LGR - 1993 Toys"R"Us Catalog Nostalgia
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2025
- These magazines are pure nostalgic bliss. As a kid, I loved "shopping" with nothing more than my eyes, an inkpen, and my imagination.
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I was 20 and worked at Toys R Us during the 1993 holiday season. The nightmares came flooding back after watching your video. Thanks man.
Ok, boomer...
I worked there during the 1999 Pokemon card craze and the nightmares were even worse. Instituting a one pack per person policy, mobs outside the door before opening, seeing grown ass adults getting into fights over them.
Dame you old as fuck lol
@@Northrop-Grumman1991 Someday you'll hopefully be too kid
@@ElectroIsMyReligion nope already dead ☠️
as a kid I'd skip everything and go straight to the videogames. My parents never bought me many games and now that I'm older I understand why, we were poor and shit was expensive.
We would always just be years behind on video games for me as a child. I remember seeing new games come out and then waiting like a year for it to be cheap enough for us to actually get.
+Waffle Wisard The same. I was still rocking an SNES during the N64 days. Good thing I had a cool aunt who got me Mortal Kombat 3. :D
parents bought us a playstation 3 or 4 years after it came out. I still rocked the SNES well into highschool though
+astrangeone and I had a n64 when the ps2 was out.
I still go straight to the videogames Aisle and I'm 24.
2:25 I have... had? have? that McDonald's "burger" maker. The patty was made from peanut butter, Rice Krispies, and Quik chocolate powder (pre-NesQuik rebrand) that you'd grind up in the tube on the right (and believe me, despite best efforts that thing was NEVER properly clean again after first use). Then you'd shape the patty by pressing it against the "grill" with the funky red-and-purple concave platen that released a wind-up dial on the back of the machine, creating a "sizzling" noise. Then you'd set it on a vanilla wafer "bun" and optionally, top with "tomatoes" and "pickles" cut out of Fruit Roll-ups, if you could ever actually punch those shapes out with the provided plastic cookie cutter tokens with completely flat edges. Then there were also the ketchup and mustard dispensers that you'd fill with red and yellow cake icing... Even as a 7-year old one mouthful of the end product was enough to make me feel ill.
And as someone who spent almost 4 years at a McDonald's in the interim, I can tell you that neither the toy nor the occupation are as glamorous as marketing would make them seem.
I had this entire set. The fry maker was just a roller you stuck a slice of bread in and it sliced the bread into fry like strips 🤣
Lol! Merry Diabeetus, kids
So much nostalgia. As a kid I always got excited when Toys R Us sent out their holiday catalog.
Real talk: I'd still play with 90% of this stuff.
Likewise.
+Lazy Game Reviews I like turtles
TYT ARE GLORIFIED GOOGLERS Na, I said the first thing that came to my mind... that was the little kid who at an interview just said that.
I like saying random things at random comments.
Random
+alanboro _A'int nobody got time fer dat._
+The Obsolete Geek i have a lot of these toys the mega tron,criss cross crash, all my brothers old toys i got when he was done with them because hes older than me by a bit
The battery pack for game gear was half the price of a game gear?! WHAT
Kinda reminds me of situation in my country from 2000's when printers with free ink cartridges would cost less than buying cartridges alone, cause cartridge company had a monopoly and overblew the retail price, while printer producers got cartridges for normal price.
@@spiddy1335 it is still like that here in the US
Just look at the SNES prices. All the games are $55-70, but the system itself is listed at only $90.
They knew what they had there. Game Gear took 6 AA batteries and lasted MAYBE 5-6 hours if you were lucky. If you used that thing regularly, you'd pay more than that in batteries within a month or two.
shit like this is why to this day, the US market is a hostile market for peripherals and if a game benefits from or needs one, it best come bundled in with it.
japanese market is much more accepting and lenient towards peripheral purchases, which is why you see japanese games still utilise them here and there.
LGR: I am with you, the doll houses and stuff seemed super fun. I wished they weren't pink and I could have them. I found my comfort in Micro Machines and Mighty Max when garage sales finally supplied such a thing. Scaled, real life living is fascinating to a kid.
I never got any of the stuff in the Toys R Us catalog, instead I got their dollar store equivalents or whatever junk was left over on the clearance rack that had parts missing. Still had good times!
Would you make your own toys?
good to hear I'm not the only guy that played with dolls as a child
AND YES THE FAKE FOOD SETS THOSE WERE THE BEST
Lol, my sister used to have dolls and plastic food, so i would say "im playing with her" just hidding that i loved to.
My dad would ask me to use my sister's Barbies to recreate arguments I overheard coming from my aunt and grandma. They babysat me, and I was privy to MANY juicy bits of info, much of which he'd pass on to my mom. Twisted, but hell if it didn't make my pop and I laugh together!!
Now I really want a TV show with the Harley Davidson kid and the Barbie Lamborghini kid having adventures.
Glad you're enjoying the catalog! I knew you'd love it. I have this, along with the ones from 1994 and 1995 and all three are very intensely nostalgic for me. Such fond memories of going down every aisle of the Toys R Us across from Carolina Circle Mall as a kid and wanting everything. Thanks for the shoutout and again, glad you enjoy!!!
You bet man, thanks so much for sending it!
All the kids in these ads are adults now... crazy :o
Or dead...
KLightningBolt Way to take a dark turn :/
MetroidSigma If they died by being burnt alive, that's the only way I could see this getting darker.
Because of the burnt skin. That's dark.
search your feelings Darrark you know it to be possible
Darrark I don’t like it
I never had the thrill of walking through a Toys R Us catalog as a kid (or hell, even a Toys R Us) but when Christmas rolled around and all the toy fliters came in with the newspaper, I would marvel and pine at all the great stuff there. I did that a lot with ad fliers, game magazines, etc. - just sort of hope I could get my hands on even a small bit of the stuff. I would even do a nerdy little Pokemon scrapbook, I wanted to get into that game so bad. Hey, I got a Game Boy Color and Pokemon eventually, so I guess some of that wishing worked!
About halfway through this, Clint went into full pizza-craving mode.
A surprisingly common occurrence.
$69.99 1993 is around $114.85 today and
$89.99 1993 is around $147.67 today... this is why video rental stores were popular back then.
This brought back memories I didn't know I had.
This was great! Brought back memories! You should do more of these if you ever get anymore 90's or early 2000's Toys R us Catalogs. My brother had that Enterprise!
Man! All of this just screams nostalgia!
R.I.P. Toys"R"Us
I remember coming home from school when I was little and the toys r us giraffe would call me and tell me happy birthday. Then my mom would take me to Toys R Us and they had this treasure chest and you could pick one thing out of it for your birthday for free. It was mostly things under $5 but I thought that was the coolest shit as a kid.
That asshole quit calling me for my birthday when I turned 13 though...
Damn 💀
Omg I was 7 and remember so much from this!!! The JC Penny catalogs were my favorite as well!
More like a catalog of broken dreams never meant to come true.
Ain't that the truth, man..
@@LGR most of those toys were pretty crappy anyway (including those we wanted to have the most back then)
@@chronosssfmsd for real. decades later, I would have rather gone outside and gone hiking like I do more of now.
That's lindsay lohan!!
6:15
+raccoonstarsmember holy hell it is.... i thought i did recognize her... but i wasnt sure because Clint didnt speak about it :P
It is! She was a model before acting.
+lilmoomoo :D have you seen her lately?
I have seen her pics here and there on celebrity gossip blogs. I'm guessing she's low key nowadays
I would have been 2-3 depending on when this catalogue came out... and yet I remember a lot of this stuff. How? Also, 13:14... that Batmobile was all I ever wanted... *wipes eyes*
Nobody seems to remember that 8-bit and 16-bit games cost so much! You try to tell people that $60 isn't that bad for games nowadays because SNES carts were that much and more and they don't believe it. You start factoring in inflation and it's crazy.
We got spoiled by the early 2000's when resales of all those old games were cheap.
@@xprincexofxsavagesx I used to go to flea markets in the 90s and early 2000s and games were indeed cheap and the selection was great too.
@@marccaselle8108 late 2000s to about 2013 you could still go to open air market and get SNES games cheap as fuuuuck.
basically right before people started just comparing to ebay prices.
now the resale market is absurdly high even for consoles that went out just a decade ago, in comparison. the days of bottoming out like that are over it seems...
I like your videos because they are so relaxing and informative at the same time. I chalk it up to your casual presentation.
Honestly, thank you so much for these videos, your pleasant voice and positive demeanor. I suffer from horrible Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and I'm having a bout right now that is basically destabilizing me, and your videos queued in my watch later calmed my mind and made me laugh and forget about counting every goddamned thing I do. Also, holy crap, that Lego train is so teeny weenie (at least compared with today's Lego trains) and is still like a hundred bucks!
Gotta love being apart of the first 5 people to see this. Patreon for the win ;)
Thanks for the support!
Lazy Game Reviews Shhh Clint, Trying to watch LGR. Haha, No worries man! I shall continue to support. Like, Who doesn't like old catalogs?! In-fact if i find some ill send them your way. (Aussie Catalogs!)
I definitely had the windbreaker dinosaur as a baby. I had a barney obsession so parents bought anything purple dino. I had a video painter too and I REALLY wish I still had it. Thanks for the throwback
Nickelodeon made some fun toys. I miss Nickelodeon as a major brand instead of just a Spongebob and TMNT re-run network and sometimes movie financier.
Dracomut never see it. But I'm super biased towards 80s and 90s turtles.
*Looks at Lucy Loud figure on desk.* Sigh...
What a nice episode! I loved my Kenya dolls and as a kid I really enjoyed getting the big Toys R Us book and seeing what were the hot new toys each year! It's kind of sad now to hear that they've recently filed for bankruptcy but at least they're not closing down their stores they say, its seems to be just a restructuring.
Love those early 90s catalogues. Awesome fun, aesthetics and spirit. Thank you for the trip and your commentary.
You're a magician, you time warped me back to age 13. Thank you!!! Good stuff.
I had to choose between getting a Super Nintendo and the Motorcycle Bicycle for Christmas. It was the hardest decision I had to make in my entire life.
Supernintendo all the way, dude, are you kidding me?
what did you get??
Oh jesus, Forbidden Bridge. Board James flashbacks, Board James flashbacks...
Nice relaxing flip through
Dream Phone? Take that thing out of here before Board James sees it
CineMassacare!
I thought that I was the only one in panic when that thing appeared. Curse you James!
I just wanna be your dream phone
And forbidden bridge, and loopin Louie and omega virus, and donut disaster, and domino rally.
Wow, so nostalgic. I can now see where some of my relatives shopped for Christmas in 1993. Distinctly remember getting that electronic Hot Shots Basketball game and that Tower of the Wizard King board game around that time.
I remember these magazines, the joys as a kid!
2:01, the house on the upper right hand side, I have that exact house. LOL. :D 2-XL was a quizzing robot where he would ask you questions and you have to press one of his four buttons hoping to get the right answer. Teddy Ruxpin was just an interactive storyteller that also used tapes. Ironically a toy on the opposite page that was similar to him, but you didn't notice was TV Teddy. Now he was similar to Teddy Ruxpin of sorts. He didn't tell stories (though he may have done I don't know) but he interacted with specially made video cassettes.
I had the Dream Phone, it tried to stab me and kill my whole family.
James Rolfe fan, huh?
As soon as I saw Dream phone on there, I instantly thought of Board James! lol
BOARDJAaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMES
I've been dreaming...dreaming about Dream Phone!
@@chestosneakoinc Same!
Oh my gosh! You are THE champion with a heart of gold for sharing this nostalgic goldmine!!! When this catalog would come around each year, mass hysteria would erupt. Lol I was 8 in '93 so I'm right there with ya! And I remember this particular catalog the most. Thank you so much, you made my day! 💕💕💕✌🏽✌🏽✌🏽
LOL Pretty sure that's Lindsey Lohan at 6:05, great nostalgia trip watching this with my sister, we used to go through the catalogues picking one thing each from every page.
Haha, thought the same thing. It definitely looks like her.
I read on Retro Junk that it _is_ Lindsay Lohan, haha.
+Lazy Game Reviews I like how the video painter has the exercise still from Punch-Out on NES on the screen.
What the fuck happened to her
how did you post this 4 days ago
toys r us was such a wonderful place to go as a kid? I do believe you mean it's just a wonderful place to go in general, heck I went there on my 21st birthday and bought some legos
Fun fact: I still have a creepy crawlers kit that I use to make customized fishing lures and bait. Its more useful than you might think
this brings back memories for me because even though i was born in 2004 my school still had those toys
Oh man.... So many memories!
+EposVox You geek out when you see this stuff. Then ive bought things like the talkboy from a car boot sale... And you remember that it sucked! lol, it was fun for approximately 1 minute! The pictures are more nostalgic than the items. I found an old tiger electronic game a while back, spent money on batteries, turned it on, and remembered how much it sucked!
Your impersonation of the "windbreaker dinosaur" was spot on. My brother had one he named Gasser because it sounded like a squeaky fart.
$65 in 1993 is equivalent to $112 in 2017. Explains why we only have a few games. Insane
I LOVE this video!!!
Reliving my childhood just as you are! Thanks for the awesome upload!
I'm convinced now: every LGR video includes the words "as a kid"! :p
Thank you for the nostalgia trip, LGR. I still remember reading the many catalogs around Christmas when i was a kid, shopping with my imagination and imagining all the cool stuff i could do if i had the toys i wanted.
Good times~
You should totally review early 90's toy and game ads.
Look up nostalgia critic commercials on youtube
I wasn't sure I was going to like this until, "That's all you're going to do as you grow up and your dreams are crushed." Your inadvertent comedy always has a way of making me laugh harder than it should.
They still make the Whale Teeter Totter! My nephew got one for his first birthday three weeks ago! Haha
Holy shit!! I cant believe they have the DinoRoars! I still have mine in my basement so I can spread the dreadful noise to others. Man I love those things...
6:24 I totally thought the little girl was lindsay lohan! (technically it kinda could be..)
+jemma callow It is her.
+jemma callow LOL you nailed it. It is her ... I was just about to make the same comment. You beat me to it. :)
+GooseGanja Ditto! I thought at first she might've been too young in '93 , but The Parent Trap remake was only a couple of years after this so yeah. Cool. :)
A great handful of these toys have been recalled and/or banned from resale.. It's awesome to look back at these. I have had that Fixin Frank toy in my Halloween stuff for a long time and had no idea what it was. Awsome video!
HEEEEEECCCKKKKK YEEEESSSSSS! I want to see a series of these for every year you can get your hands on :)
Also going through these catalogues was one of my favourite things to do coming up to christmas. I would go through cover to cover and write down everything I wanted - and probably got none of it haha.
8:00
Three Board James games, plus domino rally.
Rad.
I had the Vtech Video Painter - still do and it still works. It was the absolute best toy of all time. I remember getting it for Christmas when I was about 5, bringing it to my cousins' house, everyone loved it. One thing you could do was put a blank VHS tape in as you played, hit record, and it would actually RECORD YOU DRAWING and making various artworks, and you had a special tape to play back later. I remember drawing Buster and Babs from Tiny Toons - my dad was super impressed.
I remember reading these catalogs all the time when I was a kid. Fucking grew up poor as shit though so I never got the chance to actually experience any of them until I became older or went to my rich friend's house.... #tears
It's really nice that you're not ashamed to admit that you kind of liked dolls and dollhouses as a kid. Toys are for everyone after all! While this catalogue is just a tad before my time I do remember seeing a few of these toys, and as a toy collector it's a really neat piece of history :D
2:56
We had a talking Barney toy. We broke it somehow to the point where it would just keep saying 'Hello' over and over again...
So mom smashed it's voicebox with a hammer.
I got a huge kick out of this vid, Clint. I'm one year older than you but we had the same childhood down to hover 95. Thanks again for a great trip!
Hi kids! We're home early!
+Ｒｕｓｈｎｅｒｄ "Now you can be as clever as kevin!" Weird the things you remember.
I can smell cherries 1:39 🥹🍒 Baby All Gone was the best! BIG FRANK! His eyes glowed too! Thanks for the nostalgia! 6:23 Lindsay Lohan 😆
10:02 - I had that grey Gaucho Jeep as a kid. Mom won it in some lottery raffle the local newspaper had.
They came and delivered it to our door. Got my picture in the paper too.. Happiest kid in town. :)
3:52
a small child just found out santa isn't real
Thanks LGR for reminding me how cool our generation was for toys. I remember a lot of the commercials and even had a few of those toys.
Really luv yo man with ALL your awesome reviews!
Thank you!
When I Was Little I used to have a barbecue play set great video I love ToysRUs
6:39 I'm like 99% sure that's a young Lindsay Lohan
+Derek Lang i look at it and i was like ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
+Derek Lang Yep, jut researched it and she did Toys R Us print ads.
I had that Matchbox Motorcity carwash. When ever me and my brother would spend a few day's at my grandparents we always got to chose a toy from my then single uncle. He always spoiled us as he didn't had kids on his own. That carwash was freaking awesome, you could pull levers and the car would go in and you hit a button to spray water on the cars, then turn the last part around quickly to make it dry up (it never dried up that way but who cared you had a carwash!).
Watching this brings me back to my childhood, dreaming away for hours with all those great toy's. Never really got anything i would ask from Sinterklaas (I'm dutch we have Sinterklaas earlyer in december instead of asking presents for christmas). But i didn't care, those books were always fun to just look at all the toy's, leaving the games section for last :3
I was always jalous on the kids in those books cause i thought they would get the toy's.....until a kid in my class got to be one of the childmodels and we learned he didn't get to keep one toy. Another illusion broken at a young age :(
Oh my god, the childhood is real. I'm 5 years old again.
Wow this brings back memories. I was in 4th grade when the '93 catalog came out. My brother and I went to the Extended Day daycare after school. The program was given some quantity of money and the manager decided to let us kids decide what we would get with the money. So they handed a bunch of us these catalogs and told us to circle what we wanted for the program. And they went out and bought it! It was surreal.
6:22 is that Lindsay Lohan?
My girlfriend was saying the same. I guess you two are right. Haha.
that was my immediate first thought. lol
Maybe: "...[Lindsay's parents] signed their eldest daughter to the Ford modeling agency when she was three years old. She eventually appeared in print ads for Toys R Us and also modeled for Calvin Klein Kids" www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/lindsay-lohan/biography
holy crap
Ren K it totally looks like her.
Another awesome video! I hope you do more of these. So much nastalgia.
you should do more stuff like this, hell do it with old issues of pc gamer and nintendo power XD
+Kite198 I would love to see him do issues of Sega Vision if he can find them also.
lol the minute you turned to the bike page I was reminded of the many bikes I had stolen/wrecked as a kid. great nostalgia trip!
I would have been 14 so I would have turned straight to the video game section by that age.
OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH !! I love this video and memory reboot.
I remember back in, jeeze, 92? when my mom bought me Bigfoot for the NES, and it was $50. We should count ourselves lucky that here in 2016 videogames have been seemingly untouched by inflation.
+quelin1 Seems the opposite. You don't see any 70 dollar games (yet, at least). And it seems like just in the last couple years they started going from 50 to 60. Kind of surprising really, they have to cost a lot more to make now than they used to, at least a lot of them.
Dude... this is amazing. Thank you for sharing this.
18.99 for a Tiger handheld or 18.99 for Kirby. Kirby on Gameboy any day
I had one of those fisher price tape recorders as a child! It was awesome! Thanks for the nostalgia!
I used to build cities on my room floor. All floor was dedicated to a city life. I had a lot of boxes, bricks, constructors like "Hugo" (or whatever they were called) and "Lego". I built tons of houses, city blocks with streets. I had a lot of trees from different game sets and I used them all. Humans from "Kinder" were walking around my city - tons of them. I used to place them as pedestrians. I also had ton of small cars as you could buy then separately and as sets in my country. There was a long train track along my city with a real train - it was carrying passengers from one end to other. Bus stops, houses, apartment buildings, banks, cemetery, playgrounds, hospital, fire and police stations, even bazaar were there. I had special police, medical and firefighting cars to go along with institutions. My green carpet was city ground and plane, uncovered floor around the carpet were "water" to me so I could make harbor. With real or improvised ships. And all of this had reasonable scale - I didn`t put small houses and big people together.
I used to incorporate different game sets to story. One day there were enemy soldiers attacking the city. Other day - dinosaurs. One time a 747 crashed in a middle of a city (I had a model of the plane). Train catastrophes, ghosts, treasure hunting - every story was happening in my city which every time was built after the same layout. I had my main house with a main character - small shining in a dark dog-humanoid "Kinder" toy.
After a day of playing I used to smash everything with a blanket (it was fire to me) and check out "the victims": in wich position my "Kinder" people were found - burred under rubble (bricks), covered by cars or trees and so on.
This led me to gaming. The story telling. It has impact on me even now.
I don't know what you're talking about, MAgna Doodle was the best! I could never draw with an etcha scetch this you didn't have to have a constant line.
Based on every other video, I'd expect you to go through the specs and the inner workings of the catalog. "It comes in a sleek design held together by staples, like the kind you'd typically find in the 90s. They weren't the BEST, but you know, for the time, they were pretty good."
wow those ninja turtles only cost $3.69... My parents have a lot of explaining to do
+SirGeeeO According to this inflation calculator that i googled just now $3.69 is ~$6.05 in 2016.
+SirGeeeO adjusted for inflation that was 6.42. Money has lost its purchasing power by quite a bit...
hahaha yeah damn it !
And a Technodrome for only $15!
I loved these catalogs as a kid! Always full of pages of awesome-looking toys my family couldn't afford, ending with the best section of all - the video games!!! Though, I'm a bit younger so the heyday of my wishful Christmas gifts involved N64 and PlayStation 1. I didn't get to experience the N64 till it was already old news but I did get to play Final Fantasy VII, my first console game, on the PS eventually. Even though we couldn't afford most of what was in here it was still so fun to look at and hope for, and the Humongous Entertainment games that would show up under the tree instead were still a nice surprise.
Page 38 - is that Lindsay Lohan??? In '93, she would have been about that age. EDIT: After some googling, IT IS HER! Man, has her career taken off....
And I have both the Starship Enterprise (x2 actually) and the Transporter. I remember thinking they'd be nostalgia enough to be an investment....but they, alas, did not become that.
+Patrick Daniels I jokingly thought it was her in my head. Can't believe it actually is! Ha
Thanks so much for this upload I love these old catalogues.
1993 really doesn't feel very long ago to me.. I was 18
+SimderZ I was 17
GreyWolfLeaderTW It feels more recent than 2003. lol
I was -7 years old
i loved those electric race tracks with the cars and the guns you use to control them. my dad was really into cars and i grew up around muscle cars and seeing him in his garage working on his. he always got me car related toys and those race tracks were my favorite. the smell of burning electricity lol. nostalgia.
i don't wanna grow up i'm a toys r us kid
Awesome video! What a flashback 👍 Thank you for making this 😊
6:30 is that friggin Lindsay Lohan??
That's what I was wondering too!
It friggin is!
Yeah I was thinking that too lol. I was wondering if he was going to point it out.
100% is her. Before her TV/Disney stuff she was a child model. Find an online picture of her with freckles and compare the darker freckles under the outer corner of her eye (on the left, her right eye).
Me and my fiancée bought her daughter an Eazy bake oven for Christmas a couple years ago. I used it far more than she did. This catalog is just a bit past my child hood as I was 13 in 93 so I went straight to the Video game section at that time (still do). For me the toys I most fondly remember was G.I. Joe, and especially the M.A.S.K action figures and vehicles.
working at McDonald's right now...I had a shit ton of The toys... you got to real