Revenge of the Birthday Toy Pics - Early '80s edition!

[El Hombre Nuclear]

Okay, here's one last pair of birthday toy pics from the personal archives, this time fast forwarding a few years to the early '80s.

Pic 1 - From around 1982. The early '80s brought a slight shift in the youth zeitgeist. As Star Wars-esque space opera began to grow stale, an incursion of D&D-inspired fantasy/swords & sorcery films, cartoons and toys rose to replace it. The sharpest point of this spear was perhaps MOTU, which to paraphrase John Belushi's pirate captain, was a manly, manful encapsulation of sheer barbaric manliness. Did I mention that men were involved? Anyway, like most kids I rode this wave hard for a couple of years (Crystar, Blackstar, AD&D and a million clones) before the sheer weight of disappointingly crappy movies and cartoons, as well as advancing age, brought this fad to a dark end. But it was fun while it lasted, especially for a kid who was already reading stuff like Michael Moorcock and Stephen R. Donaldson, and who's favorite heavy metal band in the mid '80s was named Cirith Ungol (I'm not joking). So, BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL, etc. etc....

Pic 2 - 1981. Atari. Do I really need to say any more? Not actually a "toy" in the traditional sense, but perhaps the greatest plaything that our generation ever knew.
Playing a few rounds of Activision's "Fishing Derby" with my mother, who otherwise had no interest in video games, will always remain one of my fondest memories.

P.S. George Plimpton still sucks.

[nvmbrsdoom5]

Awesome pics man! I never got Grayskull, I did get into MOTU for the first year or so but then reached that "too old" phase for toys and never got a chance to have the castle. Thankfully I had younger cousins who did get it so I could play with their Greyskull, pretending that I was just being a cool older cousin haha. And Atari 2600 is still my favorite game system, I play those games still today.

[Hedji]

Great pics. Somehow, my family decided on Intellivision and never looked back. We tried to convince all my friends that the graphics and gameplay were better (which I still believe they were), but they could never get over the disc controller.

As for MOTU, I could never get over the body proportions, so I went with GI Joe as my Anti-Star Wars choice. Now, with Super7 doing MOTU figures in Star Wars style, my attention is peaked, because I think the characters themselves were great.

[Wee67]

Great stuff! Thanks for sharing. I think I may have that red sweater on pic#2

I was also "too old" for toys by the time MOTU hit the toy scenes, but I was right there for Atari. Game cartridges were the target of saving up whatever money I could come by. I can't tell how hours I wasted yelling at Pitfall. And it WAS the controls, not me, messing up.

[Werewolf]

Castle Grayskull!!! Awesome!

[toys2cool]

wow!! that's awesome.. that little knock off on the castle is awesome 2

[El Hombre Nuclear]

Great pics. Somehow, my family decided on Intellivision and never looked back. We tried to convince all my friends that the graphics and gameplay were better (which I still believe they were), but they could never get over the disc controller.

As for MOTU, I could never get over the body proportions, so I went with GI Joe as my Anti-Star Wars choice. Now, with Super7 doing MOTU figures in Star Wars style, my attention is peaked, because I think the characters themselves were great.

Yeah, all kidding about George Plimpton aside, the Intellivision was a great system. I've really come to appreciate it more over the years, and actually have one of those Intellivision Flashback consoles. My friend Joe kept his through our teen years, and I remember that they even came out with a few really good late-release games during the NES era, like Diner and Tower of Doom.

I also had an Apple II computer back then, which got nearly as much play as my Atari, and got a Colecovision when it hit the scene a couple of years later (I was blown away by the graphics on that Smurfs game, and needed the arcade-perfect version of Mr. Do!, which was one of my favorites at the time). The problem with that one is that it seemed really cheaply built. I remember my parents having to return and exhange it like three times before I finally had one that worked properly. I remember trying to con my mother into getting me an Odyssey 2 as well, but no dice.

I have to agree, the MOTU figure type was rather stiff and lacked play value, but the vast amount of weird knock-offs at the time made them fun to collect. The class of the fantasy figure wave was AD&D, no doubt. That line was just awesome. Towards the end of the era, I thought the Visionaries line was really cool, too. I was "too old" by then, but bought some anyway.