Like many of you remember, my local Toys R' Us (Burbank CA) was absolutely flooded with G1 goodness!

In regards to Skids being a 84' release, so was Jetfire. I bought him with my birthday money November 1984. In all his Matsushito-Macross emblem having Glory!

 

Nice to see toy stores before I was born. I'm sure it brings back a lot of memories for you all. I don't feel old enough to be nostalgic about the BW toy shelves and such, but yet... *sigh* to be a kid again...

 

Hmmm.... I lived through this time period as well but I don't feel any depression or sadness as others have indicated... kind of excited that I experienced such a classic time firsthand.

Buying/getting TFs as gifts was only part of the fun:

-waking up on Saturday mornings, rolling out of bed and in front of the tv for 4-5 solid hours of toy commercials (cartoons)
-going to sleepovers and playing GIJoes, Transformers, Atari, etc
-making awesome trades with your friends for stuff you didn't get on your birthday/Xmas.

Those were good times and no one can take them away from us.

As for the photos... I was surprised to see more than two or three! Amazing stuff. That B/W photo of (older) people shopping makes me suspect it was around Christmastime. They are wearing winter clothes. Trying to figure out what it was their kids said they wanted!
It never occurred to me back then that I'd ever want to look back on something as ordinary as a toy aisle... and yet here we are in this thread. However I suspect that for insurance reasons exclusively there are likely snapshots, negatives buried somewhere of vintage Transformers on shelves that haven't been thrown out or destroyed yet. Hopefully someday a huge bunch of them will be revealed.

 

Memories... Like the corners of my mind... Misty water-coloured memories...  

Ahhh toyshelves in the '80s. I can recall pushing Gobots/Rocklords to the back & bringing TFs front-&-centre, where they belong. Mum then spotted her son re-arranging shelves, grabbed him & quickly headed for another aisle. I bet my Mum loved taking me shopping...  

 

Man! I vaguely remember those stores and the names do ring a bell. I believe I may have visited the stores a couple times but I can't recall because my parents couldn't afford to buy toys for me all the time. But Circus World stands out a lot for some reason. Shoot! I want to go back in time and see what I missed at those stores.

 

I was too young for the 80s toy stores (being born in the last few years of the 80s does that lol), but I do remember toy stores in my area being like that in the early '90s. TRU is the only pure toy store that's left it seems.... except my two local TRU's never seem to have as large as a TF stock as I remember from my childhood. Boo.

I miss those days.

 

Anybody remember the store Toy Chest? I don't know how common they were, but in Illinois we had them and Childrens Palace. Those were great stores, sense they were dedicated toy stores.

 

Fuck.... now I'm depressed  

Nice thread btw *wipes tears*

 

Johnny's was cool. Every year, right at your birthday, they would mail you a key which would open up a castle at the store. You could then pick out a free toy that was in the castle for your birthday. However, I'm pretty sure all the Johnny's Toys are all closed now. All they have is that Totter Otterville place in Northern Kentucky now (the toy store part of it is long gone).

For me, living in Cincinnati, Van Leunens, Swallens, Gold Circle, and Children's Palace were where I got my plastic crack as a kid. I can still pretty much tell you what store I got my Transformers from (except the ones I got at Christmas).

 

Me too. Also, someone in the fandom likes Red Dwarf apart from me?!? Amazing!

 

any photos of beast wars in toy stores? That's when I was a kid. I was born in 86.

 

thats the website i mentioned earlier!! thx.

 

No pics of the TF aisle but thought it was cool to see TRU's outside design over the years. Also note the video game tags you had to take to the cashier and then pick up the game...

The Caldor Rainbow: Toys "R" Us Design Timeline: 1970's-1989

 

Those pictures are awesome. Brings back alot of memories of window shopping when I was a kid.

 

I'm actually getting sad because I was born in the mid 90's. *cries in a corner*

 

FreshDebesh...thanks for the link  

Ahhh...yes...the giraffe  ....   for the old days... although while we love the 80's toys we had as kids...I happen to like quite a few of the new bots too  

 

This thread brings me back to my younger days, when my home town had neither Toys 'R' Us, Target, nor Wal-Mart, yet did have the now-absent:

Children's Palace
Best
Gold Circle
Hills
Toy Stores in malls OTHER than Kay-Bee

 

The only question is how would you pay for them? You couldn't exactly use modern money.

 

You'd do what Doc did in BTTF 2 when they went back to 1955. He had a briefcase full of money from each year.