2007-04-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED what Optimus Prime cost back in 1984? Or how much money you needed to buy a Shogun Warrior or some Micronauts when they were still on the shelves at Lionel Playworld in 1977? Have you ever gotten in drunken arguments with friends who swear their mom paid thirty bucks for Saw Boss from Wheeled Warriors in 1985 when you're sure you bought it for $5? Do you remember seeing tons and tons of toy robots in old newspaper ads during the late 70s and early 80s from long since extinct stores like Children's Palace, Gold Circle and Zayre? Well then welcome to my tribute to the old toy robots of twenty five years ago and the stores that sold them. Welcome to the Vintage Space Toaster Palace.

AS SOMEONE BORN IN 1974 I was fortunate enough to grow up at a special time during which my childhood would span the dawn of the diecast toy robot age in America all the way through the greatest year for toy robots ever-1985. My first toy memory would be opening up a Shogun Warrior Godzilla for Christmas of 1979 and I'd see the rise and fall of many toy robots lines since then from Micronauts to Transformers by the time I stopped playing with toys in 1990. As a veteran of the Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s I can tell you many stories and they're all here within the old newspaper ads that make up the Vintage Space Toaster Palace.

I APPROACHED MY THIRTIES AND BECAME NOSTALGIC for the old days like many of my peers but the material reacquisition of 25 year old toy robots wasn't the time machine I thought it would be. What I really wanted was to relive the hours I spent as a kid drooling over toy robot comic books, catalogs and especially newspaper ads. Then it dawned on me that I could revisit archived versions of those ads at my local public library via their microfilm stored copies of newspapers from long ago. And so was born this project, this website, this time machine, this Vintage Space Toaster Palace.

SO I TRAVEL THE COUNTRY VISITING LIBRARY AFTER LIBRARY, compiling ad after ad to add to my own archive and building a time machine out of what little HTML I know and a whole lot of jpegs. The content here is nowhere near as clear and crisp or full color fancy like the department store wishbook and Christmas catalog scans readily available elsewhere on the internet but I hope to have accomplished something beyond just putting up some more pictures of toy robots for search engines to catalog and spit out. I hope that as I categorize and contextualize each individual toy robot ad I build a virtual repository of the answers and memories you came looking for. Armed with the knowledge contained within here that Optimus Prime was around twenty 1984 dollars you can find inner peace now and win those drunken arguments. And when your friends ask how you know these things you can make me proud by answering, "I saw it at that site with all those old toy robot ads. I saw it at the Vintage Toaster Something Something."

This is that site with all those old toy robot ads