The Toy Nexus

The last entry I talked about how I watched a lot of Toy Galaxy videos on YouTube over the holidays.  In watching those, I kind of noticed that 1986-1987 was a big turning point for the toy industry, at least for boys.  Girls toys you had some other things like My Little Pony, Jem, or Cabbage Patch Kids, but Barbie was still the queen.

But for boys there were a lot more options and a lot more upheaval.  In the early 80s from 80-85 the big names were Star Wars, He-Man, GI Joe, and Transformers.  Then you had those in the secondary level like Voltron, Robotech, MASK, Thundercats, and GoBots.  And there's always then some other stuff too.

1986-1987 was when things changed.  Star Wars had pretty much wound down with no new movies and the failure of the TV shows Droids and Ewoks.  He-Man was losing ground, especially after the failure of the movie by Cannon Films starring Dolph Lundgren, a movie that really didn't do much to tie to the existing toys since they had laser guns and traveled to our world to hang out with Courtney Cox and Parris from Star Trek Voyager.  Thanks to Harmony Gold's ineptitude, Robotech's "movie" and second series--The Sentinels--never really happened.  GoBots released a movie that did slightly better than Robotech but not as good as Transformers.  And surprisingly there wasn't a huge interest in "Rock Lords," which were literally robots that turned into rocks.  I'm shocked!  While the lion Voltron did well for a couple of years, the vehicle Voltron didn't go over nearly so well.

Transformers:  The Movie came out in 1986 and traumatized a whole generation of children by killing off pretty much all the older characters, including Optimus Prime.  In part because of that, the movie didn't really do much at the box office, even though my brother and I probably saw it two or three times.  Because of that, GI Joe: The Movie went straight to video the next year and awkwardly didn't kill Duke, though you just never saw him again.

Of all those I just mentioned, Transformers and GI Joe were the only ones that made it into the 90s, though they were limping by then.  Transformers (Generation 1) was dead by 1992 and GI Joe by 1994.  By 1987 the luster was coming off.  Transformers had to rely more and more on gimmicks:  Headmasters, Targetmasters, and Powermasters with little guys who became heads, guns, or engines respectively.  Pretenders where you had an organic shell with a robot inside that turned into a vehicle.  Micro-sized Transformers came after the success of Micro Machines.  The last gasp were "Action Masters," or Transformers where the robot didn't transform while they had a vehicle that did.  GI Joe, meanwhile, started as fairly normal military troops and vehicles, but by 1986-1987 they were getting more and more sci-fi.  Eventually it devolved into a lot of lame gimmicks like Ninja Force, Slaughter's Marauders, the anti-drug force, Eco Warriors, and finally the original Space Force.

You have to think the toy companies saw the handwriting on the wall as they came out with a whole bunch of stuff around that period to try to replace the old lines:

• Silverhawks
• Battle Beasts
• Inhumanoids
• MUSCLE
• Space Com
• Bravestarr
• Jayce & the Wheeled Warriors
• Bionic 6
• Air Raiders

Probably a bunch more I don't remember or haven't seen videos about yet.  The common thread is none of those really had the lasting power of those earlier toys.  Most had one or two waves of toys, a TV show with maybe one season of 13-65 episodes, possibly a comic book with 4-12 issues, and some other merch before disappearing.  And other than maybe a Robot Chicken parody, most haven't had any relevance since the 80s.

Why didn't they succeed?  Well for one thing because there were so many of them that they were largely splitting the vote.

But the other big factor was Nintendo.  The Atari 2600 had been around since the late 70s but the video game industry was almost wiped out in the mid-80s thanks to greed and a lot of shoddy products like ET the Video Game.  Then about 1986 the original Nintendo Entertainment System came on the scene right about the time when a lot of those kids playing with Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe, and whatever were becoming teenagers.  It might seem weird now but in the late 80s the NES was revolutionary.  It was a huge step up over the ancient 2600 and cheaper than the computer systems of the time.  I mean back then you couldn't just go online and get a laptop for $200 or a Chromebook for $100.  So yeah it was a big deal.

And for a year or so you has Lazer Tag and Photon games.  Then a kid was murdered by a cop who thought a Lazer Tag gun was real (panicky cops existed long before Tayvon Martin, Black Lives Matter, etc) and that was pretty much the end for those and realistic fake guns in general.  But Nintendo continued to dominate until 1992 or so when the Sega Genesis came out and then the Super Nintendo and so on to today with the PS4 and XBox One and Nintendo Switch.

Groundwork for the future was being laid in this same period as the indie comic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started taking the world by storm.  Within a few years it would become one of the biggest toy lines of the early 90s.

So yeah that period in 1986-1987 was a defining moment for the toy industry.  Does this have anything to do with writing or anything?  Yeah, sure.  Nothing is forever.  Some series remain popular for a long time but there are always new challengers and seismic changes in what's popular.  If you're too early or too late then you're probably going to fail.  Or if the market is just too crowded then you're probably going to end up like a lot of those toys I mentioned that didn't make a huge impact.  There, see, I tied together.  Suck it, phantom haters.