Toy Bender

Man it’s been a long time since I did a Toy Ads that Time Forgot with a comic book ad, unfortunately most of my good ads dried up. This was an old one that I found laying around that I realized that I must share with the world (click on it to make it much bigger):

(more…)

There are certain toy advertisement jingles that get stuck in your head like some bizarre Amazon worm that will stick it’s breathing tubes out of your face and you think are just really weird bits of facial hair, but then one morning larva will painfully burrow their way out of your eyes… or something like that. The Slinky jingle has lasted for decades, but other jingles that were very catchy for their time have faded away. Here’s one that was pretty damn catchy for it’s day, but is now so much more hilarious that I’m a bit older. It’s for Mr. Bucket, a mechanized plastic bucket that moves around in random patterns and shoots balls out of it’s mouth.

Ahhh Mr. Bucket. Your love of balls is unmatched. I must thank the Opie and Anthony Radio show for bringing this one back into the light of day. I had completely forgotten all about this (or maybe I had buried the memory of it’s existence).

I was too old for this toy, but old enough to clearly remember seeing the commercial at least seven thousand times during my impressionable years. I never clearly understood the point of the game, except maybe as a means to get children to run around and scream their bloody heads off. So what if you manage to get all the balls into the bucket, what did that really accomplish? Maybe there’s some bigger life lesson hidden in this that I’m missing… or it can just be a cold, uncaring, motorized plastic bucket that shoots balls out of it’s mouth. Who can say?

The Best of Toy Ads that Time Forgot:
Rom the Spaceknight Special
The Amazing Energized Spider-Man
The Top 10 Weirdest Toy Ads

toy, toy collecting, YouTube, video, funny, humor, kids, play time, commercial, advertisement

I was going to try really hard to find a comic book ad to make fun of you kids (I’m really low on Toy Ads that Time Forgot ammo if you haven’t noticed), but when I found this Nerf ad staring Seth Green on a blog called OverTimeComedy.com I knew I had a winner for this week. My research pulled up similar videos videos so I cobbled together a theme post for you. So without further ado, Here’s the top toy commercials featuring celebrity guest stars.

1. Seth Green

Before he was Scott Evil in Austin Powers, before he appeared on Buffy, or even before he had one thought about Robot Chicken, Seth Green was a nerd that proved it early on in his career with his role in this ad for Nerf toys. By God Seth Green, the horror. The clothes, the hidious hair, the Nerf, and the tough guy attitude… it’s all so brilliantly awful, like a unicorn taking a dump.

(more…)

Way back in the long, long ago, otherwise known as 1990, the once enormously successful Transformers line had become an empty shell of it’s former self. In fact it was dead. The line had lost all it’s momentum and the Transformers era known as Generation One was over. Not content to let a good, money making property stay dead, Hasbro let Transformers rest for a couple of years and reintroduced them in 1992. What’s the best way to bring back beloved toys? With commercials featuring terrible, terrible rap songs. But first, here’s a straight commercial featuring some two beloved Transformers characters:

This commercial features the return of Optimus Prime and it had been a long time for those kids (like me) who had wanted the original but never could get their hands on it. Megatron came back too, but as you can see he was a tank. Somehow that never sat right with me. I realize a tank makes a little more sense than a pistol that can shrink to fit into the hands of another Transformer, but having been raised seeing him as either a gun or cannon (as Galvatron), it’s a bit odd for a impressionable mind to handle.

Now for the advertisement you’ve been waiting for. A Transformers G2 commercial with rapping:

(more…)

After a brief hiatus, Toy Ads that Time Forgot is back… if anyone cares. Anyway, I ran across this commercial on YouTube and I couldn’t pass it up. It’s for Jem, the doll (and doll line) produced in the 80s by Hasbro to compete with Mattel’s Barbie. Unlike Barbie, Jem had more of an edge to her, because she was a female rock star who was truly, truly, truly outrageous.

(more…)

Today’s ad comes to you mostly because I love the Star Wars figure featured in it, Admiral Ackbar. He’s been the subject of many a nerdy Photoshop, but I really hope that doesn’t take away from the sheer coolness that is the Ackbar.

(more…)

Way back in the begins of Toy Ads That Time Forgot, in fact in the first installment of the feature, I dipped into the classic comic book advertisement pool and came up with one of the many toy soldier ads that were almost a mandatory staple in comics for decades. I’ve come across another one, this time featuring Revolutionary War Soldiers.

(Click on the pic to see a larger version)

I can say I’ve actually seen these plastic guys first hand, because there were a few of them laying around my house that remained from my Dad’s supply he had received as a kid. They are about as crappy as you could imagine they could be. The soldiers are are barely three dimensional, mono-colored, tiny pieces of plastic. My father was extremely disappointed when he got them, and they are directly responsible for both destroying his love of history that doesn’t involve Nazis and his hobo murdering spree in the early ’70s.

toy, toy collecting, advertisement, comic book, history

This is a great commercial that has some interesting things of note. For one, the narrator is that voice is in everything. Okay, he’s not the official guy who is in everything, but it’s the one that you get when you can’t afford the real one.

It also is a Palitoy commercial, meaning it’s the British company that handled the Star Wars toys on the other side of the pond. (That’s Europe for those of you from Mississippi)

This commercial also features that fantastic toy landscape that NOBODY had growing up. Please let me know if you had a miniature forest in your backyard that was to scale with your Star Wars figures, because I will direct a powerful wave of Omega Envy at you in that case. This replica of Endor is just the kind of set-up every kid wished he had when he was playing in a cat turd filled sandbox.

Finally, the commercial has copy that mentions the word attack about three dozen times. Listen to it again if you hadn’t noticed it. Terrible.

toy, toy collecting, action figure, commercial, advertisement, Return of the Jedi, Star Wars

I realize that doesn’t exactly fit into the action figure extravaganza that is Toy Bender, but this ad is too good to pass up.

How many different things can they fit into this game? There are game pieces that are practically action figures, a puzzle, and a spaceship! A fricken spaceship! The only thing missing is blatant product placement like a Speak and Spell and Reese’s Pieces.

Regardless, E.T. and the early 80s rule. There’s no way kids today would be hanging out wearing collared shirts and playing board games. They’d either be playing Gears of War and screaming the foulest things you can think of or stabbing homeless people.

toy, toy collecting, action figure, doll, commercial, advertisement, E.T. Board game

This old TV ad needs no introduction:

These CHIPs cops come from the highly popular (at the time) Mego series of figures that spawned figures coming from Planet of the Apes to tons of DC and Marvel superheroes. Mego is no longer with us, but the figures live on in old commercials like this one and within the pages of ToyFare’s Twisted ToyFare Theatre.

On another note, the voice behind this commercial is so baritone that it literally frightens me.

toy, toy collecting, action figure, doll, commercial, advertisement, Chips, Mego

No man on Earth has ever had so much power. An incredible power that turns a normal, uninteresting man into a hideous freak! These are the Power Lords and if you never heard of them, I don’t blame you because they didn’t stick around for too long.

(more…)

I decided to share this video for a few reasons: 1. It features Storm Shadow version two and he rocks harder than ninja Elvis. 2. I’m running out of good ads for the moment, so if anyone wants to mail me magazines or comic books with awesome toy ads that would be fantastic. 3. There’s enough flashing lights and sounds in this G.I. Joe commercial to give a blind, deaf kid a seizure. Yo Joe!

toy, toy collecting, G.I. Joe, commercial, advertisement, Hasbro

My Buddy. The first attempt to get little boys to play with honest to God dolls. I hadn’t heard the obnoxious, yet catchy, tune from the My Buddy commercials for years before stumbling across it on YouTube, which further proves that YouTube is both a blessing and a curse upon the world. Much like the evil videotape in The Ring, I must pass on the My Buddy themesong to you:

My Buddy was available in several different themes as well:

(more…)

If you were a comic fan in the 80s, it was impossible to escape Marvel’s biggest crossover event up until that point. It was called, “Secret Wars”.

Secret Wars featured some of the biggest heroes in the Marvel Universe slugging it out in another dimension against the biggest Marvel villains in a storyline that was light on characterization and drama, but heavy in the smashing department. Take for instance the normally morally upright Captain America’s plan of attack:

(more…)

Ugh, GoBots. Just when you think you’re done having to ever think about them again, they pop up back into your life just like that rash you got from the chubby drunk girl at the party. You know, the one with Hamm’s on her breath and loneliness in her eyes?

This time the GoBots return to Toy Bender via an ad found in a comic book. Instead of the regular crappy toys, these GoBots were models that you built yourself. It seems like every once in awhile the model car companies try something new to get people interested in building models again, and this was a pretty novel way to do it. Their choice of the Go-Bots for this is a little less than steller, though. I suppose that they had to keep it simple to make it work and you can’t get any more simple than the way that Go-Bots transformed. Roughly half of the transforming process of a GoBot is accomplished by turning it over. It’s got to be one of the laziest, yet most successful product lines in the history of toys.

Even the artist who obviously has some talent wasn’t able to make these pieces of crap look any better than they really are. Look at that space shuttle guy’s tiny ineffectual arms. How is he supposed to fight anybody, especially when he doesn’t have any real legs to speak of?

If you’re fortunate enough not to face the mighty suckitude of the GoBots and want to familiarize yourself a bit with their animated series, check out this video of Leader One getting power raped:

Uh, yeah… that was purely unintentional.

toy collecting, toy, Gobots, commercials, ads