Thursday, December 06, 2007

Ghost of Christmas Wishbooks Past - 1982

Zinger forwarded a link to me earlier today, and suggested I do a quick blog post about it. I, being lazy and hard up for blogging topics at the moment, acquiesced. What was the link? A Flickr album of scanned pages from the 1982 Sears Wishbook Catalog. Dox knows how many countless hours I spent pouring over the Sears and JC Penny's catalogs as a kid around Christmas time. A few thoughts that came to mind while browsing the pages:

  • I had items #2, 7, 8, and 9. . . and had completely forgotten about all of them until I saw this page
  • It amuses me greatly that back in 82 "Masters of the Universe" Toys were smooshed into the bottom third of a page with a bunch of generic "themed" toys. Oh, and the Battle Ram Mobile Launcher (item #15) is another toy I used to have which had fallen into the mists of memory until this page brought it all back.
  • At a certain point in my life, I would have conceivably killed to have items #11 and 14
  • I didn't own any of these, but my uncle did
  • Another in a long list of things I always wanted as a kid: #14
  • Gotta love the hyperbolic advertising. "It's amazing! It's unbelievable! It's a product that will soon become obsolete because a competitor will become the industry standard!"
  • Don't know what's odder: that there was a point in time when there were 5 pages of catalog devoted exclusively to Smurf memorabilia, or that that even more pages were given over to Little Orphan Annie merchandise.

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