MIB Slugslinger

 

30 years plus.

Sorry for late reply, busy with MASK lately,  .

 

MISB/MIB/MISB

 

Still waiting on WfC Magnus turning up, so taking a moment to appreciate other Magni.

 

Awesome! Hound is one of my grails.

 

I like Hound too, very much.

 

he was sooooo hard to find in 1987. it took me about 3 months and multiple calls to stores and my mom fronting me some allowance money to get him.

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Interesting. Anyone else recall G1 figures being hard to find (outside of the Xmas '84 holiday season when every figure became scarce and Ironhides tended to be the last to sell from what I remember reading)?

And I'll ask it here on the small chance someone may have an answer. Does anyone remember CVS or Rite-Aid selling toys during G1 (be it TF, GI Joe, He-Man, et al)? I was in Walgreens & Osco territory so can only vouch for what kind of toy aisles those drug store chains had.

 

Skids
Targetmaster Scourge (I got him from Toy Liquidators in 1990; they had a case of 87 targetmasters in, went back a week later and all gone)
Shockwave
1986 Triple Changers
Autobot Headmasters
Decepticon Targetmasters

i remember RevCo having toys during G1; mostly minibots and combiner limbs, some Joes, Visionaries...they were overpriced compared to Toys R Us, Target, Service Merchandise...really overpriced compared to everything except JCPenny.

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SNOWING!

 

Nice.
When I moved from Germany back to the US around 1990, a Taiwanese friend of mine gifted me his Slugslinger, complete and in great shape. I'll never forget that. It's still on my shelf with his Targetmaster brethren.

I honestly don't remember any G1 figures being hard to find, as in having to actively hunt them down. They were for sale EVERYWHERE (I got my Constructicons at a hardware store, of all places). If I saw a character on the show I wanted, I could usually find it at the store that day. But, you're right that Ironhide and Ratchet seemed to be the last to sell. I do remember seeing Ironhide left behind pretty often. I received Ratchet for Christmas '84 and I was disappointed enough with it that I didn't want an Ironhide  

I think I have a cardback with a CVS price tag on it; I can check this evening if you like.

 

I don't know why, but I find this picture adorable.

 

Thanks!
Totally channeling this...

 

Definitely.

 

As I wasn’t alive to witness the original production run of g1’s, I love hearing about it

 

Are you saying I'm old?

.............

Just kidding. I knew I was old when I realized there's adults who've never known a time without internet  

I don't know if you've checked out the thread with pics of toy stores in the 80's, but it was like heaven. Literal stacks of TFs, and you were almost guaranteed to find the specific toy you were looking for without much effort. Toys could stay on the shelves for longer than a few months and not be labeled shelfwarmers; certain popular TFs, like Starscream, shipped continually over multiple years.
Between awesome toys like TFs, GIJoe, He-Man, MASK, Saturday morning cartoons, and after-school cartoons on weekdays, it was an awesome time to be a kid.

 

These days, we're saddled with crappy cartoons and crappy distribution.

 

The price guide I compiled revealed how many different stores (so many of them no longer around) sold G1 (among other toys) and hardware stores did show up. Interesting about the CVS pricetag. Sure, post a pic. I'd like to see what their pricetags looked like then because I assumed CVS & Rite-Aid were among the many "???" pricetags which had no identifying info on them.

Yeah, it's too bad some folks have little interest in history, even with pop culture. The more one understands about a time period in history through being aware of many different threads (music, tv shows, movies, toys, video games, news events, et al), the more it becomes something almost tangible that can be understood and even felt rather than a bunch of plain dates and info on a printed or web page. Likewise with how much things have changed, with toys, with how society uses technology, takes in info, etc. It's easier to learn about things more than ever but too many seem to take too little interest to understand the history of what they're interested in (such as in a sport they follow a team in).

For those who don't remember the '80s/early '90s:

The core thing with toys to know is, at least by the '80s, companies planned for one year at a time as a block, not a rolling release where they spread out releases over the year. Also, toylines ran continuously if they ere successful, not getting a new replacement line every year to 2 years as was the pattern since Armada. Not sure how many larger Transformers took longer to come out. Some seemed to be held back (Trypticon, Fortress Maximus), but not others (Metroplex, Omega Supreme). The general pattern, for example, with GI Joe, was all the carded figures would come out in Feb/March along with the smallest vehicles, then April/May most of the other vehicles were released, then Aug/Sept the biggest vehicles (most expensive ones, the ones intended for holiday sales) would come out. I've been trying to decipher potential indicators of when cases of G1 first went on sale and it looks like a lot of the line was out by March/April, carded and standard to mid-sized boxed figures. The pattern back in G1 (He-Man, GI Joe) was they usually dumped almost everything out early in the year. Toy industry at the time had 3 general release periods- ~Feb/March, April/May, Aug/Sept. April/May was usually for new toylines to see their 1st releases, returning toys to release any yet-unreleased figures/vehicles except for the big ones (IIRC, TF came out in 5/84, GI Joe & He-Man 4/82. TMNT was a bit late, came out 6/88) whereas returning toylines had their stuff out after stores did all their inventory and all that.

Another element was figures often shipped for 2, even 3 years. G1 was weird in that it appears some figures only shipped 1 year before late in the line (1985 Autobot Cars, 1986 Triple Changers, Shockwave, et al) although there were some indications the cases may have been available for longer (a Blitzwing with a 1987 pricetag/receipt that wasn't dusty/damaged, that photo of a toy aisle with Sky Lynx & Shockwave & 1985 Autobots side by side). GI Joe had 1982-83 figures ship for 3 years, 1984-89 figures ship for 2 years, 1990 had most ship for 2 years, 1991 had most just ship 1 year, 1993 used repaints of existing figures for the reissues. GI Joe is actually good in capturing the transition, going from multi-year to 2-year to 1-year releases, from all-at-once releases to releases spread out over a year (for them, also Hasbro, that started to get implemented gradually, over 1991-93). For TF, some figures shipped 3 years- Starscream, Bumblebee, Soundwave, some cassette figures were available for as much as 4 years. Not sure about G2, but Beast Wars had rolling release schedules, constantly tinkering with their case assortments rather than having fixed content for a full year in each one. That led to some figures coming & going before the holidays or people noticing they were out.

There were shelfwarmers, which were not the mere fact it was year 2 and a toy was still available, but that a toy was gathering in large numbers. G1 had some people say the Jumpstarters, Insecticons were shelfwarmers although based on eBay data-gathering, there's a lot out there (sold a lot, but might've been overordered in places). GI Joe had a few (Crystal Ball & Dee-Jay stood out as such to me). Seems like there might've been less shelfwarming in the '80s than later. Beast Wars had Retrax, Injector, Scavenger, some 1999 figures (Transquito should be exonerated. It had an unusual release history. Its original release was not a shelfwarmer). Tinkering with case assortments led to a surplus/drought format for figures. Sometimes they ship way too much of 1 figure nowadays, too few or for too short a time of others. Transquito (BW) & Storm Jet (RID) were casualties of idiotic planning.

And in general, toy aisles were well-stocked outside of the holiday rush periods (unless a store had issues or was incompetent). There was a stigma to having bare shelves. That changed at some point, where bare shelves became a much more common occurrence when logistically, things should be easier to deliver now than before. In Japan, there's still that stigma (I recall a story about convenience stores in Japan having some bare shelves after the 2011 earthquake and that was so unusual, so shocking, NHK World felt like they had to have it be part of the story).

As I noted in my G1 retail price topic, there was a very robust "market six" (the toy industry term for everything outside the then-big 5 companies that ordered toys). A lot more places/chains used to sell toys than do now. Also, online ordering was obviously non-existent. There were catalogs to order from (Sears, Montgomery Ward, clothing dept stores), but that was usually done with stuff you couldn't readily find in stores and it would take weeks to ship, not a few days. UPS trucks were rare to see outside of December and in December, now they can be seen far more times than previously. Plus, people usually had to sign for shipments from them (small stuff run through the USPS was put in the mailbox unless it was priority mail or important documents, needing a signature). The idea of ordering a toy from Amazon or TRU's online store in the past 15 years? Yeah, not like that. You could be waiting 8-12 weeks (as was the case with Hasbro mail-order exclusives like the Omnibots, Reflector, the handful of GI Joe exclusives or the few older figures which became long-running mail-order figures).


On cartoons, yeah, the '80s was the heyday of syndicated cartoons. Used to be weekday mornings & afternoons had 1-2 channels with it over the air, some new cartoons, some classics (Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, Popeye, etc), Saturday mornings were for network cartoons, Sunday morning usually weekly syndicated cartoons. It's a long story for why that all came to an end. Tv used to cater to multiple demographics over the week and now kids have been all but purged from broadcast channels (save for the E/I mandate, which is usually crap that the channels just reair even though it's years old in some cases), used to be a lot more primetime shows with older leads (Golden Girls, Murder She Wrote, Matlock) too. News was nowhere near as prolific. They greatly expanded morning news, likewise weekend morning news. On some channels, after the 10PM news on Friday, the next news was Saturday at 5PM or if sports pre-empted it, Saturday at 10PM. News & E/I devoured Saturday morning cartoons.

 

I know it’s actually Fort Max’s ... but it’s the best I can do for now  

And dang this sword is just so big in person!

 

i forgot to mention Star Wars. Return of the Jedi and Power of the Force clearance. one dollar. sometimes fifty cents. i wish i'd bought more. but a lot of the figures i wanted weren't easy to find at the time, finding a Boba Fett at TRU in 1986 is still my greatest hunt to this day.

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