The Most Popular Christmas Toy The Year You Were Born

Every year, late November comes, and it's the same thing. The holidays are upon us, with the busy sidewalks, city sidewalks, dressed in holiday style. Every building in town and every store in the mall strings some lights, throws a tree and some fake snow in the front window, and declares the pre-Christmas shopping rush to be underway. From Black Friday until nightfall on December 24th, it's a nationwide frenzy as millions zoom from shop to shop after the perfect gift for their loved ones (or, okay, just buy them online). 

And if they're a parent, that gift for their precious little kid back at home simply must be the hot toy of the year, the one advertised day and night, the one newspapers and magazines write trend pieces about, the one that will someday represent this year in a retrospective TV show or online listicle. Yes, every Christmas has a "hot toy," and it's a phenomenon that stretches back decades. Here are the most popular toys of each and every season of the past 40-odd years — what was the most sought after holiday gift the year you were born?

Kids are a rambunctious and fractious bunch, particularly on Christmas morning, expending all that pent up anxiety from patiently waiting to open their gifts or to see if they made Santa's "nice list" after all. It's impossible to ever know how many family Christmas mornings have been marred by an overexcited kid playing too hard with their brand new toy ... and breaking off a piece of it. No such minor tragedy occurred on December 25, 1976 for the millions of kids happily breaking in their new Stretch Armstrong — a toy new to the market that year which, by design, was nearly impossible to destroy. 

Kenner Toys design director Jesse Horowitz came up with the idea, and after considering making the latex doll filled with red-colored corn syrup a sumo wrestler, he made him a blond guy in trunks, which looked like a pro wrestler of the Western variety. His arms, legs, and torso could be pulled, bent, tied in knots and stretched out — at his longest, Mr. Armstrong could be extended to four feet long. Kenner sold $50 million worth of the $11 doll, which remained popular throughout the late '70s.

Video game consoles are now as perennially popular as more traditional toys like Barbie and Lego, and they took off in the United States in the late '70s. While for years consumers could buy an electronic gaming device that hooked into a TV and allowed them to play simple, pre-loaded games like Pong, the launch of the Atari VCS introduced to many the notion of games on interchangeable cartridges, promising players an arcade-like array of choices. This Atari video game system launched in 1977, and slowly grew in popularity, making a splash during the lead-up to Christmas 1979, selling a million units and fighting off upstarts like the Intellivision and the Odyssey². 

Atari dominated the video game market throughout the early '80s, and the VCS, renamed the futuristic and computer-sounding Atari 2600, made its way to four million more homes in 1982 alone. A system isn't any good without games to play on it, and a lot of lucky kids who received an Atari — about seven million of them — also got their hands on Pac-Man, the home console port of the extremely popular arcade phenomenon.

By no means were Cabbage Patch Kids the first soft and squeezable dolls with interchangeable outfits. But they did employ the use of some novel marketing gimmicks that propelled the toy to the center of a legendary retail frenzy. The dolls weren't some mass-produced faceless toy; each one of these dolls came with individualized "adoption papers" that made its new owner more like a parent. 

The problem with turning out one "special" doll after another: Each one takes time to make, and parent company Coleco could not churn out enough of them to meet demand. As the dolls' popularity increased as 1983 wore on, leading to madness during the Christmas shopping season. Dolls sold for twice their label price, parents attacked each other over the ones that actually managed to make it off the truck and onto toy store shelves, and other parents camped out in shop parking lots to meet incoming shipments. The fad didn't subside in 1984, and Coleco got ahead of the curve, increasing production well before the holiday season arrived that time. But the dolls remained hard to get, with thousands of parents on waiting lists by Christmas 1984, receiving those dolls well into 1985. By then, distributor Coleco enjoyed sales of $776 million, the vast majority of that from Cabbage Patch Kids.

In the 1980s, an engineer named Ken Forsse took a toy as old and classic as they come — the teddy bear — and added in some cutting-edge technology to make Teddy Ruxpin, the first commercially available toy to feature animatronics. Teddy was outfitted with a cassette deck, where kids placed one of 60 tapes full of stories about the wonderful Land of Grundo, along with programmed commands to servos in the toy's head. The result: Teddy gently told tales aloud to little kids while his lips and eyes moved, like some kind of friendly robot. It's tech not unlike the "Audio Animatronics" employed by the "Hall of Presidents" at Disneyland — where Forsse honed the skills he needed to create Teddy Ruxpin. 

The toy, distributed by a company called Worlds of Wonder, hit stores in late 1985, just before a related Saturday morning special aired on ABC, and its popularity grew in 1986. By Christmas, it was one of the most sought after toys in the country. In just one year in stores, $93 million worth of Teddy Ruxpin dolls sold. Even with a then-steep $70 price, that's still more than 1.3 million Teddys.

What's the only toy that could stop the retail juggernaut that was the Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 1980s? The Game Boy, an innovation in video games from ... Nintendo. It wasn't exactly the newer, better, faster, next generation of the NES, but rather all the fun of that system in pocket-sized, battery-powered fun. Via the $90 device's two-inch, green-colored screen, gamers could leave their bedrooms and rec rooms and bring the Nintendo wherever they went with games like Tetris (which came bundled with the system), Dr. Mario, and Tennis. 

Along with a brand new Game Boy and Tetris, plenty of kids got another game to play on Christmas: Super Mario Land, which ultimately sold 18 million copies. Portable consoles became a very profitable alternative to traditional gaming for Nintendo, as the original Game Boy led to a whole line of pocketable, on-the-go systems, such as the Game Boy Advance and the 3DS. All told, Nintendo sold more than 118 million original Game Boys.

For the fourth Christmas in five years, the number one thing on kids' minds (and wish lists) was a Nintendo product. This time it was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the video game maker's latest and greatest home console. It retailed for $199, twice the price that the NES had sold for a couple of years earlier, but then its graphics were, at least in theory, twice as good, a 16-bit system as opposed to the 8-bit player of the old Nintendo. 

Hitting stores in the late summer of 1991, only a handful of games were available at launch, including the bundled Super Mario World as well as Pilotwings and F-Zero also in stores for $50 a pop. Nintendo anticipated selling at least two million SNES packs by the time Christmas was over, despite competition from the equally fast and next-level Sega Genesis and its Sonic the Hedgehog, which sold altogether for just $150. A lot of people were gifted an SNES over the years — Nintendo ultimately sold more than 23 million systems.

In 1990, the first Home Alone movie was a massive hit at the box office, bringing in $280 million on its way to becoming a classic Christmas movie, as people couldn't get enough of little Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) burning burglars' hands with coal starters and smashing in their faces with paint cans. If Home Alone popularized torture, Home Alone 2 popularized personal voice recorders for kids. In the second film, Kevin gets separated from his family in New York, and uses a device called a Talkboy to slow down and deepen his voice, allowing him to pretend to sound like an adult over the phone. 

At the time of the film's production in 1992, the Talkboy wasn't technically a real product — it was a prop imagined for the movie, based upon details given by screenwriter John Hughes, who wanted Kevin's device to seem real but also next-level. But it was also super-slick product placement; an actual Talkboy hit the shelves the exact same day the movie was released. Demand for this toy was so high that Tiger Electronics manufactured the Talkboy for years to come. They had toy store shelves around the country well-stocked with the Deluxe version of the toy in time for Christmas 1993, although plenty still sold out of the fancy tape recorder.

By the time the new millennium rolled out, a Pixar movie was a cultural event. The Disney-owned computer animation studio almost always releases a critically acclaimed movie that kids and their parents clamor to see, an experience they can commemorate with the purpose of some tie-in toys at a well-stocked big-box store. 

The shops just were not prepared in 1995 in the aftermath of the release of the very first full-length Pixar movie, Toy Story. Pixar wasn't yet a major force in the market, and even a movie about toys didn't prompt big retailers to have enough merchandise in stock, particularly fully-functional, real-life plastic versions of Buzz Lightyear, one of the movie's main characters and who is described as a "cool toy." Between the film's release on November 22, 1995, and Christmas a month later, a Toy Story toy frenzy developed, as parents snatched up the limited number of Thinkways-produced toys available. That led to a clever joke in 1999's Toy Story 2. During a scene in Al's Toy Barn, Barbie explains the aisle packed floor to ceiling with Buzz Lightyear toys is because, "In 1995, shortsighted retailers did not order enough toys to meet demand."

A decade before everybody with a pulse started carrying around a sophisticated computer that could also make phone calls, American kids got their first taste of omnipresent pocket tech they couldn't live without via an imported Japanese toy from Bandai called Tamagotchi. (That words means, roughly "egg watch.") Slightly larger than a golf ball, this virtual-egg-hatched virtual pet (as pictured in pixelated form on the device's screen) required owners to constantly tend to certain needs — feeding them with a button, paying attention to it, and such. If they didn't, the creature died. Because they couldn't just leave the toy at home, lest they risk that death, young Tamagotchi owners took their virtual pets to school, where they proved such a distracting annoyance that they were banned in some jurisdictions. 

Nevertheless, the $15 gadget was the must-have, hot new toy of 1997, with stores selling quickly selling out of huge Tamagotchi shipments. 

Since the late 1970s, when kids fully embraced and then never, ever let go of video games, parents tend to grow relieved and delighted when the hot toy at the top of their young ones' holiday gift list is something that encourages exercise and playing outside. That attitude likely helped fuel brisk sales of the hottest toy of late 2000: kick scooters, so named because that action is how the rider makes them go. They were also known as razor scooters, or rather Razor scooters, for Razor USA, the company that introduced them to the marketplace. (Founder Carlton Calvin knew a thing or two about fad toys — he also brought finger skateboards and Pogs to brief but massive popularity.) 

Razor's top-of-the-line, $100 scooters, as well as knockoffs and ripoffs by other companies that charged around $40, were essentially a skateboard with a tall handle, the whole thing a sleek, swift package of lightweight metal. Razor scooters also sold well because they were available in more than just toy and big-box stores — high-end novelty stores like The Sharper Image and Brookstone stocked the toy too. Calvin estimated that Razor sold five million scooters that Christmas, but also that it held only a 50 percent share of the scooter market, meaning as many as 10 million kids landed the gift of wheels in 2000.