Kids remember the talking bear, the Nintendo cartridge and the Muppet that shook when it laughed. The adults remember what it took to get one under the tree.
The same Christmas Arnold Schwarzenegger went to war over Turbo Man, real parents were hunting for a laughing red Muppet.
On Christmas Eve 1996, K.C. Johnson stood outside Salt Lake City’s ZCMI Center with a Tickle Me Elmo cradled in his arms. His father had told him about the rush, and in Australia, where Johnson lived, he’d found rows of Elmos still on the shelves.
He brought 12 back to Utah. The last one went for $100 in minutes. As Johnson and his customer finished the deal, someone called out from a passing car to ask how much he wanted for it.
By then, American shoppers had been rehearsing for Jingle All the Way for more than a decade. They’d counted down outside department stores, called toy clerks until the clerks changed the way they answered the phone, and learned to read the classifieds for clues.
A kid could circle a picture in a catalog and be done. For the person who had to find it, that was where the story began.
1. Cabbage Patch Kids, 1983 — Four minutes and they were gone
At a Zayre in Augusta, Maine, shoppers counted down to noon in a biting wind. Some had been waiting four hours. The manager called police before opening, and when the doors finally unlocked, adults raced for the toy department.
About 400 people had turned up for 100 dolls. The supply lasted about four minutes.
Margaret Cote came away empty-handed. Her daughter Jessica leaned against a display case, close to tears. Another shopper told UPI she’d already tried Portland and Bangor and had even called Boston.
The search could eat up an afternoon in towns that never had a doll to sell her.
At a different Zayre, in West Allis, Wisconsin, the advertised price was $17.99, with 225 dolls available. What that bought was a soft-bodied doll with a vinyl head, a birth certificate and adoption papers.
Coleco varied details such as hair and eye color. Children could give their doll a place in the family as soon as they got it out of the box.
Coleco’s mass-market dolls arrived in 1983, and production couldn’t keep up with the holiday rush. The scramble spilled into the following Christmas.
In December 1984, UPI reported that two people in Seattle were arrested after a shopper was assaulted and one of the three dolls she’d bought was taken.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a hospital tried to give families something to put under the tree anyway. It offered birth certificates for whatever doll a child received. The hospital told UPI it got more than 3,000 requests in a single day.
2. Teddy Ruxpin, 1985 — The bear with a waiting list before fall
You slipped a cassette into Teddy Ruxpin, opened the storybook and watched a stuffed animal read to you. His mouth and eyes moved in time with the recording.
If you were used to squeezing a toy to hear one canned phrase, a bear that could sit through a whole story was something you wanted to show a friend.
The bear arrived in 1985 with a price that made it a substantial gift. UPI put it at $70 to $80 that December. And Teddy brought along an entire cassette library.
By November, the Los Angeles Times counted 13 available tapes, enough to make the bear into a repeat customer’s toy if you could get hold of him in the first place.
One Toys International store already had 400 people on its waiting list by early September. In December, the head of Worlds of Wonder, the company behind Teddy, told UPI it couldn’t take another order until March.
For shoppers calling around in early December, another delivery before Christmas was a hope, and one store’s shipment could vanish overnight.
The Washington Post met Francoise Oram coming out of Toys “R” Us after her third attempt to find one for her six-year-old granddaughter. In Bethesda, a toy-store manager said he had received bears on Friday and run out by Saturday.
A shopper could be a day late without knowing there’d been anything to be late for.
Years later, a curator at The Strong heard the other side from people who’d been kids in 1985. They remembered tearing through the wrapping and finding the cassette and storybook packed in with the bear.
For a little while, somebody else got to do the reading.
3. Super Mario Bros. 2, 1988 — The cartridge that kept the phone ringing
By December 1988, a toy-store manager in Bethesda, Maryland, was getting about 500 calls a week for Super Mario Bros. 2. He’d ordered 144 copies. He received 12.
Sears had put the game in its Christmas catalog, so some families already knew exactly what to ask for when they called.
On the TV, Mario’s world had gotten wonderfully odd. You could play as Princess Toadstool and float over gaps, or choose Toad and pull vegetables out of the ground to throw at enemies.
If you’d spent months learning the timing of Mario’s jumps, watching the princess hang in midair was reason enough to want a turn.
Nintendo of America ran its U.S. operation out of Redmond, but one of its problems that year was global. A shortage of memory chips squeezed video-game makers, forcing them to cut or delay titles.
The Post tied the scarcity of the Mario sequel to the chip shortage. A kid could track down all the playground rumors about the game and still be waiting on a part inside the cartridge.
An Ultimate Game Club mail-order ad from the era listed a new copy at $44.99 and a used one at $34.99. The same ad offered $20 in trade for a cartridge.
By the time a copy made it into a family’s living room, it already had a price on its way back out.
4. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, 1993–94 — Even the mall Santa had to stall
At Santa Anita Mall in Southern California, Grant Christensen had a problem familiar to any parent in December 1993. Children kept asking him for Power Rangers. He was Santa Claus, so he told them the elves were overworked.
When he talked about the kids who might wake up without the figure they’d asked for, his eyes filled with tears.
The Fox series had arrived that year with color-coded teenage heroes, dinosaur powers and a villain named Rita Repulsa. The figures let kids cast their own battles on the living-room floor.
Which Ranger was in the package mattered. If you’d asked for the one you pretended to be at recess, another color could feel like somebody had missed the point.
The Times reported that the figures could cost up to $10 at retail in 1993. Resellers asked several times that, and some sold Rangers out of car trunks.
A year later, a Maryland retailer told the Washington Post he was buying figures on the secondary market for $14 or $15 and putting them on his own shelves for $18.95. He still struggled to keep them there.
Bandai said a factory in Thailand was operating around the clock during the first holiday rush.
The following August, parents were still lining up on Monday mornings outside a Northern Virginia store in hopes of catching a delivery. Its manager said the last batch of 144 figures had sold in less than two hours.
A Bandai spokeswoman heard about parents drawing pictures of the Rangers to leave under the tree. Others wrote notes from Santa promising the real thing would come later. It was the kind of IOU you could only write in somebody else’s handwriting.
5. Tickle Me Elmo, 1996 — One last doll in the stockroom
The Kay-Bee at University City Shopping Center in the Spokane area thought it had sold all 24 of its Elmos over Thanksgiving weekend. Then employees found one beneath a pile of empty boxes in the back room.
At that store, the doll had retailed for $35.99. Local classified ads were already asking upward of $350.
The joke worked even if you were too young to follow a whole episode of Sesame Street. Press Elmo’s belly and he giggled. Keep going and the doll shook as if it couldn’t stand another second.
The toy almost wore a different face. Tyco had considered making it as Tickle Me Taz before the mechanism found its way into Elmo.
Elmo debuted in July. Rosie O’Donnell showed him off on daytime TV, and by December Tyco was flying dolls in from China to get them onto shelves faster.
The company expected to ship a million by Christmas and told the Associated Press it still wouldn’t meet demand.
The Spokane-area Kay-Bee had one doll to work with. Assistant manager Josh Ludwig recalled a caller offering roughly $7,000. The store opted for a raffle benefiting Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery, which provides emergency respite care for children.
By the time the newspaper reported the story, about 700 people had bought a chance at the toy. A ticket cost a dollar.
6. Beanie Babies, 1997 — The $5 toy with a four-figure cousin
A Beanie Baby fit in your palm. The pellets let it flop over the edge of a desk, and the heart-shaped tag gave you a name to call it.
Ty showed its original nine animals in 1993, and specialty shops began stocking them in early 1994. By spring 1997, ordinary Beanies were retailing for $5 to $7. T
At From the Heart, a shop in northeastern Pennsylvania, several mothers were calling daily to ask about new arrivals by Thanksgiving. The store was still selling the animals for the suggested $5.
With a price like that, a kid could imagine building a whole collection one animal at a time. Getting a specific one was another matter.
When Ty retired a design, collectors started chasing the copies already out in the world. They cared about which version they’d found and whether the paper tag was intact.
The internet let someone hunting for a particular snake or elephant look well beyond the gift shop that happened to be on their way home.
One California mother of four told the Post that she paid $600 for a retired Slither the Snake at a specialty store. She put it up for auction online. It sold for $1,006.
The hunt had become a family affair, and she was already worried about what would happen when prices fell.
That little paper heart was easy for a child to pull off. By Christmas 1997, it was easy to imagine a parent hovering nearby, asking them to please leave it on.
7. Furby, 1998 — The pet that sold out in ten minutes
The day after Thanksgiving 1998, one store at Minnesota’s Mall of America sold 300 Furbys in ten minutes. At a Kay-Bee in Los Angeles, about 250 people were waiting at 6 a.m. for an allotment of 150. By eight, the store had sold its last one.
A new Furby cost about $30. Out of the box, it blinked, moved its ears and babbled in Furbish. Over time, its programming introduced English words.
To a kid who’d been talking to it for days, the first recognizable words could feel like proof that the creature had been listening.
Demand outran supply internationally, Minnesota Public Radio reported. That mattered to shoppers who’d already tried every store they knew.
In San Francisco, an FAO Schwarz manager said callers were still asking for Furbys even though he didn’t expect more until January. In Pennsylvania, classified sellers were asking $70 to $100.
In Spokane, the Spokesman-Review caught Bruce Town hurrying into the Toys “R” Us on North Division just before seven in the morning. He told the paper he was already on his third store.
Somewhere between getting out of bed and pulling into that parking lot, he’d already had two chances to call it a day.
Years later, the kid who opened that Furby might remember the eyes blinking for the first time. The adult might still be able to name all three stores.
In Jingle All the Way, the whole ordeal plays out where everybody can see it. Most kids who got the toy they wanted saw only the last scene, when the wrapping came off.
And sometimes the people doing the hunting got a little carried away by the thought of that scene. At a Goodwill auction in 1996, a postal clerk named Ruth Hamilton bid $140 for an Elmo for her granddaughter, about a day’s pay.
She hadn’t gone in especially wanting one. “I did it for the thrill,” she told the Washington Post. “To go home and look at their faces.”