The Retroist

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I can still remember the first Nerf ball I got. Like so many kids in America, I got a Nerf Football for Christmas. While I would not have described myself as particularly interested in football at the time, I was still excited to finally have once since all my friends already did. Unfortunately for me, while most kids loved Nerf products, so did other m…

For Christmas of 1983, I received a toy that wasn’t on my list, a Manglor. Specifically, the one I received was Manglord. While I didn’t ask for him, I was pretty excited to get him. The TV commercials promised a toy experience like no other. I could stretch, crush, and even tear Manglord apart and he could be returned to his original shape or whatever shape I chose. I remember playing with it that morning and putting it aside. When I went back to it again, it was gone. Manglord could survive a lot of abuse, but he wasn’t coming back from being eaten by a dog. I wish I could say this was the last time I saw him, but sadly it was not, and it is something I would rather not talk about.

Manglors were made by the company Ideal and were being demonstrated at the New York Toy Fair in February 1983. They would hit store shelves later that year. In a crowded field of action figures, the company thought they were onto something different. A figure that invited being damaged.

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Manglors were made from Sorbothane, a soft viscoelastic polyurethane material that behaves partly like rubber and partly like a very thick gel. In this toyline it was a soft and sticky material that could be stretched, manipulated, and crushed. So kids could even pull them apart and stick them back together however they wanted. Heck, you could even combine parts from other Manglors. If you didn’t guess, this is where they got their name. You could mangle them all you want and so they became Manglors. The problem was that they worked better when being destroyed than when being repaired.

You could easily tear them apart and the pieces were sticky enough to be pressed back onto the figure. That didn’t mean that they returned to their original condition. After being torn apart, pieces were difficult to place back together in the right way. Also, when you kept tearing them apart, it weakened the figure. So the thing you were encouraged to do was rapidly wrecking your toy. This attracted attention before 1983 ended.

Before I get into that, let me tell you a little about the figures and playset. The original figures were Manglord, Manglosaurus, and Manglodactyl. They also created a playset called Manglor Mountain. The next year they added Manglodemon, Manglodragon, and Manglizard for a total of six figures. With the new figures they added a new package for them. The Manglors now came inside plastic eggs called Prehi Storage Play Eggs. These eggs contained a base and figure stand and worked as packaging, storage, and a small play environment.

Manglors retailed for $5.99, but during the first year you could find them on sale for as low as $3.99. The playset would run you anywhere between $9.99 and $15.99. This price would start to slip during year two and drop even further as the toys went into the clearance bins. Five years later, you could still find the toys being advertised with figures going for less than a dollar.

As I mentioned, not everyone was convinced that these were good toys. The Consumer Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action, long name, included Manglors on its list of the year’s worst toys. The group had children test toys and judged them partly on whether they worked as advertised, and Manglors failed their test. When kids tore a figure into pieces, not only did it not go together as they hoped, the kids also had trouble determining where the pieces originally belonged. The group also had some complaints about the goo used in the playset, but when Ideal was asked to comment, they responded by saying they had not received complaints of that type.

The criticism didn’t stop there. About a year later, the Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, noted the same basic problem. They would cover the Manglors in their magazine and TV show aimed at kids, Penny Power. In a June 1985 episode they were highly critical of the Manglors, referring to them as “a piece of junk.” Sadly, I couldn’t find the episode, but only the newspaper coverage of it.

Manglors must have been at least initially popular. After all, Ideal released some new ones during year two and they were still showing up in toy catalogs. Still, I can’t find any sales figures and it’s hard to tell if this was just momentum based on predictions or real market driven decision making. The timing also didn’t help them. The mid eighties action figure market was very crowded. They might have had an unusual feature to make them stand out, but that was being questioned in the press.

Two other roadblocks were media support and variety. The most successful toys from this era often had some manner of cartoon or comic attached to them. These are often great places to introduce new additions to a toyline. But with just seven toys, there wasn’t a lot to build upon or market. Whatever the case, by the end of year two, it is pretty apparent that the Manglors were a dead toyline.

They might be better remembered if they had been easy to collect. Unfortunately, the way the toys were made and how they were played with made them very delicate as they aged. Surviving figures in good original condition became difficult to find. So the very feature that helped sell Manglors also worked against their long term collectibility. Fortunately, they were not forgotten.

Collectors eventually helped bring the name back. Toyfinity secured the rights to the Manglors property in the early 2010s and began working with Onell Design on plans to revive it. In 2015, Onell released Glyos figures inspired by the original Manglors while the two companies continued developing a new version of the toyline. The actual Manglors revival arrived in 2023 using the Glyos building system. Its removable hard plastic parts could actually be taken apart and reconnected, finally allowing the basic Manglors idea to work the way the original toys had promised.

The Manglor idea was simple. What if you could break your toy and put it back together any way you want? The promise was great, but the technology at the time really couldn’t deliver. That didn’t mean it wasn’t memorable. Kids like myself thought it was really cool and years later, when another company revived the idea with a more durable variation, we opened our wallets. They might not be as popular as GI Joe or the Transformers, but they have had an interesting run.

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I never got to go to the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, but I really wanted to. My mother had been to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and talked about how much she loved it, so when Knoxville came along we couldn’t get enough of it. We watched stories about it on television, and whenever something appeared in the newspaper, she would save it for me. We were never likely to make the trip to Tennessee, but the fair did help convince my family to visit EPCOT Center a few months after it opened. Which was amazing.

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On the show, I talk about how Knoxville managed to host a World’s Fair and some of the people who made it happen. I spend time on the Sunsphere, the international pavilions, and some of the technology people were able to try there. I also get into Jake Butcher and the strange turn his story took almost immediately after the fair closed. As usual, I pull out my local newspapers to see what was happening around the time of the Fair’s debut.

I have always liked World’s Fairs because they bring together a very specific mix of technology, tourism, architecture, and spectacle. Knoxville had all of that, along with a fairground that could be a little messy and occasionally ridiculous. More than 11 million people showed up, and the Sunsphere remains part of the city more than forty years later. I never made it there in 1982, but I am glad so much of it is still around to visit.

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• This is the 372nd episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 23 of Season 18.

• When I first saw the Sun Sphere in person, it blew my mind. It has been so long since I had seen the news about it. It lived up to the hype. The Rubik’s Cube also did.

• The Simpsons episode is great. One of the golden eras of the show.

• Lots of retro audio in this one. I had to a cut a bunch of it out because I wanted to include so much more.

• Sadly, like so many people, I have never been to a world’s fair in my life. I don’t think I would be as obsessed with them if my mom hadn’t been to the 1964 Fair. Wish she had take photos of her time there. I have one or two photos that might be in the fair, but its not obvious.

• It must have been so exciting to live in Knoxville that summer. A daily party that everyone was invited to attend.

• I didn’t go into details about what happened financially and the court cases. I wanted to mention it, but didn’t want to linger since its a mark on the fair that wasn’t exactly the Fair’s fault.

• Amazing that this is the first time in lookin at newspapers that I didn’t want to really see any of these movies. I would watch them and I have but a rare weekend where the movies weren’t for me.

• Lame that supermarkets run Mother’s Day sales that are just groceries for sale and nothing mom-centric.

• 1982 Saturday Morning cartoons were amazing!

• I would like to cover the New Orleans Fair. I was also interested in that, but I had already been to EPCOT Center and the Olympics that year was very distracting. It was the most memorable Olympics of my chilhood.

• Bonus clippings will be over on Patreon soon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

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When I was a kid, I tended to stay up late. I wasn’t supposed to, but once I was in my room and everyone else was sleeping, I would watch my small B&W TV or read way later than I should have. Because of this I was always running late for school. My mom thought I was just a sleepy kid and tried all sorts of things to get me up. Eventually she started to accept that I was going to maximize my morning time at home, but still wanted me to have something for breakfast before I got to school. When I couldn’t sit down to have a bowl of cereal she would insist I grab a Pop Tart or something even better, a Carnation Breakfast Bar.

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Much like with Granola Bars, I approached the Carnation Breakfast Bar with skepticism. I liked the bar part, but because my mom thought it was a good idea, I thought it must be filled with hidden vegetables or something. Boy, was I wrong. I am sure it was some sale that landed the first box of the bars in our house, but after having my first bar while walking to school that day, I knew they were going to go quickly.

Most online sources will point to 1975 as the launch year for the Breakfast Bar, but looking through old advertisements, I have found that they were being sold as early as the fall of 1973. Here you will see an advertisement from the Kansas City Star on September 9 using the word “Introducing.”

This ad shows that the bars were already in the familiar form many of us would come to love. While the bar pictured was Chocolate Chip, they also mention that they were available in four flavors, which were Chocolate Chip, Chocolate, Peanut Butter, and Frosted. An important component of their early advertisement really stressed that you needed to have a glass of milk to make it a complete meal. I usually ate them on the go, but when I did have them with milk, they really worked well together.

The obvious appeal of the bar is that it looked like a candy bar and tasted like one as well. This was not lost on concerned parents in the 1970s. The Florida newspaper, The Ledger, interviewed five people who had tried the bars in 1975. Four of the five people said they might use the bars as snacks or as a more nutritious substitute for candy. One concerned mother rejected them because they were, in her words, too much like the candy she discouraged her children from eating.

The children in this same article had a very different take. One parent said her two young children loved the bars and asked her to buy them again. Another ate the peanut variety with Coke and enjoyed them. The kids knew what was up. Carnation might be saying they were selling breakfast in a bar, but kids saw them as a chocolate covered treat.

This lines up perfectly with my memories of the bars. I never thought about them as nutritious. I looked at the bars as the candy they were and I was thrilled that Carnation had somehow hoodwinked the adults into buying them.

The bars did hit a major roadblock in 1978. The FDA recalled Carnation Breakfast Bars and Carnation Slender Diet Meal Bars after pieces of wire were found in some products. 4.3 million bars were recalled despite the FDA saying serious health consequences were considered unlikely. The recall does show that the bar flavors had changed since their first year. Flavors now were Chocolate Crunch, Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter, and Granola Breakfast Bars.

Granola Bars makes sense. They were becoming wildly popular around this time and Carnation took shots at them in advertising. A 1983 advertisement compared the nutrition in Carnation Breakfast Bars with products from Nature Valley and Quaker. They wanted people to know that their bars were more than just a sweet granola bar.

In 1985 Carnation was acquired by Nestle. The brand kept on being used and it didn’t seem to change the availability of the bar at the time. That would be the status quo for more than a decade, but then in 1997, the company began taking the bars off shelves and by late 1998, people were writing into newspapers asking where they had gone.

Nestle would release alternatives and even partially reuse the name after that, but the replacements weren’t the same. But people haven’t forgotten. They, like me, remember grabbing one on the way to school or having them as a snack at work, and they miss them. They were pretty tasty.

More than 50 years ago, Carnation tried something different with a convenience food and they were pretty successful for almost a quarter of a century. While fondly remembered, they haven’t generated the online fandom that might get them rereleased. If the Carnation Breakfast Bar were still being sold today, its nutrition would probably get a lot more scrutiny, but that does not change how well it is remembered by the people who ate them during their nearly 25 year run. For someone on the go, or a kid who would have preferred a candy bar for breakfast, they were a pretty tasty compromise.

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A lot of people, myself included, love the non-soda orange flavored beverage that McDonald’s serves. I am being generic here on purpose because the history of the drink itself is not as straightforward as it might seem. While many will refer to it as Hi-C Orange, Orange LavaBurst, Orangeade, Orange Drink or a combination of those things, historically only two of those things are the same. So when I go to McDonald’s to get an Orange LavaBurst nowadays, I might like it, but it’s very different from Orange Drink I was served as a kid.

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Before Hi-C became the non-carbonated orange flavored drink at McDonald’s they had been serving an orange drink of theirs for decades. This was a beverage outside of their partnership with Coca-Cola. Not only would people find it in stores, but McDonald’s Orange Drink or Orangeade could be found at community and local sporting events usually in these large McDonald’s branded dispensers outside the restaurants. It’s been gone long enough now that it’s hard to remember, but it did taste different than what we can get now.

Even if you preferred getting a Coke or a milkshake you might have tasted orange drink outside of the restaurant. The company would loan out these large dispensers that would come to be called Orange Bowls. But they are really just insulated beverage dispensers with a spout. McDonald’s would supply the “bowl” but groups would buy the orange syrup that you would mix with water and ice. Just as an aside, at the restaurants themselves, the containers were so much cooler. Here you can see one in a recreated McDonald’s in the film, The Founder.

You can find a lot of former McDonald’s employees online who remember mixing up the stuff. The syrup mixture came in one gallon containers. You would add that to four gallons of water to get five gallons of finished Orange Drink. I know someone must have tasted the pure syrup, but I can’t find anyone who mentions it. Maybe I am just a curious person, but I want to know what it tasted like.

Now you might be surprised to know that the drink did have at least some real orange in it. Although it was mainly a sweetened orange flavored drink. I found a booklet online that listed the ingredients. The drink contained corn sweetener, sugar, citric acid, concentrated orange juice, and natural and artificial flavoring and coloring. In addition, it included vegetable gum, vegetable oil, glycerine, and glyceryl abietate and sodium benzoate for stabilization.

Since the drink was not from Coca Cola, the company needed other suppliers, and I found a few names that have popped up like R W Snyder Company, Richardson Food Corporation and Golden State Foods. Golden State Foods looks like the most likely chief supplier of the syrup starting in the 1970s. Before that I believe they allowed regional providers to do the work. Which might explain why I have a challenging time finding a confirmed single source.

McDonald’s was still serving Orange Drink as we moved into the 1990s. Then in 1993, without a ton of fanfare, they switched to Orange Hi-C. I would like to say I was one of the people who protested at the time, but I hardly noticed. When I did order an Orange Drink though, I could tell that things had changed. I wasn’t happy, but I also kind of like Hi-C. So I wasn’t exactly unhappy. Which is how I think a lot of people felt.

Why did they change? I am guessing the relationship with Coca-Cola was a big part of it. I can’t find any documentation, but I imagine they didn’t like seeing any beverages that weren’t a part of their company. McDonald’s did have a habit of sticking with established products that worked. A good example would be 7-Up which wouldn’t be replaced with Coca-Cola’s alternative, Sprite, until the 1980s. Whatever the case, the switch happened and while it might linger for a while longer in other countries (like Canada), eventually the old Orange Drink went away completely.

Still, while Hi-C might not have the brand recognition of Coke, it was a real brand. So McDonald’s was able to offer something to its customers where they might have some amount of outside recognition. Coca-Cola was also a large and dependable supplier with international reach. Allowing them to replace orange drink would give McDonald’s something it also craves, consistency.

Orange Hi-C would eventually get a new name, Orange Lavaburst and Hi-C stayed on the menu for nearly 25 years. Then in 2017, McDonald’s told its franchisees that they would no longer be serving the Hi-C product. McDonald’s wanted the fountain space for a new exclusive Coca-Cola product called Sprite TropicBerry. When asked for a reason, the company didn’t cite poor sales, but instead gave the generic answer of “sometimes we change our menu.”

While Lavaburst might not have been a top menu item, it had its fans, and they began to complain. There were petitions, years of social media requests, and repeated demands that McDonald’s bring it back. Most of the time, this kind of consumer pressure goes nowhere, but on February 10, 2021, the company announced it would be returning almost immediately. Two weeks later I had my first ice-cold Lavaburst in 4 years and I was thrilled.

The history of uncarbonated orange beverages at McDonald’s is long and has changed over the decades. A lot of people don’t even realize that the drink is different and I think that is because the history isn’t well documented. Even McDonald’s in their press release for the return of Orange Lavaburst stated wrongly, “The loyal fandom of this deliciously fun and fruity beverage that teases your taste buds dates back to 1955, when it first debuted on McDonald’s menus.” It’s good stuff, but it’s not the same beverage a lot of people grew up with and I think that’s worth remembering.

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Joining Columbia House was something I wanted to do long before I really understood how it worked. I remember filling out the forms for records and later CDs, then having my mom stop me before I could send them away. A couple of my friends actually belonged, and from where I was sitting they seemed to have figured out some secret way of getting huge piles of music for almost nothing. I mostly knew Columbia House through the catalogs and all the mail that came with them. At an age when I loved getting anything addressed to me, that alone gave the whole thing a lot of appeal.

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On the show, I start with the Columbia Record Club in the 1950s and how it grew into the Columbia House most of us remember. I get into the famous introductory offers, the monthly selections, and how the company could afford to send people so much music for so little money up front. Later I follow Columbia House through its enormous success with CDs and into the period when buying music online started making the whole system feel increasingly unnecessary. I also pull out a newspaper from when the club first appeared near me and look at what else was going on at the time.

What interests me most about Columbia House is how much I remember something I didn’t even get to try. The catalogs were everywhere and I spent plenty of time deciding which albums I would choose even though I was probably never going to send the form away. Columbia House managed to make ordering music fun (at least for me as a kid).

By the time I could have joined Columbia House without asking anyone, I had plenty of other ways to buy music. The company kept going much longer than I realized, first with music and later with movies, while the part of it I remembered had already faded away. I never got the stack of tapes or CDs for a penny that I imagined as a kid, but like millions of other people, I remember choosing them and I am sad those days are over.

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• This is the 371st episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 22 of Season 18.

• My mother really scared me away from these types of offers, which must not have been easy for her since I was so persistent. I would guess that I completely filled out an order form at last every month for years hoping she would change her mind.

• I have found surprising 8-tracks for sale that seem to be very late releases. Almost all of them are from Columbia House.

• Getting mail was a much bigger deal to me when I was young. Even junk mail felt like somebody somewhere knew I existed, so Columbia House already had an advantage with me before I even opened the catalog.

• I always assumed Columbia House was mainly a 1970s or 1980s thing. I was surprised to find an ad for the Columbia Record Club in one of my local newspapers from 1955, right at the beginning of the whole operation.

• The little album cover stickers might be the thing I remember best. There was something very satisfying about physically picking out the albums and putting together an order on paper.

• I knew kids who joined Columbia House, so I was amused to find old consumer columns dealing with exactly that problem. Apparently enough children were signing themselves up that Columbia House had a policy for parents who called to cancel the membership.

• One man managed to use more than 2,400 fake identities to get over 26,000 CDs from Columbia House and BMG. The number of CDs is impressive, but I mostly keep wondering how he kept track of 2,400 imaginary people.

• Columbia House CDs sometimes get treated like strange second class versions of regular releases, but they were legitimate licensed pressings. There can be differences between individual releases, but there does not seem to be any general reason to assume a Columbia House CD sounds worse.

• The famous gold box was not just decoration. It was part of an advertising experiment designed to see whether people had encountered more than one Columbia House ad.

• There was a point when Columbia House and Blockbuster actually discussed merging. Considering how closely I associate both names with buying and renting entertainment in the 1990s, I would love to know what that company would have looked like.

• Bonus clippings will be over on Patreon soon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

The Retroist is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I didn’t plan on doing another bonus track like again, but it bubbled up again. I spend a lot of time thinking about nostalgia, which is probably obvious considering what I like to talk about. Lately I have been thinking more about how entire decades get remembered and whether the version of the 1980s we have now is really the same one I remember living…

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On the August 2026 Monthly Update I talk about what’s been going on with the site and podcast, but also some other things going on in my life and some random thoughts I have. They include:

• McDonald’s McCrescent

• Fotomat

• Hypercolor

• Atari VCS 1977

• Presentism

• RCA Studio II

• Diet Coke

• Burger King and Fast Food

• ZZ Top

• Stereo Update

• Experiencing Big Events in Life

In the early 1980s, at a comic book shop near my grandmother’s apartment, I saw my first Mars Attacks cards. I had never heard of them before, but there they were under glass, so I thought they must be important. They looked old, but the imagery was colorful and intriguingly violent. So naturally, I wanted them. The problem was they were already pretty expensive. So I started putting money aside hoping to talk the owner down and land at least one of the cards. Eventually I managed to start my collection with a card in rough shape that I paid five dollars for. Over the months trying to get just that one card I learned that the series went all the way back to 1962 and that at this rate I was never going to get my hands on all 55 of the original cards.

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Topps is well known in the sports card business, but they had already been doing non-sports cards for over a decade by the time they released Mars Attacks. In fact, the company got its start with a set called Hocus Focus Magic Photos in 1948. They followed that up with Hopalong Cassidy cards in 1950, before getting into baseball cards in 1951. By the early 1960s, Topps has a product team just trying to figure out what kids might spend their hard-earned nickels on. The team was led by Woody Gelman who had worked as an animator for Max Fleischer and Paramount before joining Topps. While there he would help create both Bazooka Joe and Wacky Packages.

Working under Gelman was Len Brown. He joined the company as a teenager and would stay there for decades. Brown and Gelman hit upon a novel idea in 1961 when they were working on a set of cards to mark the 100 year anniversary of the start of the U.S. Civil War. They would lean into violence, exaggerating battles like Gettysburg into something that was closer to horror, at least by the standards of the time. These cards, which were called Civil War News, sold out quickly. It was a smart move and its success surprised the company. Next year they would get the opportunity to try something similar without having to borrow from history.

Brown was a big fan of science fiction and one film really seemed to stick with him, This Island Earth. The Metaluna Mutant from the movie was particularly memorable and would become the basis for what the invaders in the Mars Attack series would look like. He found an image of it in Famous Monsters of Filmland and showed it to Gelman who liked it. Artists Wally Wood and Bob Powell would combine the Mutant with inspiration from Wally Wood’s cover for EC Comics’ Weird Science #16 and turn them into finished sketches. These would be turned over to painter Norman Saunders who handled the final artwork.

Brown would write the story of a Martian invasion of Earth that would appear on the back and unfold over 55 cards. The basic idea is that Mars is doomed and they decide that they will take over the Earth. Its pretty straightforward, but its how the story unfolds that really captured your attention. Each card tells a nice self-contained little story and leans heavily into shock value. You would expect to see humans are menaced by aliens, but when a dog is blasted by a ray gun or a person is about to be eaten by a giant spider, they were really pushing the limits of the time, and kids couldn’t get enough.

Topps was worried enough about the subject matter that they released them through a company called Bubbles, Inc. under the title Attack from Space. They only became Mars Attacks once sales were strong enough to expand. Parents were shocked by what they were seeing and started complaining to government officials. Topps thought they could placate them by repainting the more objectionable scenes. Unfortunately, they never got far with that plan. A Connecticut district attorney started asking questions about the cards and they decided it would be easier to cancel the series rather than deal with the trouble.

While the initial sales were good, the bad press made Topps look at the cards as a failed experiment. In fact, in a 1974 article in the Chicago Tribune about Topps’ success in baseball cards, they talk about their other successes and only one misstep. It says, “Among their failures or Topps flops, is a science fiction card series entitled “Mars Attacks.” So a decade later and the card line was being looked at as something the company would rather see forgotten.

This would slowly start to change as new generations started to discover them and card collecting really took off as a hobby. By 1979 article in the New York Daily News discussing the growing trend and cite two non-sports card sets by name Gum Inc.’s 1938 Horrors of War and Mars Attacks. As we moved into the 80s, the trend continue and priced for complete sets started to climb. By the 90s a good set could fetch up to $3,000. That turned out to be a bargain. Just this decade, sets and cards are going for tens of thousands of dollars.

Like all cards, rarity drives up the price and some of these cards were really rare. Not because of the number printed, but the bad habit many young card collectors have of using rubber bands. I did this myself as a kid. I would put a set together and then take a rubber band and wrap it up. A lot of those cards stayed with the rubber band on it when it went into storage. So years later, you will pull out a bundle of cards and the top and bottom cards will be ruined from contact with the rubber band.

Because of this, Card #1, The Invasion Begins, is famously the hardest card in the set to find in good shape, since it sat on the outside of the pack and took the most damage. The checklist, card #55, has the same problem from the other end. In January of 2025, a copy of The Invasion Begins sold at auction for $54,067.20, a record for the set and a huge jump from the $19,981.35 a lesser graded copy brought just two years before.

The cards’ value would have probably slowly increased over time, but they got a boost in 1987. That is when Mario and Eileen Bruno approached Topps with the idea of reviving Mars Attacks as a mini comic series. They got a meeting with Sy Berger, the Topps executive known as the father of the modern baseball card. He liked the idea and green-lit the project. Berger was introduced to Len Brown who was still at the company and a young talent at the company named Gary Gerani. The partnership resulted in a four issue series published by Pocket Comics in 1988.

Fun fact about Gerani he was influenced by Mars Attacks when he created another Topps card series about prehistoric monsters loose in modern cities called, Dinosaurs Attack! This set was also released in 1988. Several decades later during some successful Kickstarter campaigns by Topps we would actually get some crossover sets between the the Dinosaurs and the Martians.

Fans of the set got a treat in 1994 when Topps finally gave the original set a proper reissue. They paired all 55 classic cards with 45 brand new ones drawn by a whole roster of comic artists. Its amazing what three decades can make and the new cards could be edgier than the original. Unsurprisingly the reissue sold out fast. Older fans could enjoy a brand new set and all new fans could discover the magic of Mars Attack for the first time. What more could fans of the cards hope for?

As it turns out some people in Hollywood were fans of the cards. Screenwriter Jonathan Gems pitched the idea of a movie to Tim Burton in 1993, after an earlier attempt by director Alex Cox back in the 1980s never made it past a few script drafts. Burton wanted to make the film in the style of a 1970s disaster film with a large ensemble cast and that’s just what he made. With an impressive cast and a look that aped 1950s science fiction B movies, Mars Attacks! hit screens on December 1996 and I was there on opening night at my local theater.

I loved it, but unfortunately, I was in the minority at the time. The film opened to mixed reviews and a disappointing box office. Fortunately though, it did much better globally and over time has developed a cult following.

While the movie might not have been a big hit. The cards it was based on got a boost from its release. As a tie-in with the film they released a new set of wide cards that are still a great starting set to get into collecting Mars Attacks cards. They didn’t stop there. New card sets and comics hit shelves and we even managed to get some toys. Not just the ones related to the movies, but some great stuff from companies like Funko and Super7.

I wasn’t around when the original Mars Attacks cards were first released. If I was, I would like to think I would have been one of those kids who tried to collect them all. Fortunately, they found plenty of fans among those first collectors, and that interest helped keep Mars Attacks alive long after Topps had written the set off. It eventually led to reissues, new card sets, comics, toys, and even a movie. Most of us will never own a complete original set, but there are still plenty of ways to collect Mars Attacks.

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I remember seeing Hypercolor shirts down at the Jersey shore the summer they came out. Like a lot of people, I wanted one. By the time I actually got a shirt that Christmas, a few months later, the trend was already fading. I might not have been timely, but I didn’t care. Watching the color spread out under my own hand still felt like something out of the future. It turns out that I wasn’t alone in being late to the party with Hypercolor. These shirts only had about a year of shelf life in their original form. But like many other products that were short-lived, they never really disappeared. They just changed into something else.

Hypercolor got its start in Seattle at a company called Generra Sportswear. Generra was founded in 1980 by former executives from Brittania Sportswear. That company that had turned Seattle into the country’s jeans capital during the 1970s, but is hardly talked about today. Generra had that company’s expertise and grew quickly expanding rapidly in the early 80s before being sold in 1984 to a Texas company. Five years later it would be back in the hands of its original management team and looking for a breakthrough product which they found in Hypercolor.

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The color changing technology behind Hypercolor came from Matsui Shikiso Chemical, a Japanese company based in Kyoto that had spent decades making inks and pigments for the textile printing industry. In the early 1980s Matsui developed a line of thermochromic paints and inks, meaning color that shifts with temperature. The technology was pretty durable. According to Miska, it worked on almost every color except darker shades like navy. The big issue was care. You couldn’t clean it in hot water, iron it (despite what you see in the commercials) or tumble it dry. All of those things could kill the effect for good.

Generra licensed the technology and began showing off a clothing dyed with the thermal sensitive pigment in January 1991. This release was backed by a marketing campaign that had already been running in MTV spots and teen magazines like Seventeen and Thrasher since late 1990.

The commercial shows how fun Hypercolor was going to be and how it worked. Anything that changed the temperature of the shirt would change its color. Which I think to most people at the time meant temporary handprints. Generra chairman Steve Miska was quoted in the press at the time saying that moms would be confused when dealing with Hypercolor. I doubt that any of this would be true, but it works as generation marketing. He said, “Kids understand, but imagine their moms. She remembers the kid’s shirt as blue, but then it comes out of the dryer and it’s white. She sets it aside and it turns blue again.”

One the ads started running, Generra couldn’t keep up with demand. They shipped 32,000 different Hypercolor garments in February of 1991. The next month they shipped another 274,000. The hype was so great that stores around the country were pre-selling the clothing. This results in them being sold out before other customers had the opportunity to get their hands on them. The company had projected that they would sell $20 million worth of clothing for the entire year. By May of 1991 they had sold $50 million with t-shirts making up 80% of sales.

While this was a runaway success, on thing Generra couldn’t escape was the cost of the dye. This was a sophisticated product compared to normal non-technical clothing. Dye alone was $16 million a year.

How much did Hypercolor clothing cost? A basic Hypercolor T shirt ran about $24, with tank tops closer to $15, jeans around $54 and shorts around $34. This sounds pretty reasonable for clothing that was extremely popular, but for clothing that was so fragile, it felt like you were paying for something that was at best temporary. It was one of the reasons my mom didn’t want me to get one. She knew how rough I was on my clothing and the idea that I would properly take care of a shirt that wasn’t super easy to wash seemed ridiculous to her. Of course, she was right.

While marketing certainly contributed to the success of the brand, they were also being featured on TV and it was hard to escape seeing them anywhere young people were. At schools, the interactive nature of the cloth made them a walking advertisement. Those first few days when someone wore them to school, everyone wanted to touch the fabric and see it in action. Some schools even banned the shirts because of this. Not because they were a distraction, but because they invited unwanted or aggressive touching. Despite that, Hypercolor sales weren’t slowing.

Generra couldn’t keep up with demand. They hired more staff and added more production capacity to try and keep up. They even set up a subsidiary Generra Production Corp just to manufacture its Hypercolor and Hypergrafix lines. Despite these changes they could only make enough clothing for about half of what retailers wanted.

As demand raged on, Generra kept expanding, but by the 1992 the apparel industry was struggling. Licensed sports clothing was hot stuff and chains like the Gap was pushing new casual looks for young people. The companies junior and girl’s clothing line which had been doing well, crashed. It was being described as too “fashion forward” when the rest of the industry was moving towards simplicity. In July of 1992, Generra Sportswear filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They owed more than $60 million and shut down their juniors and girls divisions. At this point they started selling undyed cloths as part of their new LOH label, which stood for leftover Hypercolor. It not that Hypercolor wasn’t selling well. The problem was, it was one of the only things that was still selling at all and it wasn’t enough.

The company started to downsize and by the mid-nineties, less than a dozen employees were left. They did this by giving up on making their own cloths and instead licensed the brand to others.

“We tried to make too much product available in too short a period of time,” Miska admitted. If he could do it over again, he said, he would have limited distribution on purpose, since he believed it “would have done a lot to prolong the life of the product.”

One brand they wouldn’t be managing domestically was Hypercolor. In 1993 they sold that part of the business to the The Seattle T-Shirt Company. They did retain the international rights which they would sell under the name Global Hypercolor. After that the company would be sold and the Generra brand still exists today, but they do not put out Hypercolor or anything else. My thought is maybe the name is being kept alive for possible future use. The trademark is currently held by Exude LLC, but nothing in the Hypercolor line has been released in years.

That doesn’t mean that color-changing clothing went away. Over in the UK, Global Hypercolor seemed have found life in the rave music scene. There, crowds of dancers provided plenty of heat to keep those colors changing. By 2008, designers including Anzevino and Florence and Henry Holland tried using it, while American Apparel sold their own version and Puma even released sneakers that changed color. The original craze may have lasted only from 1991 into 1992, but the basic idea has continued turning up in new forms ever since.

None of these new uses would ever match the mania that ran wild for a little over a year in the early nineties. My own shirt showed up a little late in the original short story of Hypercolor. Amazingly after just a few months, it was already past its cultural peak. But for a kid who wanted one all summer at the Jersey shore, it didn’t feel like a futuristic fad running out of steam. I still felt like I was getting a small piece of the future, just a few months behind schedule.

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