Tag Archives: Throwback Thursday

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Throwback Thursday: this 1986 Laser Tag commercial!

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I remember Laser Tag as an exciting but fairly brief blip in 1980’s pop culture.  A lot of the kids I knew got excited about these commercials, a lot of us asked earnestly for Laser Tag guns Christmas, and … none of us got them.  (Our parents seemed unanimous that they were too expensive.)

Ah, well.  The subsequent buzz around my neighborhood was that our parents were probably wise, anyway — we heard later that the guns hardly worked, making the product nowhere near as cool as the commercials depicted.  (I am linking below to Kevin Noonan’s Youtube Channel, by the way.)

And then the fad faded — all the hubbub around Laser Tag (and Photon, its cheaper competitor) just kinda went away.  It sort of makes sense.  Paintball was alive and well as an edgier, more subversive, and more exciting sport; I can’t imagine how these gaudy electronic products could compete with that.

The Wikipedia entry for Laser Tag had a couple of surprises for me.  For starters, the technology for the products’ infrared light guns and sensors was developed by the United States Army in the 1970’s — I guess it was an Ender’s Game-type scenario.  And the first game system using the technology was South Bend’s Star Trek Electronic Phaser Guns in 1979.  (Those toys were released in conjunction with the premiere of that year’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”)

Didn’t see that one coming.  I’ll bet those toys fetch a nice price among collectors.

Anyway, there was another Laser Tag commercial that everybody talked about back in the day … it depicted American and Russian teams competing in a dystopian-future tournament, in which the Statue of Liberty was the trophy.  It’s smile-inducing.  I couldn’t find a really decent copy of it to link to here, but you can find it on Youtube.

 

 

 

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Throwback Thursday: Wacky WallWalkers!!!

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Okay, the Apple Jacks commercial below is a pretty regrettable example of 1980’s cornball marketing buffoonery.  I’ll tell you what, though — I have fond memories of that wicked-cool glow-in-the-dark Wacky Wallwalker that came as the cereal box prize.  (I am linking her to the DJ Nurse Annabella Youtube channel, by the way.)

Had I gotten mine as a prize with Apple Jacks?  I guess.  I know my mom had returned from the store with these for me once or twice.  (They were the non-glowing variety, but they were still fun as hell.)  She only partly regretted her decision when it became apparent that they left vague streak marks on white walls.  When these cheap toys started losing their key adhesiveness, all you had to do was wash them with soap to make them sticky again.  That might have had something to do with it.

That definitive treasure trove of information, Wikipedia, informs me that Wacky Wallwalkers are made from “elastomer.”  And they raked in about 80 million dollars for the Japanese-American inventor who bought the rights to the toy around 1983 from their prior owner in Japan.

I swear I want to play with one of these right now.

 

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Throwback Thursday: this 1985 commercial for Alka Seltzer Plus!

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This commercial came up in a conversation today with a friend of mine. I’m honestly not sure why I remember it after 35 years. Part of it is the last guy interviewed in the 30-second ad, and his unusual sentence construction — it’s a linguistic idiosyncrasy I’ve occasionally heard in movies or on TV, but never in real life. It’s just gotta come from a regional dialect somewhere. (The man’s name was Linwood Workman, which unconsciously suggested to others throughout his life that he was a reliable man to hire, I’m sure.)

But I might remember this ad well just because it seemed so weird and campy to me at age 13, when it aired constantly. Ads aimed at my age group made products seem cool and exciting, or maybe just farcically zany. (Consider the Spuds MacKenzie ad campaign, for example.) Ads aimed at adults were strangely cornball stuff. What was the angle here? Were adults meant to trust these people because they were relatable or special? My town had only one professional fisherman (who, coincidentally, was also my science teacher, my part-time employer and a really cool guy. SHOUT OUT TO MR. TSCHIEMBER!) But were small-town New England fisherman especially trustworthy about which cold medicines should we buy? Why?

You could argue that this was a very effective ad, because I remember it after 35 years. You know what, though? I’ve never purchased Alka Seltzer Plus in my life. Maybe I’m just a cynic where fishermen are concerned.

 

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Throwback Thursday: this 1983 TV ad for “Stratego!”

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I barely remember this TV commercial for Milton Bradley’s “Stratego,” but I sure remember the game.  (Thanks to Youtube user Lokke for posting it online.)  When I was a kid, I used to think of it as “pre-chess” — the strategy game that kids played before they graduated to that paragon of all games — even for adults.  (I was quite the chess enthusiast when I was in gradeschool, which is odd, because I wasn’t exceptionally good at it.)

My skill at Stratego was similarly undistinguished, I guess.  I pretty consistently relied on the most obvious gambit … planting my “flag” piece in the corner and surrounding it by “bombs.”  (To keep my opponent guessing, I’d sometimes pull a switcheroo and plant my “flag” in the other corner.)

My older brother had been playing Stratego for longer than I had; it was his board game, after all.  So he regularly sent his “miners” and expendable pieces straight for my predictable strongholds to ultimately win the game.  (Come to think of it, the kid next door got wise to my standard gameplay pretty early on as well.)

But I still loved it.  Stratego was hella fun.  (Yes, I am back on the “hella” train.)  I remember being in my early 20’s and being delighted when it was mentioned on “The X-Files.”  It was in the Season 2 episode “Colony,” in which Fox Mulder’s long lost sister returns.  (Or does she?)  The first thing the putative sibling does when she she spots her brother is joke about Stratego.  That felt like a shout-out just for me.

 

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Throwback Thursday: this 1986 commercial for “Sorry!”

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I have some great memories of sipping ice pops and playing “Sorry!” with my best friend on his back patio after a long summer day.  (I believe it was licensed by Parker Brothers in the 1980’s, and not Hasbro.)  Not once did anyone ever chime in and say “sorry” during gameplay.  Because that would have been weird and stupid.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Rebound!”

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I’m pretty sure that my older brother got Ideal’s “Rebound” game when it first came out in the mid-1970’s; it wound up in my hands a few years down the line.  When I was in the first or second grade, I thought it was the coolest thing imaginable.

 

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Throwback Thursday: Milton Bradley’s Connect Four!

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I loved this game.  Just about the only drawback to it was that if two kids got reasonably proficient at Connect Four, they would somewhat consistently reach a draw every time they played.

If you glance at the comments section for the video (I’m linking here to panbiscuit’s Youtube channel), you can see that plenty of people still remember the “Pretty sneaky, Sis” line at the end.

Weird world — when I was a little kid in the late 1970’s, I totally had that kid’s haircut.

Hey — you can actually play an online version of Connect Four for free if you’ve got Adobe Flash.

 

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Throwback Thursday: this 1970’s Slinky commercial!

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Slinkys are still sold today — but I’ll always remember it as a staple of the 1970’s, when I was a toddler.  It was one of my favorite toys.

I remember occasionally needing help from an older sibling to get it to “walk” down the stairs, as it was intended to do.  (Again, I was never the brightest bulb in the socket.)  I also frequently got it so tangled up that it looked like one of those razored traps from the modern “Saw” films — and an adult had to fix that.  But it was always fun while it lasted.

There’s a pretty cute story about the toy’s origin right here at The National Museum of Play.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Sometimes you feel like a nut …”

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These ads for Mounds and Almond Joy where everywhere when I was a kid.  (I am linking here to the 80’scommercialsforever Youtube channel.)  This ad campaign was around for a long time too — it started with this earworm of a jingle in the 1970’s and lasted until at least the late 1990’s.

 

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Throwback Thursday: “Spuds MacKenzie” (1987)!

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This is just another strange ad campaign from the 1980’s — Spuds Mackenzie was the mascot for Bud Light.   People went nuts for the dog — the campaign spawned a ton of merchandising.  (People in the 80’s got worked up over the damnedest things.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess here that I myself owned a Spuds MacKenzie button at the close of the decade.  I wore it on my dark gray denim jacket — along with a bunch of other arbitrarily selected buttons that I thought made me look extremely cool.  (It was a late-80’s thing.)  Hell, I even wore that jacket-and-button ensemble during the first semester at Mary Washington College.

Weird world — Spuds was actually a female dog.  She was a rescue dog, and she was named “Honey Tree Evil Eye.”  (I feel certain there is an interesting story behind that.)  And Mothers Against Drunk Driving lobbied against the ad campaign as it allegedly targeted children.