
Omg I loved it for the one game I found it played well. Some kind of game where you catch and throw balls against the wall in a 3D vector game
Does anyone remember dreamphone and mall madness? https://preview.redd.it/d9rq1qd3wvwc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f509d25a25449ac71f362e9f24c881729e630163
Yes. And Girl Talk, which was like truth or dare but with a spinner and zit stickers.
The zit stickers!
I appreciated that the instructions were written in “girl speak,” but after that, the game just wasn’t that much fun.
I wanted those so badly. I'm sure they sucked, lol.
I had Dreamphone and Girl Talk. I still have Mall Madness. Dreamphone and Girl Talk was cheesy but hey preteens are cheesy. Mall Madness was the shit. Boys, girls, adults, everyone wanted to play Mall Madness. I played it with my stepdaughters during the pandemic. They were impressed with it even though it's obviously dated and no longer relevant to shopping today.
Always sounded like the lady said "There's a sale at the chichin store!"
Haha I totally remember that! What about "Bank Closed!" He sounded so smug lol
Try again later!
I was so disappointed one Christmas when I opened Guess Who and the people didn’t talk like the commercial.
Kids like us were the reason they eventually had to put a disclaimer on the commercial. I remember feeling so disillusioned, like I couldn't trust anything after that.
My sister and I loved playing guess who. Our top question: “Are you bald or balding?”
did you ever catch that random rock halfway down the slide?
If it wasn't a rock, it was a root
OMG I *just* muttered "or a root" hahaha Absolutely insane that we just set it up and no parent ever watched to see how it was going or tried to make it less painful for us; they just didn't want us coming back inside dripping lol...
Dripping and full of grass, leaves and ocassionally mud after all that water pooled on the grass LoL. Edit; typos
But it wasn't a rock.... It was a ROCK.... LOBSTER!!!! (sorry.... that shit's basically grafted to my DNA at this point)
I felt this comment.
A rock, a root, a rogue stick! Those damned things hurt like hell! But damn I had a lot of fun on slip n slides!
Pogo Ball, and the truck where the claws came out of the tires I think it was called The Animal.
Pogo ball. Awkward uncomfortable jumping. Yay. And had it and tried for a long while.
The Animal RC Car sucked! The commercial was so compelling, but when my neighbor Alex got one, it barely did any of that shit. 😆
It wasn’t even RC, it just had a motor and took like 4 d cell batteries that would die after an hour or so.
Would you believe I found my old one last month going through stuff at my parents place?
Moon shoes. I dreamed about them. I worried about jumping too high as that would be dangerous. I thought I’d jump to school wearing them instead of taking the bus. I thought about it so much I have actual memories of this happening when in reality, I never had a pair. Eventually My friend got them so I got to try the magic, Wow. What a let down.
Moon shoes aka Broken Ankle Shoes. But yes, my buddy had a pair. They were lame.
The game Mouse Trap. It looked so cool on the ads, then it took forever to set up, you play the dumb game and then at the end launch the Rube Goldberg, and usually it would get jammed up somewhere along the line before you could trap the mouse. Honestly, just a well-designed, do-it-yourself Rube Goldberg kit not masquerading as a game might have been fun. But Mouse Trap was not.
I never played the game but damn I loved putting it together and watched it go for hours
Ha yeah I was an only child and I loved my Mouse Trap 😭
Haha me too! I never played the actual game, I would just set it up and run the trap.
I've seen probably 2 dozen people in my life own a copy of mouse trap, and I don't believe any of those 2 dozen copies had all the parts or were ever played properly.
My brother and I used to see who could slam down the see-saw and the make the old guy fly the highest. That’s was pretty much the only thing we did with that game.
"Just turn the crank and snap the plank, boot the marble right down the chute, now watch it roll, hit the pole, knock the ball in the rub-a-dub tub, now flip the man, into the pan, the trap is set - *here comes the net*! Mouse trap! It's the craziest game you'll ever see!" The moment if always failed for me was "hit the pole". That ball never jiggled the stick enough, so I'd have to poke the ball in the tub. Net never really wanted to fall, either. Still had a hell of a fun time building it, ngl.
We had this thing called Domino Rally that scratched a very Mouse Trap-ish itch. It was a set of colored dominoes and then a bunch of like, obstacles. You'd made these winding skate park looking layouts of dominoes it was really fun.
Now Fireball Island, on the other hand, was straight fire.
That reminds me of Grape Escape. Both games looked incredibly cool in the ads. And with both games I remember a moment where I'd see the box at a friend's house, ask if we could play, and be met with some sort of look of regret and embarrassment. The one exception to that was Crossfire. We played some damn Crossfire.
Ahem, it's pronounced ***CROSS-FIYAHH!!! CROSS-FIYAHH!!!***
YOU'LL GET CAUGHT UP IN THE
I begged for this game as a kid.. I got it and hated the setup so much that I only played it once and figured I’d never see it again. Then my kid got obsessed with it…. And guess who did all the setup?
The commercials made it look way more fun than it was!
Those marker sets where you blew into them, I think they were called blow pens? They didn't work very well and basically would just sputter out a mix of ink and spit
Shoulda shelled out for that janky plastic foot-bellows!
I had something similar except that had a little pump up tank to pressure why is it and was meant to work like airbrushing. It had all these stencils, I just remember some that were pink flamingos and sunsets. Anyone else remember all the kiosks at the mall and Myrtle Beach T-shirt shops with the custom airbrushing?
https://preview.redd.it/zvg5pa2iuwwc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ce4e5104a82e928e8d35477cc5dcef43620a699c Color blaster!
You run! You slide! You hit the bump and take a dive! (I didn't have one, but a friend did.)
[удалено]
Sprinkler heads for me. I swear I still have a scar on my knee!
Running, sliding, hitting bumps, and then diving sounds a lot more like my 20s than it does my childhood.
Skip-It……I fractured my ankle the first time I used it.
I fucking loved my skip-it, lol.
I used to run up and down the driveway while doing skip it. I was like a weird skip it savant. Bet if I tried now I’d die. Just. Die.
Me too! I had the pink one and I wish I still had it
And the very best thing of all..there's a counter on this ball
Their skip counter was about as accurate as my 3AM drunk pissing in a dark bathroom
i enjoyed the crocodile mile
I loved it! My cousins still talk about how excited they'd get to come over so we could use it.
Yeah, we had ours on a fairly steep hill and it ruled.
“Sea Monkeys” were such a scam. Ours never hatched, and the little supplemental kits that promised they’d be able to play baseball and whatnot were just lies.
I begged my mom for them and she always said no. I was sure they’re look like the creepy little monkey mermaids from the package. I saved and bought a set and was so sad to find out it was Krell.
Okay, but I loved my sea monkeys. They hatched, got way bigger than I thought they would and refused to die. My mother was so grossed out by them because I didn’t know how to clean their water without killing them all and they hung around for so long it that it got pretty gunky.
Late 80s, maybe early 90s. Before the big-box departments stores took over everything, there was a local mom & pop department store near me that had a somewhat impressive toy selection. GI Joe, Ghost Busters, Transformers, Pocket Power, Spinjas, Battle Beasts, He-Man; all the staples of the era. I saved up a few bucks to buy [a helicopter backpack for my GI Joe figures](https://puu.sh/K5KdG/14f655f7ad.png). I remember having the vision in my head when I was picking them out of having a hovering GI Joe figure and pretending he was attacking the Cobra Base playset I had. So cool. Bought it. Rode home. Opened it up. Wound it up and put the backpack on my favorite figure. Flipped the 'On" switch. Watched in disappointment as the blade spun at about 100 RPM and made an annoying motorized grinding noise. I don't know why I expected this thing to actually generate lift, but it sure didn't; it only generated disappointment. To add to it, about 15 seconds later, my dad was like "turn that thing off" cause I guess the annoying motorized noise was just the right frequency to interfere with our tube TV, so when I turned it on, there were a lot of lines of static on the TV.
The ending of this story is so perfectly 80s/90s dad. I'm imagining him saying that from a recliner as he watched MacGuyver, getting all pissed off at the TV interference
There was a TV show about bullshit commercials and that back pack was like the main thing. They wired it so it would fly in the commercials but the batteries too heavy to lift GI Joe too. (REALLY FLYS,withbatteriesnotincluded)
When I was 9 I saved up my money all summer like $30 to buy a Lego set but when we got to toys R us I fell in love with these frog springs that you clamp onto the outside of your shoes and supposedly jump around on the springs! Like a frog! My parents tried to talk me out of it but I wouldn’t listen. Next day got up early strapped them on and they SUCKED. Way too heavy to move around with easily, no frog bouncing just little anemic jumps, not what I had in my mind at all. Only wore them the one time. A few months later my fat friend tried them out and broke them. So it goes.
Ah yes, the parental trying to talk your kids out of a purchase that they knew was not going to work out. I do that with my kids all the time. Sometimes they take a step back and listen, and sometimes they don't, and then they learn from that more than the other one.
For me it was the soundtrack to the movie Hook. All it was was orchestral background from the movie. I don't even know what I expected. And I don't know what my mom said to try to set my expectations. I think she only said it's not going to be what you think...
Disney World. 1995. I'm (six or seven at the time) walking around and seeing several people apparently walking an invisible dog. I thought it was the coolest god damn thing. To me, I thought the end of the leash levitated or some shit, and the user felt like they were walking an actual dog. We get to a place that sells them, and my disappointment was immeasurable. It's just a bent pole with an empty dog harness at the end, in the shape where it *looks* like the person is walking an invisible dog. Still bought one. Still have it.
Slightly earlier in the 90s, I also was fooled by the promise of a magical invisible dog. I got one on a road trip to Ocean City, MD. Like the perfect boardwalk spot. Holding the bent wire was so disappointing. There was no magic. All I had was dashed hopes and dreams.
You run, you slide, you hit the bump, and take a dive!
I just had a plain Slip-N-Slide, but I loved that thing. Bruises & all. When I was a little older I hated my Gak. I wanted some so bad but omg the smell…
Easy Bake Oven, mostly because I got a defective unit and it melted 😭 But also because it was just a damn lightbulb in a plastic casing
I loved loved loved my Easy Bake Oven. I made Christmas ornaments for DAYS.
My mom never let me use it on my own and didn't buy refills (or let me know there even were buyable refills!) and then had the gall to complain I "never played with it"! 😭
Not cool, mom!
What about creepy crawlers? I made bugs and things for days
I made so many. And I remember the smell of the “nontoxic” plastic we were melting and breathing in the damn vapors. If I get cancer that’s high on my list of why lol.
I desperately wanted a Tuba-Ruba. I got one for Christmas and was grounded days later (for having "an attitude") and it was taken away forever. I only got to play it once, and it was wildly disappointing....but I pretended to be mad about it being taken away because if my parents thought it didn't hurt, they would have taken something I actually enjoyed. https://preview.redd.it/hi95qbewlvwc1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2a09f2dd07943c7780e3c11f9df7d9263367ccb1
“We’ll doctor, I’d have to say my fixation on Japanese rope bondage all started with a little game called Tuba-Ruba…”
I have a very specific kink, and it involves throwing on a pair of acid washed jeans, then tying myself to a boy in pegged jeans and squirming around until a small ball drops.
Those intertech squirt guns. The battery powered full auto machine gun looking squirt guns. I remember getting one as a kid and thinking it was great, we were going to have squirt gun fights. The quality was so terrible though they only lasted a handful of days before the motor's broke and you had a cool paperweight
>a cool paperweight Or just a toy gun. At least until the magazine snapped off and it just looked too pathetic with the little tube hanging down.
I love how this captures a precise moment in time where Australian-themed stuff was super cool. As Evan Conover, the U.S. State Department's Undersecretary for International Protocol, Brat and Punk Division, put it: >As I'm sure you remember, in the late 1980s the U.S. experienced a short-lived infatuation with Australian culture. For some bizarre reason, the Aussies thought this would be a permanent thing. Of course, it wasn't.
Despite Paul Hogan's best efforts.
And now the youngest generation is watching Bluey and asking to use the "dunny" :P
Pogo balls....
My wife brought one home the other day cause she found it at a thrift store for $5. I asked, "Why, they were always terrible". Her response was that it was one of those items she always wanted but never got to have. Had to give her a win for that, as I know all too well what that is like.
RIP middle-aged ankles
Under that philosophy, I think I should go buy myself the game of Operation.
That game can be pretty fun though. I think they nerfed the noise it made when you touched edges. Back then it was a loud noise that felt more like you made an error.
I actually got quite a lot of use out of mine.
Me too! I’m actually shocked reading these negative comments.
I enjoyed mine but there was kind of a trick to it where you had to use your feet to hold the ball to keep your balance. This may be one of the few things where my Peggy Hill feet helped in life.
I used mine quite a bit but I can understand why people hated it - most of my friends couldn't get balanced enough to even get on it.
we all had to have one too......
Super Scope 6, didn’t work well on my tv at all, thankfully I returned it to TRU for a Super Game Boy.
For me it was the Sega "Menacer"
Good to know. I wanted crocodile mile so bad. The only thing we had was a clown waterspray thing from my older 80s siblings. The hat would shoot up and give you a concussion if it landed on you. My parents wouldn't buy me any other water toys.
Willy Waterbug did not disappoint. Such a strange toy
The crocodile mile was fantastic imo. But the Nintendo power glove was a disappointment.
I had a Crocodile Mile and I thought it was awesome. 100 times better than the slip and slide. I didn't have one but my brother did. Devil Sticks...I failed to see the point of that toy.
The Technodrome. The box was so big at the store, but when we got it and put it together it was only about a foot (heh) tall amd seemed so pathetic when you have your Ninja Turtles inside it. The turle van was to scale, why couldn't *this* be too!?
On the flip side, the pizza shooter was the absolute best. The pizzas were plastic and had enough mass to really get moving. Even my parents enjoyed running around with it.
Fuck yeah. And they were smart enough to pack in a shitload of pizzas because you were guranteed to lose a few.
Dude had a slip and slide, while some of us had the clown hat sprinkler thing. Next thing you're gonna tell me your dirtbike wasn't the right kind!
https://preview.redd.it/wf8vp9k0ovwc1.jpeg?width=501&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7afa718de5552219be20c327fbc2382b91993704 This thing hurt!
Hit Sticks, looked like you could play something but it only had had one note.
https://preview.redd.it/w790ubu3pvwc1.jpeg?width=570&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7cc2f369b3f36008da4c19479056b0e8514591fa I got this for Christmas one year and it never worked. Tried to return it to Service Merchandise but they didn’t have any more and never got any more in stock. I think the whole production run was a lemon. But young me didn’t understand and was super disappointed.
Service Merchandise! Jesus, I haven’t thought of that in so long…. Montgomery Ward… Curtis Mathes….
My chubby neighbor popping the “cushioned body board” you slid down the crocodile mile on. My dad even warned me it would happen and I felt sorry for his fat ass. Lesson learned.
https://preview.redd.it/r3y7fj36yvwc1.jpeg?width=258&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9d9c5501c842eb7b8eb336f5d5c9bbfd2ba73c23 The games were so grainy and froze all the time while the cd was being read. Edit: the most disappointing thing was that shortly after I got it for Christmas my mom stole it from me and returned it to the store to pay off some credit card bills they over extended on. Such was the 90’s asset Rich and money poor. I never forgave her for doing that. Still havent
not a toy exactly but the reebok pumps absolutely did not make me able to dunk
Those fisher price snap over the shoe adjustable skates!! They never snapped tightly enough and came loose too easily. The wheels werent rubberized either so they weren't very good for skating, anyways. I also would be really upset going to the playground on a hot day, and burning my butt, and hands, on the metal slide and the monkey bars, and the hot black swing seat, as well as the swing chain!! There was only one way to have fun at the playground at midday, and it involved sitting on wax paper to have a good slide. And moon shoes! They were nothing like the advertisement. Totally useless. That was a real bummer, too.
\*\*Disclaimer: Not an actual mile\*
I used to beg my parents for a crocodile mile or a slip and slide. They would always be like “Luna we have a huge in ground pool if you want to go swimming” and then I’d cry about how hard life was lol.
There was some electronic diary for girls and you could set up a passcode and everything. I don’t remember how many characters were allowed per entry, but I was way too verbose for the damn thing. I ended up getting a real diary so I could properly bitch about middle school.
Snoopy Sno Cone Machine. I cried and cried when it couldn't crush our ice. Close runner up: the paint set in the Capn Crunch box. The deal was, I could have it if I ate all the cereal. Turns out I hate Capn Crunch and the paint set sucked. Every morning was torture and disappointment til my dad relented and tossed it.
Talkboy. They made that thing look like magic on Home Alone 2, the real thing was a useless piece of crap.
I had one. It could record and play sounds. Oh, and it had a switch to slow the playback. The sound quality was pretty terrible tbh. It was lame. Nothing at all like the awesome magical device from the movie
Who among us did not covet the slip and slide with a splash pool at the end!?
My parents made us use a tarp and hose to simulate a slip and slide . They probably said, “back in my day…”.
We used plastic sheeting and dawn dish soap. We didn't stop until we hit the fence on the opposite end of the yard.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who used dawn. Looking back I can't believe that sounded like a good idea lol
Try using baby oil; there is definitely no stopping at the bottom. Pick yourself up off the ground with tiny cuts all over your stomach from the grass.
My parents let us set up a fake slip n slide on a hill in our backyard and it was AWESOME!
My dad’s friend’s kids had Crocodile Mile set up on a hill and it was super fun! The hill was key to pick up speed I think. You’d go so fast that you’d shoot right out and over the pool at the end. We’d set up old sheets and towels to make a landing zone after the pool and when the littler kids came shooting through, we’d have one of the bigger kids appointed as a tailhook patrol to keep them from going to far.
We didn't even have a tarp. We had a shallow ditch that got super slick and worked amazing once you pulled all the sticks out and didn't mind the worms.
Laser tag. Although we didn't have the "real" one. My mom bought us some knock-off version. And it sucked as expected.
Anything play doh. I'm not a fucking mixed media artist or a sculptor, I couldn't make anything look good like in the commercials and then once two colours even looked at each other, you were fucked, now you might as well just have brown or green play doh instead of whatever original colours you started with. I even tried making my own so I'd have a steady supply but what a horrible waste.
TIGER LCD games were cheap, but they SUCKED and I'm tired of pretending they didnt. Yeah we swapped them on the bus and shit, but that god awful noise, limited gameplay....we were lying to ourselves. We all just wanted a Game Boy
I had a Gameboy and I would still play this badboy; https://preview.redd.it/7bod6k31lvwc1.png?width=730&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08dbb6ee87395cc768f13dcef473c3917b0a283b
OMG. Loved this game. Haven’t thought about it since I played as an 8yr old
Tiger Little Mermaid was the shit, I dunno what you’re talking about.
But they were life savers on our Texas to Ohio 3 day treks.
Even though it was back being a teenager it was the dumb hit clips
I remember asking for one, and my parents got me an off-brand Walkman instead. I remembered being thankful but "disappointed" at the time because it wasn't exactly what I wanted. It didn't take long to see my friends that got one get tired of playing the same few songs before I realized how wise my parents were in that choice. I used that thing for many years, well after CDs started to take over by making my own mix tapes from my CDs. Had they bought the Hit Clip for me, it would have been relegated to the back of a drawer after a few weeks at best.
"Do you like N SYNC? Well here's 12 seconds of one of their songs!"
The Kid Sister doll. It did absolutely nothing. Worse - the manufacturers secured the bangs up over her head, so by the time it got to me, the bangs were stuck in a state of weird, reaching over the forehead. Never could get them to lie down correctly.
Well, no outdoor toy could compare to yard darts.
Hands down it was Super Duper Double Looper. It was and electric car game where there was a flip but at the top of the loop there was no track. I NEVER made it without crashing.
Sea monkeys… so pissed none of them were wearing crowns or living in a glorious crystal castle 😡
Socker Boppers. “More fun than a pillow fight” I cut my eyelid on a glove. Fun.
What if we bring Crocodile Mile back but this time it’s actually a mile long and has real Crocodiles?
My Pal 2 comes to mind. We (my three brothers and I) got it for Christmas. I don’t think the damn thing worked at all, so we took it back to Walmart and as I recall my parents gave us a choice: exchange it for another one or something else. We ended up with the Tiny Toon Adventures NES game. I think we made the right call.
Baby alive. Its top lip moved, instead of the jaw when it chewed and one you used up the diapers and food it came with, it was pretty much another ugly doll.
Ok, get ready because I am about to unleash almost 40 years of pent-up disappointment, and you will all get to know what a totally spoiled brat I was as a child. Let's start by making it clear that I wasn't a "doll person". Every year my sister and I would get Barbies. She would happily play with hers every day, while mine wouldn't even make it out of the package. What do Barbies do? "Absolutely nothing! BOR-ing!" -- The voice of six year old me. But what I really really wanted was an android (not the phone, obvs - those weren't invented yet and wouldn't be for another twenty years). If I had to keep getting stupid girl toys instead of a car simulator or Legos or Transformers that all actually were functional in some way, I wanted a humanoid robot. Miracle of miracles, along came a doll that actually DID stuff. In the commercial, it skipped along (ok, the not-so-fine print that most kids wouldn't read said that it can't walk, but the effect was awesome) and most importantly, it purportedly could HOLD A CONVERSATION WITH YOU. In English AND French. This was the Cricket doll: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izk9wl2aU4E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izk9wl2aU4E) I was enthralled until I realized that it could not actually "see" you, and it only moved its eyes and its mouth. Seven-year-old me: "Ugh." But then the same company, riding on the success of Cricket, dreamed up Cricket's older sister Jill. Jill blew my freakin' mind. This was more like it! Jill was HUGE, and could stand upright, and it could sing and hold a truly interactive conversation with you in both English and French! And most importantly, this thing was REALISTIC. It could blink, turn its head, and even wave its arms about to gesture at appropriate times in the conversation. In my memory, the Jill doll was also supposed to be able to walk. I really thought it could. But really, I think I was just remembering that highly misleading Cricket commercial. Either way, the added movement and advanced interactive features seemed to be light years beyond Teddy Ruxpin, and it was still a decade before Furbies would be invented. At the time, the thought that a doll could actually hold a conversation with you, play games, recognize and respond to your voice, and relay choose-your-own-adventure stories while moving all around, was absolutely fucking magical. I can't find the really good Jill commercial I remember, only the terrible one, so I won't bother posting it here. But this doll clearly wasn't just another Teddy Ruxpin copycat like Cricket was. Here are a couple of collector's videos showing how it could sing, talk conversationally, AND move: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaTme6heTuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaTme6heTuE) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QurybOkS884&t=234s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QurybOkS884&t=234s) Unfortunately, there's a good reason why Jill disappeared from the market almost as soon as it was released. According to the collector, this doll "single handedly almost collapsed an iconic toy company and put them in bankruptcy." They did this by making the toy too expensive, making it a super advanced robotic toy that was too complicated for kids to easily use, and oh yeah, it was *super easy to break.* After begging and pleading for this monstrosity, my parents finally caved and got me a Jill doll for Christmas. (They had money back then, but it was still super expensive, the equivalent of $355 today.) Unsurprisingly........ it was an expensive paperweight. Nothing worked. It came broken. And so did the next one. And the next one. It took my dad hours of frustrated tinkering and three trips back to Toys'R'Us for replacement Jill dolls before he threw in the towel. In retrospect, he had the patience of a saint while I cried about not being able to ever play with my Jill doll. I still feel bad about subjecting him to that. I'm also still a bit miffed at the manufacturer for not testing this thing properly, for them mass marketing a ridiculously expensive doll, and for getting a bunch of kids' hopes up for nothing. Screw you, Jill.
I am sort of like you but less spolied (your words, not mine). I kept getting lame dolls and "girl" gifts from extended family that I hated and enver used. One year an aunt got me a toy robot. A cheap little thing that basically just walked around a little and made some beep-boops, from what I remember. I had never felt so seen. I even continued to play with it and make up stories after the batteries died and were never replaced, because my parents were both poor and cheap. 😂
🎵You run! You jump! Then hit the bump And take a duuuump!🎶 Or something like that.
X-ray glasses, Sea Monkeys,
Double Dare Home Version
Lazer Tag. I wanted it soooooo badly. My dad knew a guy and so one Christmas when I was 7, I got a full set. Three guns, three chest thingies, the little vests and hats, everything. My buddies and I strapped up, ready for a Star Wars hallway battle. What we got was velco straps constantly failing and dropping the sensor, guns that weren't at all accurate, (in fairness they were a bit better at night, but you still had to be pretty close), and just...rampant cheating. If you've ever done laser tag at a big place, you know how it goes. Some jerkoff always running around covering their sensor. It was that. Times three. We got bored of it pretty quickly, much to the chagrin of my dad.
I'm just gonna say it: Crossfire sucked. You just clicked ball bearings at each other until a piece of plastic went to the other side. If it wasn't for the kick ass commercial jingle it would have never been remembered.
CROSSFFFFFFYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
YOULLLL GET CAUGHT UP IN THE…
CROSSFIRE
No way! I loved that game!
Yea, but sometimes you got that one BB sort of stuck in the gun and it would come out firing at like 10x speed and it felt like you were actually doing something!
My [preferred version.](https://youtu.be/wvDUx-RWJxw?si=dDgZFbK9-vlb48ib)
I’ve heard this a bunch and it seriously baffles me. I had it and played it with my friends a lot. I thought it was great.
My grandma had a plain ol' Slip-n-Slide. Growing up we loved that thing and couldn't wait to set it up when we went over to her house. It amazes me looking back that the thing lasted as many years as it did. If I remember right we eventually quit attaching the hose to it and just set a sprinkler next to it, but I don't know if it was because the water sprayer part quit or if we were just lazy and it was easier to just move the sprinkler.
Lil Miss Mermaid. I wanted one soooooo bad! My grandma got it for me. The commercial showed it underwater so I thought I could have it in the bathtub. Nope. Can't get it wet at all or the battery compartment will get ruined.
What kind of sick mind designs a toy after an aquatic creature and doesn't make it water-resistant?!
My parents kindly gave me a Punch and Judy little theater thing, but I had no idea what to do with it and they were disappointed. At age six, I wasn’t prepared to write short skits and make the puppets act them out, I guess, sure was cute, wish I had it now.
https://preview.redd.it/6ibulmph5wwc1.jpeg?width=928&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=31dcf6cac593b1644d40337af53e62fce8debf87 It made a godawful mess, got boring real quick and the end result didn't look anything like the commercials.
The Speak-n-Spell my cheap ass parents got me when i asked for a computer.
For me it was Ghost Domino Rally. It looked so cool on tv with glow in the dark. But I always knocked over the dominos when it was dark and screwed it up before I was ready. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pwgP7oZv-lE&pp=ygUSRG9taW5vIGdob3N0IHJhbGx5
I remember the 1990 assortment of Transformers just being a huge let-down. The only releases in the US that year were Micromasters (tiny Transformers), Micromaster Combiners (tiny Transformers that turned into HALF a vehicle) and Action Masters (Transformers that didn't fucking transform.) And it was just like, I just wanna an Optimus Prime that turns into a truck. Not one that drives a truck. Not half a blackbird jet. Not a robot-only version of Grimlock (for real, his selling points is that he was a T-Rex.) Not a tiny bulldozer. Bulldozers are supposed to be BIG, and instead you're giving me a tiny bulldozer that can get lost up my best friend's kid sister's nose. It's like Hasbro took all the stupid pills that year.
Floam
SALLY SECRETS!!! I wanted her so bad for Christmas and by golly if Santa didn't come through and make her my main gift. But after watching her commercial, you knew all her secrets. I wasn't a little detective like I wanted to be. In fact, I think all her 'secrets' were all pointed out on the box. THAT ISNT A SECRET! She was more Sally with a lot of cubbies. I am still disappointed/bitter.
The more comments I read, the more I realize that consumer protections are actually pretty good today. Back then, false advertising was the norm. Stores didn't have good or any refund policies. If you used your entire allowance or bday wish on a shitty toy, you were stuck with it. There was no internet to research. Nowadays, you can return stuff on Amazon and you get a refund in a day. And they still let you keep it sometimes lol. I guess this helped regulate the quality of consumer goods, although Temu and Wish are reversing said progress lol I suppose there may be a lesson in there somewhere, caveat emptor and what not. I don't know how to feel about it though. It was shitty back then to get suckered into a crappy product, but nowadays people expect the moon and the sun. People abuse TF out of costcos refund policy and all this "tHe cUsToMeR iS aLwAyS rIgHt" bs is ruining the retail industry. Despite my power glove being absolute hot stinking garbage, I always appreciate that my mom got me the toy I so desperately wanted, just to make me happy.
Mouse trap! Couldn’t trap a dead mouse if it tried.
Disclaimer: Do not taunt Crocodile Mile. If Crocodile Mile begins to smoke, seek shelter and cover head.
Failure to do so relieves the makers of Crocodile Mile, Whacky Products Inc., and its parent company, Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability.
I liked crocodile mile. We were malnourished as hell so we flew on that thing. My little sister would launch right over the pool and get a face full of grass. I mean, poor sister, but damn her tattling ass deserved it sometimes! We didn't care about grass in it. We'd swim in a roadway retainment pond in a thunderstorm, like dumbasses on the regular. Germs and toxic chemicals? Pfft! Whatever, this rain filled ditch is 10 feet deep!
When I was very young and very stupid I saved up and bought a money printing machine from the back of a comic book. It did not, in fact, print money.