As I mentioned before, my favorite April Fool’s day prank was the 8-bit tie available at ThinkGeek. Turns out that they are going to make it after all:

Hey! You! Quit emailing us to make this for REAL already ; ) We promise, we’ll make it. In fact we are already working on it. You’ve just forced our hand! Click the ‘email me when available’ link above to get notified! Thanks! I guess the joke is on us this year :p

While I’m certainly appreciative that I grew up in a time of Transformers, Voltron, Robotech, etc … I’ve started looking at the toys that are available to my son. You know what, we were gipped.

Exhibit A, the Dinosaur Easter Basket pictured above. I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up all we ever got was the gender neutral ones made out of twigs and straw.

Exhibit B, Lego Star Wars Death Star, Imperial Star Destroyer, and Millenium Falcon. Girl Plankton doesn’t buy my excuse that purchasing them would be an investment. I’ve tried convincing her that they would be an investment in our children’s geek credentials. That didn’t go over as well as I had hoped. Subsequently, I tried convincing her that they would be collectors items which could be exchanged for large sums of money upon acceptance of our children into Ivy League institutions. To her credit she pointed out that I wouldn’t be allowed to remove them from the packaging if that was the case.

Exhibit C, Toys R Us has a Robots Category on their website. Completely glossing over the fact that when I was young the only two options for shopping at Toys R Us were waiting for the catalog to come with the Sunday paper, or go to the store with the folks. Nowadays all you have to do is bookmark the Robots Category on their website. How effing cool is that?

I think it’s painfully clear to everybody how badly we were screwed. We had Easter Baskets, but not fuzzy dinosaur ones. We had Legos, but the most you could hope to create was a tower or a bridge. Sometimes you had most of the necessary pieces to put together a helicopter or an airplane. Nobody had gone to the trouble of putting together a kit to build a Death Star with them. We had plenty of robot toys, but we didn’t have such convenient methods of shopping for them. Our only option was to beg our parents to drive us to the store. Even then we were at the mercy of the clerks who stocked the shelves. Maybe they had Roy Focker’s VF-1 that you saved for months to buy. Chances were that you were going to have to settle for that Zentraedia Battle Pod because it was the last one on the shelf. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Of course, it could have been worse. All our father’s had had to play with when they were kids was fire and the wheel.