Dino Drac’s 25 Days of Christmas!
Welcome to Dino Drac’s 25 Days of Christmas! From now through December 25th, I’ll be posting a little something, every single day. Remember to check back, because I won’t be plugging this often!
12/1: Children’s Palace Circular! (1989)
Children’s Palace was a chain of castle-themed toy stores that only barely survived the ‘80s. Much like my old hamster, it died in 1992. (Pour one out for Children’s Palace, and another for Cyrano Magnus Maximillion.)
This old Christmas circular might seem like everyday nostalgia bait, but I have a specific reason for mentioning it. On the upper left, you’ll notice the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Footcruiser, a flying car that was meant for the bad guys. (It was a bit of a faux pas for Children’s Palace to put Mikey behind the driver’s seat, but in their defense, that old Shredder figure was a bitch to pose.)
I actually received the Footcruiser for Christmas, a year after this circular was, uh, circulated. At my family’s big Christmas Eve party in 1990, it wasn’t long before me and my cousin found ourselves downstairs, gleefully plucking our gifts out from the giant piles, while the adults devoured crab legs upstairs.
She was younger than me and we rarely got along, but with Christmas came camaraderie. We were the only kids at the party, and this whole inspecting-our-gifts-before-midnight thing had become an annual tradition for us.
Looking back, we could’ve gotten away with opening them early. When the clock struck midnight, it was always total chaos down there. Nobody would’ve noticed. Still, we abided by the unspoken rules, and would only let ourselves shake the wrapped boxes, desperate for hints.
What would turn out to be the Footcruiser – which, ironically, was a gift from that same cousin’s parents – was wrapped in paper that was kinda/sorta semi-translucent. Held to the light, I was at least able to make out a Ninja Turtles logo.
I spent hours agonizing over what might be inside, and when the clock finally struck midnight, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to see the Footcruiser.
See, I’d convinced myself that the gift was actually Killer Bee, one of the TMNT “Mega Mutants,” which I’d been openly begging for. Besides, the Footcruiser was pretty old news by 1990. Anything tied to the Ninja Turtles was a win, but in the immediate aftermath, the car didn’t seem like such a great payoff to six straight hours of Gift Inspecting.
Oh, how wrong I was. When I opened the box an hour or so later, sacrificing sleep for toys, I immediately fell in love. The Footcruiser RULED. I’d still probably rank it as my favorite vehicle from the entire vintage TMNT collection. It was like the Mad Max version of the flying DeLorean, but somehow from the 1960s.
I spent much of the subsequent winter break making that thing fly around my bedroom, complete with whistling sounds provided by yours truly. As I recall, Scumbug was its most frequent driver. Or pilot, I guess? Either way, thanks for the memory jolt, Children’s Palace.
