Tag Archives: Throwback Thursday

*Originally posted on Mike the Pod 05.01.2008.

Twenty years ago* was a pivotal point in the “male action” aisles (get your head out of the gutter) of toy stores. Hasbro’s venerable Transformers and G.I.Joe lines were still popular, but also beginning to feel the strain of their expanding lineups. In two short years, after infusing just about every conceivable gimmick, they would both be discontinued in the US. Micro Machines and a certain group of mutated sewer turtles were exacting their kudzu-like stranglehold of toy shelves, and it seemed like a new batch of hyperactive plastic-mongering cartoon shows hit the air every week. Street Sharks. The Fake Ghostbusters. Madballs. It was all a desperate cacophony designed to seek out the Next Big Kid Craze that would replicate the boon times of 1985, wallets flying from parents’ pockets like startled pigeons, compensation for all manner of arcane electronic injection-molded crap.

1988 was also the year that those of us who were young at that time learned that Nothing Lasts Forever. Children nowadays have the luxury of always seeing Star Wars figurines and Transformers on the toy shelves at Target, unless they’re sold out. In most cases, those toys have been available since the parents were kids. This was not the way things were in 1988. You could be wined and dined by a cool new toyline, read the comics and watch the cartoon, become a veritable wizard of the details of it, and then one day it would just be gone. And there sure as hell wasn’t an Internet to tell you why, or whether it would ever come back again. Anyone who loved “StarCom” as much as I did knows exactly what I’m speaking of.

But in 1988, no one had a clue of what was, inevitably, to come. Kenner themselves would be subsumed into Hasbro three years later. They went out more or less on top, with M.A.S.K. and many other beloved lines completed or underway by the end. Kenner’s plastic wasn’t always the greatest, and not every toy they made has stood the test of time, but twenty years ago, they were still bringing kids the ACTION. Luckily, I was young enough at the time to still rely on relatives willing to fund my expeditions into new and uncharted toys.

If you’re within this site’s recommended age group, hahayeahright, you may fondly recognize one of the logos on the cover above. I used to think that maybe the Silverhawks inhabited the same conceptual galaxy as the Thundercats and Tigersharks, but I was probably overthinking it. I won’t be covering Starting Lineup, not just because I don’t care for sports, but because looking at little plastic statues of ballplayers is legally the most boring thing ever. I would literally be breaking Internet law by posting it.

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