Pirates of Dark Water
Pirates of Dark Water
This show was so good but the toys were so bad. I don’t even think the arms bent and I know the legs didn’t. What the hell is that about? Its an action figure, dudes, it should be able to participate in actions other than standing and perhaps pointing.
Power Lords
Power Lords
This is just raw, , marketing goodness. Toy company (Revell) creates a new action figure line. Company hires sci-fi writer to launch back story. Company launches comic book, board game, video game, jigsaw puzzle and coloring books based on toy. Company does not make a tv show, no one gives a shit about toy. Its unfortunate really because the toys were pretty decently made and lets be honest, James Cameron at least owned that guy up there right? Avatar? Anyone?
Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves
Robin Hood
These toys were awful. As in, couldn’t even sell them in the discount bin at K-Mart awful. Who wants a Kevin Costner toy? The figures were too small to interact with any other popular toy lines at the time and for a poor kid, that’s a fuckin deal breaker, the play sets and vehicles were shitty and flimsy and most of the figures looked like they just finished dancing over at the “Tool Box”.
I am opening with this game because of how truly awesome it was. The point of this game was to get into this kingdom, steal a treasure and a key card and get the hell out. The board itself was bright and colorful and really set your imagination to work and one of the coolest things about this game was that the board was divided into multiple parts with all different paths on them so you could connect them together in different ways. Also there were these bad ass whirl pools you had to jump through and to a young adventurous kid the only thing cooler than a whirl pool was quicksand. There were some traps and shit in the game but you were given tools to get by them.
At first I thought I would be violating my own rules of popularity by talking about what is without a doubt one of the greatest, zaniest boardgames of all time, Mouse Trap, but I was amazed to find out just how many people have never heard of Mouse Trap before. In this game you play as a mouse and have to navigate through what is essentially a large crazy mouse trap. The trap itself was a complex Rube Goldberg machine and in all honesty, if your hands were steady enough to set the final trap at the end you must have been a Zen master. This game was fun to set up, fun to play and even more fun to play drunk 20 years later.
No this isn’t the game Steve Irwin was playing with his kid a few years back, This is a game with a little motorized croc that chomps up and down. The players had to remove his bottom teeth with out having their extractor chewed on. It was a lot of fun as a kid and as an adult I stored an ashtray in his mouth.
As an adult geek this game gives me a chub just thinking about it. My neighbor had this game and we used to play it for hours and hours. The basics about this game are, each player has a territory and when it is that players turn the turn the tower toward them. The do shit, land on spaces and then press the matching button on the tower. The tower kind of acts like a Dungeon Master and tells you what happens. If you haven’t heard of this game its probably because it was only made for a year or two before the producers got sued for stealing the concept. If you have a working copy of this game put that shit on EBAY, it’ll put your kids through college.
My cousin had this game and he loved it, but I never really gave a shit. You picked cards moved around and then had to hit a button that might wake the dude in the sprig loaded bed. It was just kinda boring. Though now looking at it I wouldn’t mind having the little bed thing just to have it for weirdness sake.
This game was like battleship but with faces. You and your opponent both have a card with a face on it, then on your little rack there are all different faces. You ask a question about a feature like, “Do you have a mustache?” If the other player says no you put down all the cards with mustaches. Eventually you’ll only have a card left and you’ll win.
If you’re thinking this game looks like Clue and Mouse Trap rolled into one you would be 100% correct. My mom and I played this game a couple of times when I was a kid and I think it made an appearance at a few parties but it wasn’t a family favorite. It is surely worth checking out but I wouldn’t lose sleep if you’ve never played it. The breakdown is that you’re in a haunted house and the house is trying to kill you.
This game is one of three that I wrote this article for. When I was a kid this was possibly the best and coolest game I ever had. I freaking loved playing this game and everyone that came to my house knew it because I forced them to play with me. As a player you were an Indiana Jones type dude that had to progress along the board until you could climb up to the bridge. The bridge and the Idol it was connected to were motorized and would rumble back and forth. The goal was to get your guy to the idol and put a jewel in your back pack then get back across the bridge and to safety. Because of the movement your dude could fall off the bridge and you would lose the jewel. Just talking about it makes me want to order this shit on ebay. Any how, long after I lost most of the pieces i would you the bridge set up with my action figures.
This game was introduced to me by my babysitter when I was like five. At the time I loved it because everything about it reminded me of David the Gnome and the little pine trees had treasures hidden under them. It was a lot of fun to play as a kid but looking back on it I don’t think it would be as exciting as an adult…unless my hot ass baby sitter was still willing to play it with me.
This wasn’t exactly a game either but my god was it fun. Colorforms were thin plastic pieces that would use static to stick to a shiney board and you could make different pictures with them. There was a color form for almost every major cartoon when I was a kid and they were always a good time.
I have probably played this game more than any other game on the list. To tell you the truth i still have an ongoing challenge with my grand parents. This game has been at the heart of more family feuds than any thing else in the history of my family. I remember there was an entire year that my aunt refused to play any other game with my family because of how badly we all teamed up against her in Aggravation.
Man this game was the shit. It had the pain-in-the-assness of Operation combined with the motion of an epileptic taking a fit. The game itself was a big plastic bed that had a little motor with a plastic actuator under it. You would turn the motor on then dump all the plastic bugs out on the bed. Each player would pick a color, red, yellow, blue, or green and then you would get a corresponding set of grabbers and you had to get all of your color bugs out of the bed before everyone else. This was the type of game that would usually end with a punch in the face.
I came across my first Action Jack at a toy con a few months ago. They are kind of like G.I. Joe’s REALLY lame cousin. They aren’t that articulate and kind of poorly made, but they still seem fun. Plus, look at that mountain play set!
One of my friends told me about these a while ago and he described it as “Some kind of car with an air pump that makes it go” and the only thing I could think of were those old water pressure rockets. Then, about 2 months ago I saw one on EBAY and bought it for him for Christmas. It was exactly what he described.
As a kid, who didn’t love the Etch A Sketch? When I was little I used to use one to design stuff I would later build out of Lego’s. I also used to draw a lot of stairs and squared off boobs. The Animator was the next step. It, as its name implies, allows you to animate your drawings. Hours of fun!
I have seen a lot of people compare Army Ants to M.U.S.C.L.E. figures and to be honest, I guess that is a fair comparison. They are both small, their are WAVES of both of them and they don’t really do much. The Army Ants are a little bigger and to be honest not quite as cool, but they are still fun. I have 2 that do battle from time to time when I am really drunk.
At first I wasn’t going to include this because I didn’t think anyone would know what the hell I was talking about. Of course I thought that about the Armatron too and I ended up getting a ton of emails about that so I am putting this in. The Big Trak is a six wheeled toy and you could program it to do things with the keypad on the back. It moved kind of slow but it would crawl over lots of stuff. I used to use it with my G.I. Joe’s and say it was a renegade tank. I think you could also buy a dumping trailor thing too but I never owned that and only vaugely remember it.
The Bionic Six were always one of my
It took me FOREVER to remember what these things were called. Between my cousins and I we had about a billion pieces of these things. Iwould describe them to people and they always thought I was talking about Lego’s or an erector set. They were three sided beams that would lock into the special joints and you could build all kinds of shit. Tanks, Starfighters, buildings. They were awesome. 
Curse of the Cobra was a game that I imagine was sued out of existence by George Lucas. Even the 80′s Allen Quartermaine movies didn’t rip off Indiana Jones quite this bad. The point of the game was to lift things off of an Idol with out having the cobras wrap around your hand.
Hey, remember that Dick Tracy movie from the 80′s that had a HUGE cast and should have been a major hit but pretty much bombed out of theaters? Well it had a toy line. Don’t ask me why. I can say this, I had pretty much the entire line because my neighbor was selling them at a yard sale so he could buy a Nintendo game. He was sold me all of them for like $3.00 and I still have three or four of them. Any how, you can’t go to a toy convention without seeing a shitload of these because a bunch were made and no one bought them. So now you can get them dirt cheap on ebay. They are kind of cool though.
These toys were another one of my favorites. Infact I can’t express how great these were. The legs and arms didn’t really bend but the vehicles were cool, the toys were sturdy and they were based off the fucking Ghostbusters. What more do you need fool?
These weren’t my favorite toy as a kid and the only reason they really made the list is because someone asked me about them and I remembered I used to own them. They were essentially plastic drumsticks attached to a shitty speaker that blew out right away. Woo hoo. What kid wouldn’t want that? I think they had some gay keyboard thing that made you retarded if you looked at it.
This toy is a robot that from as near as I can tell you are supposed to sing into or some shit. The one pictured here is black, but mine is red. Mine is also missing an arm and even after I tracked down the right batteries for it it didn’t actually work. It looks cool thought.
I honestly never heard of these things before the Steel City Con last year. I happened upon what I thought was a really cool looking G.I.Joe knock off jet toy. Turns out it was a MANTA Force toy. The ship can fit a dude a little smaller than a Joe actually, about a M.A.S.K. size so it is interchangable with other lines. From everything I read the toys were made by some company that got bought by Mattel and then Mattel never made this particular line. If anyone else has any more info please tell me. They seem like cool toys.
Honestly I shouldn’t include these because they were a bit too popular for this list, but they were also the ONLY car toys that were fucking cool. I hated Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars as a kid because they were just cars and had no personality. But Micro Machines made the car the action figure. It was an awesome idea. They had really cool playsets and thousands of different cars. They also did stuff for the Star Wars movies and I think the Star Trek movies too but I could be wrong on that. If it doesn’t say Micro Machines…Its not the real thing!!!
Monster in my Pocket was the lamest of all the M.U.S.C.L.E. knock offs. I mean they were poorly detailed and looked shitty, but I guess in their own way they were kind of charming.
The original tiny toy. There were thousands of these little pink dudes and they were cool as fuck. I bought a bag of 180 of these guys off EBAY one time for $10. Man these things were cool.
One of two games in the 80′s that had to do with pigs. This game was actually really fun. I remember when I was in 5th grade I used to take it to school every day and me and my friends would play it. It ended up turning in to throwin bones for lunch money but it was still fun. I also kissed a girl for the first time because she lost a game to me. Yeah.
The point of this game was to get all the peices in the right spot before the timer went off and they all flew out. The tag line was “Pop goes Perfection”. I used to play this all the time with my best friend down the street. I had the board up until about 2 years ago when I threw it out because I only had like 3 pieces left.
The Pocket Rockers were these little mini tapes that had one, maybe two songs on them and would play on a loop. They were kind of like the original I-Pod for kids. I think the idea was good but just a little over priced for all the more they did. I would love to see one that was still in working condition. If you were a kid in ’89 and you had a Pocket Rock and one of those Tiger handheld games you were cooler than a kid with a PSP now.
Rattle me bones was another one of the non-board variety family games of the 80′s. Only this one was really fucking cool. There was this skeleton who was all decked out in treasure and the goal was to take it from him. I think the thing was though if you bumped him around to much he went crazy and knocked all of the shit off. Either that or you had to try and put the shit on him. I don’t really remember. I just remember how much fun my mom and I had playing it.
