Top 25 Toys That Ruled the 80’s

What are the best toys of the 1980’s? Today we are going through the most popular toy lines that defined a decade and influenced an entire generation.

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[thepadawancollectorofficial]

What are your top 5 toys of the 80s? Let us know, and please give this video a like to support the channel!

[bountyhunter]

Oh, brother, you have brought up so many memories with that video!
I'm so grateful that I was born in 1977 and had the chance to have and play with many creative toys in the 80's and 90's.
For me Star Wars, G.I Joe, Voltron, MASK, and Transformers will always be my top 5. Still, we can not forget A-TEAM / BATTLESTAR GALACTICA / BRAVESTAR / SILVER HAWKS / POWER RANGERS / RAMBO / ROBOCOP / THUNDERBIRDS / PLAYMOBILE / ULTRAMAN / BIKERS FROM MARS / MICRONAUTS and so many others!
(I was using my Sister's Little Pony stable for G.I Joe's secret headquarters...true story)

[MoparMcNeer]

My "Toy" childhood all in a single video. I may not have owned items from all these lines, but I certainly was aware of them all having grown up around them in the '80s.

Always love the added history and details you provide Joey. It's amazing how many of these lines had cartoon tie-ins. The TV advertisements were a great touch too, really takes me back to Saturday mornings.

I would have to say my top 5 lines from the 80s would be:

Star Wars
GI Joe
He-Man
Transformers
TMNT
Honorable Mention: Super Powers (DC) & Secret Wars (Marvel)

And I always loved (and still have mine) M.U.S.C.L.E & have a soft spot for Pound Puppies too.

This was a fun toy romp through my childhood. Excellent as always my friend and I look forward to seeing where nostalgia takes you & your collecting.

[jorgearellano]

Great video.
1 StarWars
2 Thundercats
3 Hotwheels
4 Transformers
5 Voltron

[UsualmikeTelevision]

This is a wonderful video. Congrats and happy to see #01 is Star Wars

[DRAGOINTHEHOUSE]

Man, so many lines rambo, silverhawks, visionaries, tigersharks, too many to name. All-time favorites as a kid, 1 thundercats, 2 Gijoe, 3 centurions, 4 ghostbusters, 5 transformers.

[danjohnson]

With He-Man, G.I. Joe, and Transformers epitomizing the core of the decade, and bookended by Star Wars and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there never had been and never will be again a decade for toys like the 1980's...

[scotthildebrand]

Excellent video my Padawan 👍 brought back a lot of memories seeing this 🙌 keep collecting bro 😎🤙

[TALott]

GI Joe, Transformers, Voltron, He Man, Pound Puppies

[billpaulk]

Very nice presentation Joey! As I was around for the beginning of Star Wars toys in 1978, that will always be my favorite line. My other favorite lines would have been from the 70s, but Star Wars and Transformers from the 80s.
Star Wars
Transformers
Six Million Dollar Man
Evel Knievel
BattleStar Galactica

[ostrak]

Great video. I would have included some of favourite being Six Million Dollar Man, Micronauts, Mego, Clash of the Titans, Black Hole, Battlestar Galactica and Big Jim

[mrgreatbigmoose]

You have to give it up for Kenner's Star Wars. In their first year they convinced parents to put a cardboard cutout and a promise under the Christmas Tree! What a marketing department!

[JediBubba--]

1. Star Wars
2. GI Joe ARAH
3. MOTU
4. Transformers
5. MUSCLE

[coxystoycantina]

Agree with number one of course and I loved MUSCLES!
I would have added Battle Beasts in there! And maybe the A-Team figures.

[Dav]

Really enjoyed this video Joey, I think you were spot on.

[andyrozycki]

Great video joe!!! You know star wars will always be #1 with us!! MTFBWY

[enfieldjohn]

It's funny how convoluted the acronym for MUSCLE Men is! I had almost forgot about them. Never had them but I remember seeing them now that you remind me. I had Army Men instead as they were super cheap so you could have a ton of them for making your own wargames.

I never had a Boglin, but I remember wanting one. Instead, my family got me all sorts of other hand puppets. I had a duck, monkey (those two were full body puppets that had velcro on their hands and feet so you could loop them around you as if you were carrying them in your arms. Technically, the monkey was my sister's, but I played with it more.), Oscar the Grouch (he was my first hero when I was little because I related to him so much), a platypus and a lizard (which was more of a simple marionette that you controlled with a thick wire 'leash' around his neck). I loved puppets and still do. I still have my Oscar puppet. In some ways, the AT-AT (best toy ever!) is also a puppet since you can move its head and neck around with the hand control inside its body.

I remember seeing Jem dolls and the cartoon. My sister liked the cartoon, but she was already into Barbies. I think my family, perhaps wisely, decided that we kids only 'needed' to be super invested in one major toy line, so they never got us ones from other lines. Mine was Star Wars and hers was Barbie.

I remember Starting Lineup. I watched sports with my dad and grandpas as a way to spend time with them. I had my favorite teams: Green Bay Packers, New York Yankees, Boston Celtics, Nebraska Cornhuskers, etc. but I never got into sports toys. Kids in school sometimes gave out baseball cards as gifts to the whole class when we'd have birthday parties in school, but that's the only reason why I have any. I do have a few good ones though like Orel Hershiser and Reggie Jackson. I also got into watching our local AAA baseball team and have a couple decks of their cards as well as a baseball that I caught and several players signed. One of the guys who signed it was James Loney who went on to play for the Dodgers, so it's cool to have that ball and a rookie AAA team card of him.

I loved Super Powers figures! I did have one of them - Firestorm which one of my cousins gave me for my birthday back then. It was a cool line for sure and I've been tempted to collect them in years since then, but I don't have the room. I do have all of the Batman the Brave and the Bold Happy Meal toys though. Those are pretty neat. I would still like to find the Shazam one though as he's become one of my favorite heroes.

Rainbow Brite was rather odd. I'd forgotten that she was invented by Hallmark. I suppose it was to compete with American Greetings' invention of Care Bears. It's hard to imagine a greeting card company being powerful enough to launch a toy line today, but back then those companies sold a lot of cards. I loved the Care Bears and have a few of the mini ones that my grandma would give me (along with Smurfs mini figures) when we'd go to the pharmacy to get her medicines. Grumpy Bear and Good Luck Bear were my favorite.

I loved the Indiana Jones movies! They were a bit scary at the end for a somewhat sheltered kid like me, but I still loved them, even if I did wind up closing my eyes through the worst parts of the enemies getting melted or something at the end. I wanted the Indy toys but didn't get into them. I did wind up getting similar toys from the Lone Ranger line - Lone Ranger, Tonto and Butch Cavendish from my grandpa for Christmas. He loved the Lone Ranger from the radio days and movie serial days and really loved watching the then new version with me when I was little. He got me a set of the cap guns later on too and they still work.

The Ghostbusters movies were and still are my favorite 'horror' movies because they are part sci-fi, part horror and part comedy. I love how inventive and clever the ghost designs are. Much more fun that your typical guy in a white sheet. The cartoon was fantastic too and I often watched it. It was really odd that they had to deal with legal action from another earlier and almost forgotten show also called Ghost Busters which later on also made a cartoon. That's why the cartoon based on the then new movies had to add 'the real' to its title. What a great cartoon that was! Never had the toys as a kid, but these days I do have a big Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and the three Ghostbusters - in Playmobil form thanks to finding them at thrift stores. Recently got a Jada toys die cast Ecto 1 to go with them.

I always thought pro wrestling was silly and never got into it. I do remember a few of the wrestlers from back then but mostly for their appearance in commercials (we'll never forget Macho Man Randy Savage snapping into a Slim Jim will we?), cartoons and TV shows. Did you know that Mr. T of A Team fame started out as a pro wrestler? What a great guy he is! He is now a pastor. How about that?

I barely remember Centurions. I loved toys that you built or could customize a lot, but I never had these. I had a couple sets of Construcx instead which were cool because you could build just about any space ship you could think of as well as having characters in there.

Thundaar the Barbarian, Brave Star and the Herculoids were great cartoons! I liked them better than Masters of the Universe as they weren't as cheesy, but I did enjoy watching Masters of the Universe too. My favorites were Cringer and Orko. Just about any character who was a little magical fellow with glowing eyes peeking out of a hooded robe was cool to me. Probably because of how much I loved the Jawas as a little kid.


GoBots were my jam! I got into them because my other grandma knew I loved Matchbox cars and also robots. She enjoyed wataching the cartoon with me as well. She thought the toys were very clever and hoped that they'd help me improve my poor hand-eye coordination since they are kind of like puzzles. Not as hard to change from one mode to another as Transformers were later, but still a bit of a challenge. I only ever had two Transformers, speaking of them, because they were more expensive and were too hard for me to change. Gobots was the only other toy line that I wound up with a lot of due to those things and because they were much cheaper than Transformers. I had a lot of them and even had the Mobile Command Center - so clever since it transformed too, and a robot that transformed into a toy gun big enough for a kid to hold. It was even better than Megatron too because the toy gun is a fully functional cap gun. I still have it. A lot of people forget that the Gobots predated the Transformers and were not in fact, Transformer knock-offs.

I thought Thundercats was kinda neat, but in a way it was too weird to me since they were all cat-people. So odd.

My sister liked Pound Puppies but we never had them.

Teddy Ruckspin kinda freaked me out so we never had one. The animation weirded me out.

I loved MASK! It was the last toy line that I got into collecting and I bought most of the ones I had with my own money. I wound up selling them when I started moving around a lot though and just didn't have room for them. What a great concept though! Better than G.I. Joe in some ways because it combined some of the transforming idea from GoBots and Transformers as the vehicles all had hidden battle modes. My favorite was Gator the Jeep/boat combo. I think I loved it especially because it kinda reminded me of my very first toy line: Fisher Price Adventure People back in the 70's before Star Wars came out. That was an epic toy line as well. I still have a few of them left. My favorite is the daredevil with his working cloth parachute. A testament to how well they were made is that even though I played with him for decades, he is still complete and everything he came with still works.

My cousin loved Strawberry Shortcake and had the whole line. I also had a best friend who had almost all of the G.I. Joes and another friend who had a lot of the Masters of the Universe toys. So, I got to play with lots of different lines as a kid. I liked playing with Strawberry Shortcake's villain the big chef - I forget his name at the moment.

It's amazing how popular My Little Pony line still is. It's kinda cute but I've never gotten into it.

Cabbage Patch Kids was one of the lines that my wife got into as a kid. Her family couldn't afford them, so her grandma made her hand-made ones and she had several.

I have always loved TMNT since they came out. I read and collected the comic books and watched the great cartoon, but never got into the toys. I have the set of action figures that were made much later that look just like the original versions in the comics. The TMNT video games are great fun too, especially Hyperstone Heist for the Sega Genesis.

What a great video! I could write volumes about Star Wars, but I think you already know how much I love that line.

[markrussell]

Excellent top 25 toys keep collecting 👍🏻🇬🇧👍🏻didn't see any A team figures

[maverick]

12 inch Action Man (Gi Joe) and Original Star Wars were my favourite as a kid, and i have collections of both

I still have my original childhood Boba Fett and he is very mint to my surprise 😂

[marklechman]

My buddy had a few of the Raiders figures and the Well of Souls set. They were pretty cool.