Micro Machines	Speak N'Spell	Boob Tubes

Nerds became a hot commodity in the 1980s.  Wealthy and brainy computer wizards like Bill Gates and Stephen Wozniak helped.  So did movies like Revenge of the Nerds, Lucas, Stand by Me, and Peggy Sue Got Married. TV joined the nerd ranks with ABC's hit series Head of the Class.  Kids loved eating Sweetarts, Skittles, Nerds, Runts and Hubba Bubba Chewing Gum.
Collectibles were big in the 1980s.  Kids went crazy over E.T. paraphernalia, Cabbage Patch dolls, Care Bears, Micro Machines, video games (Nintendo, Pac Man, Game Boy), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Garbage Pail Kids, GI Joe, Hug-a-Bunch, Little Professor calculators, Speak `N' Spell, Smurfs, Matchbox car stunt tracks, My Little Pony, My Pet Monster, Rainbow Brite, Pound Puppies, He-Man and She-Ra action figures, Garfield, Boob Tubes, Star Wars action figures, Strawberry Shortcake, Transformers, Wuzzles and Barbies (now Hispanic, Black, Asian). 

Trivial Pursuit	Nodding dog	Rollerblading

Nodding Dogs: A popular accessory in the back window of cars in the 1980s was a nodding dog. It was essentially a toy dog of a kind that are longer than they are high, but with its head separated from the body and balanced on a pivot. As the car moved, the dog's head bobbed up and down.

Rollerblading: In the latter stage of the 1980s, the exercise and fitness industry was overwhelmed by a skyrocketing interest in inline skates, known as rollerblades. In 1980, Scott and Brennan Olson created a company which they ran out of a Minneapolis garage which began manufacturing a line of inline skates which they called Rollerblades. The creation was based on skates that were initially developed in the Netherlands, where athletes used them to practice skating and racing on land. The Olsons decided to use them to practice playing hockey during the summer months. While their company, Rollerblades, Inc. enjoyed some early success, they gambled that the skates were more of a fitness product than necessarily a competitive sports product. The skates differed from traditional roller skates in that they had the four wheels lined up one after another instead of in a rectangle. This allowed for greater agility, maneuverability and speed. The inline skate industry would soon grow to more than $380 million per year in sales.

Trivial Pursuit: In December 1979, Chris Haney got together with his friend Scott Abbott and the two decided to create a new board game. After many concepts and iterations thereof, they finally settled on a fairly simple idea - a game that dealt with the who, what, why, where and when. Chris' wife suggested the name Trivial Pursuit and it stuck. The goal of the game is to earn wedges by answering questions from four of the six categories. The categories are represented by different colors and by answering a question correctly, you receive a matching color wedge. After earning four different wedges, you are then looking to move to the center of the board where you will have an opportunity to answer a final question in order to win.
After forming a company, Haney and Abbott began seeking investors and raised enough money to manufacture the board games. Game-maker Selchow and Righter helped to initiate a public relations and marketing strategy which helped to turn the game into a hit. Five years after developing the game, more than 3.5 million game sets had been sold. One year later, they sold 20 million units and by 2000 they had sold more than $1 billion dollars worth of game sets. As the game swept the world it was distributed in various languages and in different formats (including handheld electronic, desktop computer and online web-based versions).

Baby On Board Signs: Like many things, these signs started off as a good thing and quickly became an annoying, gimmicky eyesore. They originated in 1985 when a child-safety oriented company saw them as a way of letting parents inform drivers around them that extra care should be taken to protect the small inhabitants within. Initially, the public reacted very favorably to the signs, leading several other companies to begin marketing their own versions of the sign. Then they began selling signs carrying other messages, and little plastic hands that waved with the movement of the car, and this became their undoing. Besides the annoying silliness which caused many fellow drivers to shake their heads, the signs also posed a safety hazard as owners often placed them in areas which obstructed the driver's view. By 1990, the signs had been legislated out of existence.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles	Koosh ball

Dance Crazes: Though there were nowhere near the same number of dance crazes in the 80s as the 60s, many new songs did came with their own dance steps.
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Koosh Balls: During the 1988 Christmas season, the Koosh ball was the hottest toy on the shelves. The Koosh ball was a rubber ball filled with a jelly-like plasma and its outside consisted of hundreds of rubber spikes making it look like a soft and flexible porcupine that did not hurt to hold or squeeze. When someone sqeezed the object, the plasma caused it to squirm around in his hand while the spikes provided something to grip in one's hand. The koosk ball was developed by Scott Stillinger and Matt Button, the owners of Oddz On Products. The toys had great appeal with a suprising number of adult fans. It was estimated that 40% of the toys were purchased for adults to play with. Several million units were shipped from the next four years and were supported by an official user's guide "The Official Koosh Ball."

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: In 1983, Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman were working regular jobs when they were introduced and began working for a small local comic book publisher. While sitting around sketching and watching television one night, the pair began joking about the current genre of comic book superhero, with the two most popular themes centering around ninjas and mutants. Envisioning a silly parody, Laird and Eastman came up with a comical storyline of four turtles who were exposed to a radioactive substance which caused them to grow to human size proportions. Taken under the wing of the venerable sage Splinter (a rat who had undergone the same transformation and was trained by a master ninja warrior), the foursome used their unique abilities and training to fight against criminals, while always looking for teenage fun and frivolity.
The first issue of the comic book did so well it was reprinted three times. While this was a huge success for the authors, it was a small foreshadowing of what was soon to come. The turtles (Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello) were soon found on the cover of magazines, lunchboxes, school folders and represented in television cartoons, action figures and movies. By 1990, an ainimated cartoon appeared each day on more than 125 television stations, the movies were hits at the box office, and the comic book was selling at a rate of 125,000 each month, making it the most successful black and white comic book in history. While the turtles have not quite disappeared, they suffered from oversaturation.

Newton's Ball	Pac-Man	Rubik's Cube

Newton's Balls: The first of many executive toys to come onto the market in the 1980s. Newton's Balls were a series of chrome ball-bearings suspended from a metal frame, which could be pulled back and released to cause the balls to move in rhythm and make a (supposedly soothing) repetitive, clicking sound.

Pac-Man: The video game PAC-Man took the market by storm in 1981. A Japanese computer firm, Namco Limited, modelled the game after Paku, a Japanese folk hero known for his appetite. Bally Manufacturing bought the U.S. rights in 1980 and turned it into a video game a year later. The game was simple, PAC-Man had to eat all the dots in a maze, staying alive by running from ghosts, called Galaxians, found in the maze. If PAC-Man ate a giant dot, he could eat his ghostly enemies. To regain strength, he needed to eat floating fruit in the maze. PAC-Man quickly became seen on everything from clocks, cards, toys, and pajamas. Atari moved PAC-Man into households with the introduction of the PAC-Man video game. Around 1982, PAC-Man hit a slump and the end followed soon after.

Cabbage Patch Dolls: They had pudgy faces, stumpy arms and small close-set eyes and were dramatically different from the traditional cute baby doll. Each was subtly different from every other one as a computer randomly placed small changes in the manufacturing process for each doll. Cabbage Patch Dolls were by far the most wildly successful dolls of the 1980s. They were the brainchild of Xavier Roberts, a sculptor living in Georgia. Roberts showcased the dolls in his art exhibit, dressing his assistants in maternity ward clothing and holding the dolls up for adoption. Instead of selling them, he allowed people to adopt them, passing on "official" birth certificates and adoption papers. Roberts' marketing gimmick worked brilliantly and sales exploded across the world. In many places, they were such a hot Christmas commodity that fistfights broke out between potential customers, and stores had to hold lotteries to determine eligible purchasers; police were called to help quell near riots. Sales grew dramatically from $60 million in their first year to more than $600 million in 1985 and other companies tried to profit from their success by creating facsimiles of the dolls. The dolls were unable to sustain the long term popularity, but not before becoming the biggest fad of the 1980s.

The Boom Box: Sony's new Walkman was at the tiny end of the portable hi fi range of products available in the 1980s; at the other end was the boom box, a radiocassette player that was a gigantic cumbersome piece of equipment. It followed the format of the regular radio cassette player except that it was hugh; it needed to be to house the huge speakers at either end. The Boom Box was carried on the shoulder - it was very much a 'boy toy' because of its sheer weight and size. The Boom Box was also known as the Ghetto Blasters as they became commonplace among the youths of the ghettos of America's big cities. When the breakdance craze hit in the mid 1980s, Ghetto Blasters that provided the music.

Rubik's Cube: Erno Rubik was an Architecture Professor at the Budapest School of Commercial Art in Hungary - the world, however, knows him as the father of Rubik's Cube. The cube is a six sided object which splits into three rows and three columns, each of which slide up to 360 degrees. Each side of the cube has a certain color but when the cubes rows and columns are twisted or rotated, these colors move to other sides. The object of the game was to twist and rotate the cube until it was a multicolored mess and then figure out a way to methodically return it to its original state. While some younger children were able to determine the solution in mere minutes, in actuality, there were more than 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible positions into which the cube could be manipulated.
Originally, Professor Rubik designed the small puzzle as a way of teaching his students about three dimensional objects, but after securing a patent for it in 1975, he began marketing it. When toy manufacturer Ideal Toys contracted with him to produce it, the cube's popularity skyrocketed, with sales of more than 4.5 million units in 1980. Over a seven year period, more than 30 million units were sold with pirated versions and several sequels also popping up. As a companion to the puzzle, several books were written to provide hints and solutions to the puzzle - many of which went on to become the biggest sellers ever for their publishing houses.
At it's peak, the cube's popularity reached incredible and sometimes unhappy proportions. Stories abound that fans became so addicted that one developed tendinitus in her wrist from struggling with the puzzle and another was divorced by his wife for becoming so infatuated with the device - which she had bought him for Christmas! Around 1982, the cube's popularity finally began to decrease, largely because of its massive overexposure. Self help books popped up to enable people to kick the cube habit (with titles like "How to Live with a Cubaholic" and "101 Uses for a Dead Cube").