Toys 'R' Us a trip down memory lane with redpill as your time traveling tour guide to the age of dinosaurs

yesterday wed March 14 2018

i observed the death of Stephen Hawking 1942-2018

today i click on the news

Toys 'R' Us

Toys 'R' Us goes out of business, 30,000 jobs at stake
By Tracy Rucinski and Abinaya Vijayaraghavan

(Reuters) - Iconic toy retailer Toys 'R' Us Inc the will shutter or sell its stores in the United States after failing to find a buyer or reach a deal to restructure billions in debt, putting at risk about 30,000 jobs.

The closure is a blow to hundreds of toy makers that sell their products at the chain's U.S. stores, including Barbie maker Mattel Inc, board game company Hasbro Inc and vendors like Lego.

With shoppers flocking to Amazon.com Inc and children choosing electronic gadgets over toys, Toys 'R' Us has struggled to boost sales and service debt following a $6.6-illion leveraged buyout by private equity firms in 2005.

and

Without Toys R Us, 30,000 jobs, a black hole for toy makers
Associated Press
Anne d'Innocenzio, AP Retail Writer
NEW YORK (AP) -- The demise of Toys R Us will have a ripple effect on everything from toy makers to consumers to landlords.

The 70-year-old retailer is headed toward shuttering its U.S. operations, jeopardizing the jobs of some 30,000 employees while spelling the end for a chain known to generations of children and parents for its sprawling stores and Geoffrey the giraffe mascot.

so Toys 'R' Us along with Stephen Hawking are both dead.

as a young boy of the 1980s Toys 'R' Us was an important part of my life.

i'm a time traveler of the 80s. my travel from the past towards the future. so on Thu Mar 15, 2018 i will time travel to the 80s when I went to Toys 'R' Us

Toys 'R' Us is where my parents bought for me gi Joe Action figures storm shadow cobra ninja. Star Wars action figures Buba Fett. And Transformers Optimus Prime. Other boys had other action figures so we had a party in which we bring our action figures to play and we mixed and match so we had luke skywalker battle cobra ninja.

80s were also the time of Saturday morning cartoons which i watched, from He-Man to Smurfs to Dungeons and Dragons. It also doubled as advertisement, after watching Transformers cartoon and GI Joe cartoon, we wanted the toys and action figures. I still remember my mom coming home from work and presenting to me the Optimus Prime transformer she bought at Toys 'R' Us.

Across the street from my local Toys 'R' Us was another toy store, Childs World, which also sold toys.

TBH after playing with action figures i kinda got bored and lost interest. For example, after playing with Cobra Ninja and Optimus Prime for several hours I kinda lost all interest in them and then stored them, though I did show other boys in my neighborhood when they came over.

It was only cool for like 10 minutes.

As my interest in action figures waned, the 80s were also the time when there was the introduction of video game consoles, and in particular the atari 2600. It was at Toys 'R' Us that I saw rows of Commodore 64 behind glass locked displays. Along with Adam computer and Atari computers.
And game consoles the Atari 2600 and 5200, Coleco Vision, Vetrex, Intellivision, and another area where they sold cartridges for those games. all locked behind glass displays. an employee with a key had to open them to prevent theft.

I didn't own them but i knew boys who did and I played them. The one exception, my dad bought and came home with a Vetrex. Only we got it from Montgomery Ward, another defunct business.

I spent countless hours playing those. It was also at Toys 'R' Us that I got both the Sega Master System and the original Nintendo. I initially had my parents buy Sega, but when I saw all the games and everyone with Nintendo, they refunded under Toys 'R' Us generous return policy I think it was 90 days, and I got a Nintendo. In some ways I preferred Sega but all the games and all the boys had Nintendo and same with games. I still like Ghost House on Sega.

My very first bicycle was also purchased from Toys 'R' Us

It was a very long bicycle to my Toys 'R' Us as I lived in a residential suburb and Toys 'R' Us was in a business district but I would go there to look at cartridges of games and I couldn't help but notice all the games were for Nintendo, not Sega.


In the vicinity of the business of Toys 'R' Us was also a Radio Shack, and a computer store outlet.
It was Radio Shack that I got my family to buy my first home computer the Tandy 1000sx with 8088 7.16 mhz CM-11 and upgrade to 640k ram. It was the computer store where I saw the IBM PS/2 model 30 and 50 and 60 sold for like $3000+ in 1980's dollars. My school had Apple 2E but I didn't know where to buy them. Radio Shack nor computer store sold Apple 2e's or Macintosh.

In college I was actually able to sell my 8088 7.16 mhz Tandy 1000sx
But yeah I used it for games like Kings Quest, Space Quest Black Couldron, Thexder, mostly Sierra Games. PC DOS since a lot of other kids I knew also owned IBM PC or Leading Edge Model D and we traded. Tandy had offered the best gaming experience on a pc the enhanced the pc with 16 color graphics and 3-voice sound but it was SLOOW and hard drives were too expensive. Tandy Radio Shack wanted $799 for 20meg hard card.

Even after I left childhood and entered high school and college I visited Toys 'R' Us for both Playstation 1 and N64 games. This was before Gamestop.

Eventually I switched over to Gamestop and renting games at Video rental stores, like BlockBuster which have all also gone out of business.

I obviously spent a lot more time playing video games than with action figures. COD got me interested in WW2 and tanks.

The local mall had an arcade where you buy tokens 4 for a dollar and then used tokens to play arcade games. It has since went out of business. Galaga and Darius and Street Fighter were my favorites.

The local mall also had a small business owned pet store. It has also since went out of business, though Petsmart and Petco are still around. Some Walmart sell fish, and there are marine fish specialty stores still in business.

I also liked comics and I still have my collection from a time when they sold for 75 cents. (!) yep you read that right. My comic books have the price printed on the cover 75 cents. (!) though they had a shit ton of advertisement for dubious products like x-ray products that lets you see through clothing. and sea monkeys which is where i got the idea. ultimately I bought my own sea monkeys from Toys 'R' Us. it worked but the crittters didnt look like what was on the box and in the comic book

I did chores for my parents like clean dishes floors cut the lawn and exchange I got 75 cents. my local mall had book stores, and other malls had different book stores which had comic books.
they included BD Dalton and Crown Bookstore and Books a million several others I forget. Borders books store had a lot of comics. I mostly bought Xmen GI Joe and Transformer comics. At Borders I bought star wars comics. They have all gone out of business and died. Only Barnes lives and they don't carry comic books though they do carry graphics novels. There used to be a lot of CD only music stores which have since went out of business.

I also witness the deaths of many Bestbuy competitors from Fretter to Circuit City to High land to several others i've forgotten, one was very high end.

So as a time traveler in my travel through time I've seen Toys 'R' Us, Child World, Radio Shack Montgomery Ward, arcades, Block Buster video rental stores, specialized computer stores, even pet stores, and book stores specialty comic book stores all die.

several malls i visited as a kid also died and went out of business and closed. Richard Simmons fitness guy and Tiffany the 80s pop star actually sang in these malls, though i wasn't there on the day they were there, it was in my local news.

I actually had an Adam Walsh experience in that the local Montgomery wards had a Vetrix and there was a lot of boys including me who wanted to play it. Adam Walsh in Florida was in a store that had a game console like atari 2600 when there was a fight and everyone was kicked out, which was how he was abducted. In my case there was no fight we took turns. Consoles were expensive and didn't do much the atari 2600 wasn't that great. but there was nothing else like it, except things like Vetrex and Coleco vision.

As a kid I went to the mall to spend ours playing a frog game on intellivision in Montgomery Ward or Toys R US where you jump on a lily pad and the goal was to shoot your tongue to catch flies. that's it. yet it was free and fun. In the background it starts day then slowly creeps to night.

perhaps one day Gamestop will also die as games are being moved away from DVD to digital distribution?

today's kids of course know none of this and are glued to their iphones and tablets. no more Saturday morning cartoons which went the way of the dinosaurs. perhaps no more action figures either. future generation of kids won't know what a toy store is, though Walmart and Target has sections for kids.

Today's death of Toys R US is like an asteroid that nuked the dinosaur age of childhood, an age when kids went to toy stores to buy action figures. i'm from that age, the age of the dinosaurs, an age when there were Saturday morning cartoons and action figures no internet no cell phones. this was also the age of the Oriental martial arts craze, the craze over bruce lee and ninjas and the Karate Kid. with mystical martial arts and mystical powers to dodge bullets and beat up bullies twice as big. with mystical wisdom and teaching.

an old age of the dinosaurs passes away and a new age of childhood is upon us.

there are photos of me as a toddler playing with this



Shogun warriors, complete with tiny parts a toddler can choke to death on and spring loaded fists and missiles that can gouge out toddler eyeballs but still fun

i wonder what kind of childhood girls of my generation and today play with. certainly nothing like i've written about. i know they played with barbie dolls cabbage patch kids and taking care of infant dolls like they were mothers as in changing diapers and feeding them with a bottle. as opposed to gi joe vs star wars vs transformers vs xmen war

with Toys R US gone, will the movie Toy Story from Pixar/Disney have any meaning to current and future generation of kids?

what kind of toys and action figures do todays parents buy their kids?

Toys R US RIP