The Retroist » Catalog

WishBookWeb.com

Flack — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:00:26 +0000

Like many of you I’m sure, one of my favorite Christmas rituals was thumbing through Sears’ annual Christmas catalog to find all the toys I wanted Santa to bring me.

WishBookWeb.com has Christmas catalogs dating back to 1933. The online collection of scans includes catalogs from Sears, J.C. Penny’s, F.A.O. Schwarz, and others. The interface is a little clunky and you have to scroll around a lot, but once you find the Smurfs, Star Wars, He-Man and G.I. Joe toys for sale, you’ll forget all about that.

The Intellivision Page from the 1980 JCPenney Christmas Catalog

The Retroist — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:00:13 +0000

In 1980, the entirety of the Intellivision system could fit on a half page of the JCPenney Christmas Catalog. You can see why the Atari 2600 had an advantage that year. In this catalog it was offering twice as many games and the system was nearly half the price.

Transformers Toy Lineup for 1986

The Retroist — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:00:29 +0000

The big toys dominated the 1986 lineup which was the beginning of the end for the 1st generation fans. I wanted everyone of these vehicles, but my family couldn’t keep up and I think I just rounded out my collection with some Dinobots that year. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I got some of the +$20 vehicles.

G.I. Joe Toy Lineup for 1986

The Retroist — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:00:47 +0000

In 1986 you could get one of the well-named Cobra accessories ever released, The Terror Drome. I wanted it so much, but never got it. Instead I got number 12 The Dreadnok Stinker. Not the best copter, but it had a sweet swivel gun. Eventually with some liberally applied black marker it became the perfect vehicle for Dr. Mindbender.

1982 ColecoVision Catalog

The Retroist — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:00:40 +0000

My friend Keith was the first kid in our neighborhood to get a ColecoVision and me and all of the rest of Atari players were just blow away by the faithful arcade quality games. I think I spent an entire weekend at his house when he got his system, playing just Donkey Kong. The graphics were amazing for the time, but the controller hurt my hand so much that the next weekend I was back on my Atari.

The siren song of amazing graphics is hard to resist, but if your system is difficult to use, you will lose your audience. ColecoVision, I hardly knew ye.