Ghost of Christmas Wishbooks Past - 1985

Well, it looks like our faithful scanner of Sears Wishbooks has not been able to get the 1984 catalog scanned in, which is a shame, since that was the year that Transformers and GoBots and the like really took off; curious to see what might have caught my eye from then. But, for now, let's just take a look at 1985.

• No, I never had any of these, but I always wanted one, especially the giant version of Maxx Steele from RoboForce.
• Poor GoBots; never quite got the following of some other series of transforming robots. I had a few, but the only GoBot toy from the catalog was Item #13. Man, was that a funky looking playset or what?
• And here are the winners of the transforming toy robot war: on this page you'll see my favorite Dinobot Swoop, which was, not coincidentally, the only Dinobot I owned.
• I present this page not for the rest of the Transformers toys, but for item #24, which I had completely forgotten about until I saw it here; what a hassle to keep track of that was.
• By this year, Masters of the Universe had graduated to a full 2-page spread, not to mention the She-Ra page later on. On the first page we get to see one of my favorite toys, Item #3, Orko, which would spin around like crazy when you pulled a ripcord; way too much fun with that one. There's also the Battle Armor He-Man which had a rotating plate on the chest that would record "damage," and the funky little Dragon Walker which looked oh so cool on the commercials, but was painfully slow and uninteresting in person. On the second page is another of my favorite toys, #24: Modulok. Or, as anyone who remember the toy commercial might hear in their head: Mod! U! Lok! Modulok, Modulok, Modulok!
  
  
  
  A better look at the joy which was Modulok can be found here., which includes the package art and instructions as well as a look at all of Modulok's modular parts. Had way too much fun playing combinatorics with this one.
  
• Again we have entrants into the "toys I never had but always wanted" category: M.A.S.K.
• And here we have something which you know could not help but catch young Cap'n Neurotic's comic geek eye: lucky Item #13, a random grab-bag of 30 Marvel comic books. This one became a Christmas staple for several years; yes, I always wound up with duplicates of books I already owned, but surprisingly very few. Probably the biggest benefit for me was that one of the random issues later inspired me to track down the full series of Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja, which was so far removed from what the title implies you would not believe it.