MovieChat Forums > 8-Bit Christmas (2021) Discussion > lite brite and cabbage patch kids

lite brite and cabbage patch kids


not so big of a craze by 1988 if i remember.

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They made a point to say the year wasn't clear, in the beginning.

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He said he wasn't sure of the year. BUT in the scene where the mom is videoing them on Christmas day the time stamp in the corner of the video camera says 1988. So they set the date of the movie, they just didn't have any sort of consistency with the toys in the movie. The Cabbage patch craze was in 1983. By 1988 Mattel had bought the rights to make the Cabbage Patch Kids and they were no longer in short supply they were easily found with no fighting for them. The worthless Power Glove for the Nintendo was also not out until 1989. You simply have to watch a movie like this without thinking of it as a historical documentary because it was way off base in lots of areas.

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I can personally attest, those time stamps in the videos were often inaccurate. But yeah, like the Goldbergs, it's a conglomeration of that era.

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While that is true that time stamps have a tendency to be wrong, when they are wrong they tend to be perpetually set at January 1 of some year because the battery that keeps the clock going is bad... but in this instance they had the date set for December 25, 1988... So most likely it was not wrong from what they intended it to be. They simply played loose with history when making the movie. They were correct in somethings date wise like the Rampage game being in the game used to highlight the NES in the store. That would have been very believable as Rampage was just released for the NES in late summer of 1988 so it would have been a prime candidate for the game used by a store to push both the NES and the new game for Christmas sales.

It would simply be nice if show runners trying to set a movie in the past would spend the extra couple of hours to get the little details right. I mean there were hard to get girls toys in 1988 but it wasn't cabbage patch dolls it was Dolly Surprise the doll that had hair that would grown when you did some shit with her arm.

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You aren't wrong, but I get why they don't. They want to capture an entire era in a snapshot of only a few days. You're sort of forced to smash it all in. One thing this movie got perfectly right....the power glove really sucked,lol.

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Yeah, you are remembering correctly, the Cabbage Patch craze had waned by then. And, as you know, Lite Brite was more of a '70s toy. The people who make these clearly didn't live through the '80s. Stranger Things particularly grinds my gears in this regard.

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I dunno man, it was still a thing here. I remember the commercials back as a kid and I'm a 80's kid. Think they were still playing it during the 90's. I even remember getting one for Christmas.

https://youtu.be/gGCu0ezL4-U

Ah, nostalgia.

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Meant its popularity wasn't at the same height.

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Lite-Brite was actually created in 1967 by Bandai in Japan and then licensed to Hasbro which sold it in the US where it eventually peaked in popularity in the US in the early 80's. The problem is the uncle that sent the present from Japan would have been unlikely to have sent the Lite-Brite in 1988 as by that time it was no longer that popular in Japan and wouldn't have been likely to even be on most store shelves. The problem with the show is the writers didn't actually seem to know much about the 80's beyond what they picked up in random movies from the 80's.

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Man, so many people upset that this fiction movie isn't a historically accurate documentary. I can't believe the whiny comments I'm reading.

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