Toys and games in the 1980s

Definition Recreational products, introduced in the 1980’s, that had major economic and/or cultural significance

The 1980’s saw a series of new toy and game brands that had unprecedented popularity, many becoming cultural icons.

Several factors contributed to the toy industry of the 1980’s. New technologies allowed for the development of a wide range of electronic toys. The oil crisis of the late 1970’s caused an increase in the cost of plastic, which, in turn, inspired toy manufacturers to pursue less expensive ways of making plastic toys as well as to increase the use of other materials, such as die-cast metal. These experimentations with new technologies and materials led to new product designs and gimmicks.

Meanwhile, many companies tried to imitate the success that Kenner had with its toys based on the Star Wars films from 1977 to 1983, using elements of the company’s formula: action figures with vehicles and play sets, figures that were based on “good versus evil” archetypes, and cross-merchandising. This trend was compounded when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lifted its restrictions on tie-ins between children’s programs and toys.

The rise of national retailers such as Toys “R” Us and Wal-Mart created opportunities to sell toys year round, not just on holidays and birthdays. Cable television broadened opportunities for advertising, allowing fads to spread more quickly than before. This led to the creation of an annual tradition: the “must have” toy that parents were expected to buy for Christmas, leading to long lines and waiting lists at department stores.

Games

The first fad toy to hit America in the 1980’s was the Rubik’s Cube, a puzzle that had been invented in 1974. The puzzle was a cube with nine colored squares on each side, in six different colors. The objective of the puzzle was to get all the same color on each side. Consumers of all ages spent hours trying to solve the puzzle. At the height of the fad, there were books being published about how to solve the cube as well as similar puzzles and replacement stickers to put on an unsolved cube.

The other craze in 1980’s games was trivia. While television game shows were on decline in general, syndicated evening versions of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune became national phenomena, spinning off various board game and electronic versions. Trivial Pursuit was released in 1982 and had become a fad by 1984, spinning off dozens of sequels and variations. It was an easy game for large groups of people to play at parties, and similar kinds of “guessing games” came to be released by the end of the decade, such as Pictionary (and its television game show spin-off Win, Lose or Draw), Scattergories, and Outburst.

Electronics

The early 1980’s saw the rise of popular video games, such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, a new medium that changed the cultural landscape. Children, teenagers, and adults alike would gather around home computers and home video game consoles. Stand-alone arcade machines became fixtures at restaurants and other gathering places. Video games would increase in popularity and technology throughout the 1980’s and beyond, eventually overwhelming the market share of traditional toys.

Advances in electronics created more than video games. Electronic games such as Simon were released in the late 1970’s, but their popularity and proliferation grew in the 1980’s. While remote-controlled and radio-controlled toy vehicles had been around for decades, refined technologies led to a new wave of popularity in the 1980’s, and many other toy lines began incorporating motorized components. Meanwhile, some companies began to produce dolls, action figures, and vehicles with built-in voice recordings.

Other toy lines capitalized on advances in laser and infrared technology to make a new kind of toy gun: Lazer Tag and Photon lines were games in which players used special light guns and “body armor” to shoot at each other and score points based on hits recorded by the armor. A similar idea was attempted, unsuccessfully, in Captain Power, an action figure line in which the toy guns and vehicles could be used by children to interact with the television series.

In 1982, Hasbro’s Playskool division released Glo Worm, a plush doll that glowed when squeezed, providing young children with a combined comfort toy and night light. In 1985, Hasbro released the My Buddy and Kid Sister dolls, which were partially motorized to serve as imaginary friends. While the line was not successful, its aggressive advertising campaign created a popular jingle. Far more successful was Teddy Ruxpin, an animatronic teddy bear with a built-in tape player that “told stories” by moving its mouth and eyes. Teddy Ruxpin pioneered a whole new area for toys and novelties in the following decades.

Action Figures

Mattel and Hasbro both found huge success with their attempts to jump on the Star Wars bandwagon. Novels and films in the “sword and sorcery” subgenre had been popular at the time. While the film Conan the Barbarian was not released until 1982, Mattel released a toy line in 1981 that was loosely based on characters and concepts from the novel. Masters of the Universe, first marketed in a comic book by DC Comics, featured the war between the warrior He-Man and the evil sorcerer Skeletor. The franchise’s first few action figures were released in 1981, and the line came out in full force in 1982, but the concepts would be tweaked several times before the line finally became a huge hit.

In 1983, the FCC lifted a long-standing rule forbidding connections between cartoons and toy lines. As a result, toy manufacturers began producing cartoons based on their latest lines. When Mattel went to Filmation, one of the leading animation companies of the time, to make Masters of the Universe into a cartoon, Filmation took the unprecedented route of putting the cartoon in first-run syndication and airing the new episodes on weekday afternoons, rather than on Saturdays. The move paid off. The toys became a top-selling brand for several years and inspired a spin-off line for girls, She-Ra: Princess of Power, featuring He-Man’s sister. An ill-fated live-action movie released in 1987 signaled the decline of the brand, and an attempted revival and repositioning in 1989 failed. However, Masters of the Universe would continue to enjoy international popularity and a strong fan base.

Similarly, in 1982, Hasbro reinvented its G.I. Joe brand, which had been out of production for several years as a direct competitor to Star Wars. Reducing the 12-inch action figures to the same size as the 3.75-inch Star Wars figures, Hasbro introduced a similar line of vehicles and play sets, an “evil empire” enemy, and personalities (previously, the G.I. Joe toys had been anonymous soldiers). The line was designed in conjunction with Marvel Comics and with an animated advertising campaign by Sunbow Productions. The toy line and the comic book were issued on the same day in September, 1982. Both sold out within a few days, and the comic became one of the most successful titles of the 1980’s. An animated series, produced by Sunbow, premiered in 1983, setting G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero as a perennial brand for Hasbro.

A major trend in American toys was imported from Japan. Several Japanese toy companies had produced toy lines featuring robots that changed into other forms. These toy lines coincided with the popularity of anime in Japan and were imported to the United States in the mid-1980’s. Many of the lines introduced in the United States were pastiches of Japanese toys and cartoons licensed and then rebranded by American companies. Lines included such brands as Voltron, Gobots, and Robotech, but by far the most successful of the “transforming robots” brands, in fact the brand that gave the category its name, was Hasbro’s Transformers, introduced in 1984.

Hasbro licensed the designs for various robot-themed toys from Takara, a Japanese company that had originally licensed the G.I. Joe brand from Hasbro in the 1960’s. Using the same formula that had succeeded with the new G.I. Joe toys, Hasbro cross-promoted its Transformers line with Marvel Comics comic books and a Sunbow cartoon. Eager for new products, Hasbro also licensed robot toys from other Japanese manufacturers, but those designs led to copyright issues when those companies’ brands came to the United States. The Transformers line was so successful that Takara canceled its original lines and bought the Transformers concept from Hasbro. The line was an international hit, and, even when one of the companies put the line on hiatus, Transformers was continually produced by either Takara or Hasbro for more than two decades. The line would see a renewal in 2007 with a major motion picture that become one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

As the Star Wars line faded with the release of Return of the Jedi (1983) and as the new brands from Hasbro and Mattel featured various action gimmicks, Kenner needed a new brand to regain its market share. In 1984, Kenner licensed the rights to make action figures based on DC Comics’s superheroes and had great success with the Super Powers Team line. Another success for Kenner was M.A.S.K., a series about a team of heroes, similar to G. I. Joe, that drove shape-changing vehicles and battled an evil organization. However, neither line quite captured the market the way Hasbro and Mattel had done.

The Ghostbusters (1984) movie was spun off into both a successful toy line and cartoon named The Real Ghostbusters (to distinguish from the similarly named television series Ghost Busters, a Filmation copyright that predated the film and was made into a competing toy line by Mattel). Other movies and television series turned into action figures included The A-Team, Knight Rider, and the World Wrestling Federation.

In 1987, Playmates issued a line of toys based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book and cartoon series. The franchise would be hugely successful, sparking various movies, cartoon series, and revival toy lines. The final big toy line of the decade was Galoob’s Micro Machines, a line of toy cars introduced in 1989. The toy cars were smaller than the traditional Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars and featured elaborate play sets.

Dolls

Perhaps the biggest toy craze of the 1980’s was none of the various action figure lines but rather a line of dolls marketed to girls. The Cabbage Patch Kids were a line of unusual dolls designed by Xavier Roberts and first mass-marketed by Coleco in 1982. The gimmick was that each particular doll was not just a toy; rather, it was an adopted child, complete with an imaginary adoption certificate and the conceit that it was as unique as a child. The Cabbage Patch Kids became the first “must have” Christmas toy. Parents waited in long lines to try to obtain the dolls, inspiring marketers and toy companies to focus on creating the next big “craze.” The dolls generated more than $2 billion in the year 1984 alone.

Also in 1982, Hasbro introduced My Little Pony, a line of cute, somewhat anthropomorphic and multicolored toy ponies that ranked with Transformers and G.I. Joe in success and, for a time, overtook Mattel’s Barbie as the top girls’ toy brand. Hasbro also enjoyed great success with Jem, a line of dolls released in 1985 with an accompanying Sunbow cartoon, featuring the adventures of an all-girl rock band.

In the early 1980’s, Kenner had success in the girls’ and young children’s markets with toys based on characters from American Greetings’s juvenile cards, including the Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake. Mattel and Hallmark responded with Rainbow Brite, a billion-dollar franchise at its peak. Tonka’s Pound Puppies, released in 1985, applied the Cabbage Patch Kids concept to stuffed animals, presenting its characters as rescue dogs with supplies and adoption certificates.

Impact

Many of the toy franchises introduced in the 1980’s became cultural icons. As children who grew up in the 1980’s became the teenagers and young adults of the Internet revolution in the late 1990’s, they reached out to one another online, starting Web sites and online discussion groups to share their continued love for their favorite childhood toys and entertainment franchises. This led to many of these toys being revived in the early twenty-first century as part of a nostalgia movement. While some lines were revived only briefly and mostly unsuccessfully, certain brands from the 1980’s, such as the Transformers, Cabbage Patch Kids, Trivial Pursuit, and My Little Pony, have demonstrated perennial, cross-generational, and international appeal, making them indelible landmarks of American culture.

Bibliography

Miller, G. Wayne. Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G. I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies That Make Them. New York: Crown, 1998. The story of how Mattel and Hasbro dominated the toy industry and then bought up most of its competition throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Santelmo, Vincent. The Complete Encyclopedia to G. I. Joe. 3d. ed. Iola, Wis.: Krause, 2001. Covers the G.I. Joe brand from 1964 to 2000.

Sweet, Roger. Mastering the Universe: He-Man and the Rise and Fall of a Billion-Dollar Idea. Cincinnati: Emmis Books, 2005. The man who originally designed He-Man for Mattel chronicles the history of the toy line, its success, and its failure.

Walsh, Tim. Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them. Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews McMeel, 2005. A history of various “classic” toys, from Slinky to Trivial Pursuit.