Robots in General will be “The Thing” in 1985
The November 28, 1985 issue of The Evening News includes an article all about toys for that year’s Christmas season. Written by staff writer Dick Shea the article, titled “Variety of toys available today almost staggers the imagination,” gives us a peek at what was hot in the toy industry at the time. Not surprisingly, transforming robot toys receive a few mentions in the article.
“The Sears representative said the amazing robots that change from one thing to another will be among the most popular items this year.”
This old articles are a great source of information on the past, and going through the Google Newspaper Archives makes me hope that either the archives remain online or I manage to track down every entertaining article and ad before the articles are deleted. There’s no reason to suspect these will suddenly vanish, but with the web everything that’s here today could be gone tomorrow.
So I’ll just keep working my way through search strings and trying to snatch out the fun information. After all, finding this article without the Google Newspaper Archives would have been nearly impossible. And without the article we wouldn’t have fun quotes like:
“Al Derisi of Fun Services in Beacon said robots and transformers are the rage thus far this Christmas season in his store. They come in all prices, ranging from $1.50 to $50 and price doesn’t seem to make much difference.”
It’s those $1.50 transforming robot toys I’d really love to track down today. Transformers and GoBots get lots of attention online (and in some books), but the cheap transforming robot toys of the eighties never get the attention they deserve.
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