What Product Fads Did You Participate In?

In My Humble Opinion
81

I never actually owned a pair of the shoes, but a few friends did. I messed around with the pump a lot. It was fun, almost addicting, really. My friends weren’t too happy that I liked to pump their shoes, though. Heh.

Those places are creepy. I went to one a few years ago at a summer program with my RA group. We didn’t have enough people, so the employees sent in this really creepy old man who ran around laughing maniacally as he shot people. If he was an example of the regulars at such places, I really don’t want to go back.
jessica

82

Oh my. I was thinking, well, I didn’t participate in any! until I started reading these posts…

Big earrings. BIG EARRINGS. In the 80s. Wow. I have this one pair around here somewhere, and they are freaking huge, these big jangly silver and black circles… whoo, tack-KAAAY.

I ate the freeze dried ice cream. And I was the VERY FIRST person at my school to have shoelaces with designs on them… remember, a long time ago they were just white or black or tan. Mine had little heart rainbows on them. My cousins from the Big City sent them to me. My next pair were purple with stars and lightening bolts on them.

I have beanies, but only the kitties, because I collect kitties and they were cute. I had lots of rainbow-y unicorn stickers, and all kinds of stickers, teachers used to give them out on papers and it was fab motivation. How retarded is that?

I like black jelly bracelets. Still. Hey, they are pretty cool.

I really wanted to be in on the lip gloss craze of the late 70s and early 80s, but we were too broke, really. Anyone remember ‘kissing potion’? It was clear, with a silver cap… and had flavors like chocolate mint and bubblegum…

I got really into Calico Kittens at one period of time, and I bet I’ve got more than 100 of those things.

I bought as many Breyer horses as I could afford, and the prancing palomino went with me to the hospital for knee surgery number 3.

My stuffed Snoopy from 1975 went to all of my knee surgeries but the last one, and man did I regret not taking him.

Did anyone else want or get a Denim Doll or whatever the name was? It was so HIDEOUS, but I wantedwantedwanted one. It had loud red yarn hair and a denim jacket and pants. You could zip the zippers on the jacket and everything. Why I wanted it, I will never know.

Wow.

83

Since I grew up in the eighties, I have to chime along with:

Cabbage Patch Kids-my first one was named Rainey Carlene, and I believe she is somewhere in the attic, but my dad does like to throw stuff away, so maybe not.
Garbage Pail Kids-my mom hated these.
Strawberry Shortcake-but I just barely remember this.
Voltron-my friend had all the toy cats, and I was jealous.
Alf-I had an Alf lunch box.
Trolls-when my older brother left for college, he bought me a troll doll and left it in my room. Trolls had their arms outstretched, and he left a note that said “I’m going to miss you this much.”
Slap bracelets
Cavarricis
Girbaud jeans
Hypercolor shirts
Simpsons T-shirts-right when the show first took off.

There are probably more-I had indulgent parents.

84

I still have Strawberry Shortcake stickers on the insides of my toybox lid. They’re fading fast, but they’re still there. I mostly keep my journals and other personals in my toybox now.

I still have an ALF doll. I let my mom take him, though, and he now sits on her window sill in her office, enjoying the great 13 story view.

In 2nd grade, I had Simpsons everything. T-shirts, pencils, erasers, the board game, bendable figurines, everything. I remember taking this stuff into class and asking my classmates if they watched The Simpsons. “My parents won’t let us.” They said. How times have changed.

85

I’ve always said that this was the difference between math geeks and engineering geeks. The math geeks would actually solve the thing, whereas the engineering geeks would take it apart and put it back together. I’m much more of an engineer type than a math geek. I could never get more than one side of the cube to be a solid color, but I was quite handy with a screwdriver by the time I was in 5th grade (which is when this fad was going on) and I had no problem “solving” the Rubik’s Cube that way.

86

And I also had Pound Puppies. And Kitties. I had a little white poodle newborn, that was my first one ever. She had a pink bow, and she was so adorable. I named her Genevieve. I had a large brown cat and a tiny little kitten. They didn’t have names. Hehe. :slight_smile:

87

Anyone remember the little stuffed Bunnies/Cats/Dogs that “gave birth” to tiny beanie bunnies/kittens/puppies via a velcro seam on the bottom of their stomach?
I had a bunny one. She had 4 baby bunnies, all in different poses. Don’t remember what they were called though…

88

They were Puppy (Kitty/Bunny/Whatever) Surprise. I have one. Mine has three puppies; a boy and two girls.

89

I forgot to own up to my Beanie collection. As God is my witness, I don’t know what got into me, but a few years ago a friend and I would come back with half a dozen new ones between us every time we passed a certain drug store on our way to lunch. See, they had this deal, by 4 get 1 free…

I still have them all, but I think the only ones I’ll end up keeping in the long run are the cats and a few that were given to me as gifts, like the cute little brown bat.

A word about the Rubik’s Cube-- my cousin, may he rot in hell, switched the stickers around on one of the corner pieces. I had solved the damn thing only to find that the colors on this one corner would never be in the right position. Thing is, I didn’t realize he had made the switch-- I thought I’d screwed up the puzzle! It wasn’t until later on that I realized it wasn’t physically possible for the colors on that corner piece to be in the positions they were in, and remembered my dear cousin messing with the stickers.

My Cabbage Patch Doll’s name was Corneal Ernesta, btw, and she was a newborn. Awwww.

90

My family got in on the creepy crawlers fad the first time around. They made a comeback about 10 years ago, in time for my nephews.

91

Wacky Packages, no doubt. Star Wars when it first came out. Rubik’s Cube.

Currenlty, I am part of the harry Potter fanaticism. Yes, I am 33 years old and I am anxiously awaiting the next book as well as the movie.

92

No, I had a pair. They were purple and chartreuse. :eek:

(Hey, when you’re ten, purple and chartreuse look really good!)

And I owned a lot of the '80s stuff under discussion. (Including Gak. Gak was fun.) In fact, this whole thread reminds me of those “Are you a child of the '80s?” pop-quizzes that are floating around the Internet.

Of course, when I was a kid I was at the utmost tail-end of everything trendy…

Re Beanie Babies: the unofficial mascot of the UMGASS HMS Pinafore was a Beanie Baby dubbed “Kinky Dog,” who sported a leather vest and handcuffs, and had a…slightly revised poem on his tag. (I don’t remember how it went, but it was pants-soakingly funny.)

93

OMG! Wacky Packages! When I was 7 or 8, I too collected tons and tons of those. I also collected baseball cards. I wound up with more of those little sticks of hard, tasteless gum than I knew what to do with. If I still had that collection, it’d doubtless be worth a fortune by now.

And, 25 years later, I must have collected more than 4000 Magic: the Gathering cards in the first two years they were released (1995-96??). (If you don’t know M:tG, just think of Pokemon Cards designed for adolescents and adults.) Egad, it was like a drug habit… one formed in childhood and never really kicked. And those cards are worthless and will never be worth anything near what I paid for them.

It was especially unusual because I usually scoff at fads and develop my own tastes and habits.

94

Oh I just thought of a spinoff thread for this, but I’ll pose the question here: What was the craziest thing you did to obtain these product fads? I stood in line forever. I sold lemonade, my other toys, and my soul to satan himself just to get the “newbies” and “old retireds”.
How about you guys?

95

The interval between the time that I was socially inept enough not to have any awareness of fads and the time that I became enough of an adult to purposely not follow them was just long enough for my brother to get me obsessed with Magic cards.

When I moved out, I sold my entire collection for $200 - I don’t want to think of how much money I had “invested” in them over the course of the previous three years - except for my pretty good green/white deck (which is probably now utterly obsolete due to rules changes) and a very few cards which I really like just for themselves (the Serra Angel I got in my very first deck, Autumn Willow, my Italian Equinox,…)

I don’t think I’ve played a game of it in a year and a half.

It wasn’t a total loss though… one day when I was sixteen, while shopping for Magic cards I ran into a guy I had met a few days previous… one thing led to another and I went back to his place, where he cured my virginity. Which I understand is the opposite of the usual effect of playing too much Magic… :smiley:

96

Ha. He “cured” your virginity. I wonder if TV evangelists can cure stuff like that.

[evangelist voice]
"And with the power of the lord…I proclaim you…HEALED of your virginity. NO MORE will you be considered innocent. NO MORE. Now come to Jeeeeezus
[/evangelist voice]