Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
Cabbage Patch Kid #1: That was great, Colonel Casey, can we do it again?
Cabbage Patch Kid #2: Yeah, take us on another ride!
Cabbage Patch Kid #3: Yeah!
Colonel Casey: Sure, we’ll do it again.
So creepy. Yeah, I listened to most of it. So what?
There was also a TV movie called The Cabbage Patch Kids First Christmas that premiered in December of ’84. Lucky for all of us, it’s not available on the internets.
The happy kid has diverse tastes, and a sleeping bag (Cabbage Patch Kids for summer, Return of the Jedi for winter?) for every occasion. I think she’s wearing a Care Bears sweater.
Between ROTJ and the Garfield trash can is the Centipede (1983) board game. In a fascinating, sometimes clever, yet ultimately desperate attempt to compete with the new gaming paradigm, Milton Bradley released a number of board games based on popular (and not so popular) video games well into the ’90s, including Berserk and Zaxxon.
I don’t know what the C.A.R.P. box is. There’s a bird feeder kit in the trash can.
UPDATE: Thank you, Bradley Conrad, who figured out that C.A.R.P. is a Biotron clone (Cosmic Android Robot Probe) from the Inter-Changeables line. The Inter-Changeables were post-Mego and not technically Micronauts, although many of the molds are identical. Innerspace Online has the line being released around 1985, but I’m almost positive the photo above is from 1983. (Box images below are via Hake’s.) The title of this post has been updated to reflect Bradley’s great find.
(First image via eBay)
Dusty Abell—holy shirtless wonder, Batman!—sent in this beauty last week. He says:
Best guess would be December 25, 1977. Star Wars [toys] had yet to hit, otherwise I’m sure we’d be seeing the Falcon and Star Wars figures in the shot! Ideal’s Star Team came out immediately following the release of Star Wars and filled the gap until those toys hit the following year.
Toys seen include Mego’s Batman’s Wayne Foundation, The Amazing Spider-Car, Batcopter, and Batman and Spidey figures; Ideal’s Star Hawk and Zem 21 (from the S.T.A.R. Team line); Hasbro’s Super Joe Commander and the Super Joe Rocket Command Center (see both here); and the Tomland Star Raiders figure Yog (between Batman and Spidey).
Try not to be too envious of Dusty’s righteous haul, people. He grew up to be a talented artist who focuses on geek pop culture of the ’70s and ’80s—so he’s giving back to the community! See a couple of my favorite works below (click to enlarge), and then check out lots more at his DeviantArt gallery.
That’s Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer Playset under the Land of the Jawas Playset. Among the figures you can see the Hoth Stormtrooper, my third favorite ESB figure after the AT-AT Driver and Hoth Han. Hoth Luke is also there.
Two items I’d forgotten about are Star Snoopy Colorforms (1979) and Tomy’s Mr. Mouth (1976).
There were a couple of different versions of Mr. Mouth, one featuring a green frog as the centerpiece, the other featuring a dopey yellow guy. The dopey yellow guy is the one I remember, but I could only find a commercial for the frog version. The yellow figure was later repurposed as a Pac-Man bank, seen below via the 1982 Tomy catalog. I got Pocket Pac-Man as a stocking stuffer in ’81 or ’82, but I never did get Mr. Mouth.
I also had the Fisher-Price Play Family Fun Jet, seen at the far left of the original photo.
(Christmas morning photo via the Rebel Scum forums)
I interrupt my holiday programming to bring you the worst Spider-Man poster anybody has ever seen. It was given away during an early stamp book promotion—a year before the Value Stamps were introduced in 1974. Extremely rare, according to seller Marvel Museum, and also extremely hideous.
“Marvel Comics yearly reach an incredible 77% of all kids in the United States between 6 and 17.” I have to believe there’s some padding going on, but still, that’s a big number, and I don’t doubt it. Bringing a comic book to school would buy you a class full of friends for a day.
The Kenner Star Wars/The Empire Strikes Back stuff starts at 2:43. Brother and sister demo the Wipeout set at 4:04.
The mother of all Christmas morning Star Wars videos is here.
The Odyssey 2000 (1977) was the 7th iteration of the original Odyssey, the very first home video game console, designed by Ralph H. Baer. As many of you have heard, Baer passed away on December 5th. Pong, though much more popular, was essentially a knock-off of the Odyssey’s Tennis game, and so the history of home consoles begins with Baer, not Bushnell.
The owl calculator is The Little Professor, a “learning aid” that presents mathematical problems for the user to solve. There’s an emulator, if you want to give it a go.
The first photo comes from DudesLife and shows the brothers playing the first commercial home version of Pong, the Sears-exclusive “Tele-Games” Pong.
In the second photo, via Michael Schroeder, dad and son play what looks like Atari’s C-100 Pong, released in 1976. (Pat Schroeder, seen in the poster on the wall, was the first woman from Colorado to be elected to Congress.)
The shot below (source unknown) shows the Super Pong (C-140) box on a Christmas morning in ’76 or ’77. Super Pong featured four games, while the other versions played only one. Compare all the versions at Pong Story.
2 Warps to Neptune 