7/30/2023 0 Comments Jcp online time clock![]() ![]() You could get carded versions at Toys “R” Us, but then you’d find the same figures with simple hangtags at your local pharmacy, on a shelf between miniature globes and dusty notebooks. Imperial’s Classic Movie Monsters collection was just the best. Bet you $10 that if you really think about it, some of your biggest childhood toy obsessions were born out of gifts you never requested. Joe stuff exclusively, but once they got a load of Visionaries’ holographic chests and SilverHawks’ chrome suits, they became instant fans of those lines, too. While both Visionaries and SilverHawks had dedicated fans, I think they still fit that particular bill. Stuff we didn’t request, and sometimes stuff we’d never even heard about. In practice, though, we got all kinds of toys for Christmas. Most kids were laser-focused on only one or two different toy lines, and when it came time to beg Santa for toys, they weren’t likely to deviate from them. One of the undervalued plusses of Christmastime was the chance to broaden our action figure horizons. I’m grouping these together for a reason, I swear. When I close my eyes, I can still hear the gears and motors. Especially if we got one of those motorized banks that worked like Pee-wee’s breakfast machine. Most of our presents only burned bright for like fifteen minutes, but a coin bank could stay relevant forever. Such banks rarely topped kids’ wish lists, but we were always happy to get them. It was the present you got from an uncle who didn’t know you well enough to roll the dice on anything more specific. It was probably because every department store placed them on their most obtrusive displays, along with all of those other “basic” gifts, like Isotoner gloves and cheap glassware. Novelty coin banks were extremely common Christmas presents during the ‘80s and ‘90s. I don’t remember if I actually got it from Santa, but I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s camping out by the tree in that bag, trying to soak up those last bits of String Light Glory before my father threw everything back into the attic. You probably didn’t run out on Christmas morning to brag about your new BraveStarr sleeping bag, but you sure as shit lived in that thing during the week off from school. ![]() They were great gifts, even if most kids were loath to admit it. There’s nothing inherently Christmassy about sleeping bags, but I still associate them with this time of year, thanks to the many multi-page spreads in old holiday catalogs. JCPenney called them slumber bags, but I’ve only ever known them as sleeping bags. On the goofier side was that wristwatch, which bordered close to ALF taxidermy. ![]() I never had the Talking ALF shown here, but it was essentially his version of Teddy Ruxpin. I can’t think of another gift I wanted more as a kid, and that was just a simple plush doll, competing against the likes of the Nintendo Entertainment System. If you were too young/not alive to catch ALF in his heyday, he was the coolest “person” a kid could name.Ĭase in point: Coleco’s standard ALF doll, which looked like the Talking ALF shown above, was probably the best Christmas present I ever got. These items come from an era when ALF was inarguably The Shit. May the following doodads unlock rusty parts of your brains, too. I see an action figure I had as a kid, and suddenly I can remember the color of my old bedroom walls. Not just about the toys I grew up loving, but also the stuff surrounding them. These old catalogs spark so many memories for me. Yeah, I already mined it for another article, but there are like 500 pages in this thing. Let’s walk through the highlights from JCPenney’s 1987 Christmas catalog. Pour some coffee and wrap yourself in a throw blanket, because you’re mine for the next fifteen minutes. More Highlights from the 1987 JCPenney Catalog!
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