He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Magazine From 1985

Back in the 1980s, there were more magazines out there than what was just on your local magazine rack. You may not have seen a lot of them, but there were magazines available and devoted to all kinds of kids’ favorite properties. He-Man, G.I. Joe, Barbie, The Smurfs, and numerous others. In most cases, you had to subscribe to these magazines, and you would receive a new issue every quarter.

I knew of the existence of these magazines but never was fortunate enough to be able to subscribe to them. In theory, I could have saved up my allowance money and subscribed, but that allowance money was usually going to wrestling magazines on the newsstand instead.

But for those of us who didn’t really get to experience these magazines, I’ve got a treat for you. In this Time Capsule, we’re going back in time to 1985 to check out the 2nd issue of the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe magazine! It’s mostly intact, but I did remove a couple of irrelevant ads just to make the size of the post more manageable.

I hope you enjoy this trip back in time via this Time Capsule, and if you have memories of these magazines, drop me a line in the comments.

Batman Forever Trading Cards (1995)

In this episode of Wax Pack Flashback, Adam and Jason from The Retro Network both open a pack of Fleer Batman Forever cards from 1995. This 120-card set featured promo shots and stills from the movie. Unfortunately, there were no chase cards produced with the set, but the guys find some very fun cards and share their memories of Batman Forever to kick off the video.


Wax Pack Flashback is a series that appears on TRNTV on YouTube, hosted by a rotating cast of Mickey, Jason, and Adam. See all of the various trading card opening videos on TRNTV.

Weekend Reading 08/07/22

Every weekend, I like to share a curated list of retro & nostalgia-themed articles, stories, and posts that I’ve come across in the last week. It gives you a chance to escape the daily grind, and just sit back and pass the time reading about the good old days. So with that in mind, here are some things I wanted to share with you this week.


In the News

Retro & Nostalgia

New on Retro Ramblings This Week

The 1992 Topps Baseball Card Project

I’ve always been a big fan of trading cards. Ever since I first laid eyes on my brother’s collection of Elvis cards when I was really young, I’ve been fascinated by them. That fascination only increased when my friends were bringing the original Garbage Pail Kids cards to school.

I think my first foray into that world was actually Panini sticker albums instead of cards. The first one I remember having was the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe one. I followed that up with several others including more licensed ones and even the generic ones like the exotic animals album.

If my recollection is right, the first packs of actual trading cards I bought for myself were Awesome All-Stars and Greatest Gross Outs. These were imitation baseball cards that depicted weird aliens as baseball players in comic form. I loved those things, and my passion for cards only grew stronger.

Fast forward a few years and I was an avid collector of cards of all types. Baseball, basketball, football, non-sports, Panini stickers…if it was out there, I was interested in it. But 1992 may have been the peak of my fandom in my early years. It was that summer that a group of friends and I spent most days just trading cards amongst ourselves. It was also the year Topps released the 1992 version of their iconic baseball cards.

I was buying a couple of packs every week, and would proudly proclaim to my card trading friends that I was going to get the whole set. They were behind me and even gifted me their doubles on a regular basis. But what I didn’t calculate at that time was the sheer size of the set. Combine that with a meager allowance and you have the recipe for a failed attempt at collecting a whole set. Needless to say, I didn’t even come close.

Fast forward many more years to where I got on eBay and picked up a few packs of some random non-sports cards. Just the act of opening those packs once again got my juices flowing, and I started buying more and more old unopened packs. Before I knew it, I had an impressive collection of them. Figuring that there were more people out there in the world like me who enjoyed that feeling of ripping open a pack of cards and rifling through them to see what they had got, I took to filming the openings and sharing them on YouTube. You’re probably familiar since I’ve posted several of those videos here on Retro Ramblings.

One of the packs I happened to pick up then was the 1992 Topps baseball. When I opened a pack of those cards, so much nostalgia came flooding back to me. Memories of summer days and a promise I made long ago. Now we’re about two years removed from that day, and I had the itch to not only open some more cards but try to assemble a set.

The cards I started opening were Dick Tracy cards based on the movie from 1990. I had about 25 packs of them and I thought I might have a whole collection there. I opened them, put them in pages, and came up really close. It turned out to be a really fun evening, and then a thought hit me. What if I once again tried to assemble the complete 792 card set of 1992 Topps baseball cards?

All of my original cards are long gone, but what I did have was about ten unopened packs, plus the cards from three packs I’ve opened recently. I ran the idea by my friends at The Retro Network, and they’ve been really supportive. So much so that Karen’s dad has offered to send me a bunch of his doubles from the set!

So I’m going for it. It’s a project that I’d consider to be 30 years in the making. I ordered 100 trading cards pages from Amazon, bought a heavy-duty 3-ring binder, decorated the cover of it with a package from a pack of the cards, and wrote all 792 numbers down in a small notebook for keeping track of the cards I’m still looking for when I’m out and about.

While this is mostly just a personal goal of my own, I thought I would share it with you in case you’ve got something you’ve been holding off on starting for a while. Don’t wait. Go out and get started! As this project matures, I’ll probably share more of the journey with you here on Retro Ramblings. But for now, I’m going to go open another pack of cards.

Dino Pebbles Cereal

Recently I talked about some old junk foods that I had missed out on. Well, here’s another one…

Post cereals have made some real winners in their time, and possibly at the top of that list is Fruity Pebbles.  And maybe right behind that is Cocoa Pebbles.  The combination of those little sweetened flakes of rice and the pitchmen duo of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble is a nearly unbeatable combination. 

Fruity Pebbles has been a staple of my complete morning breakfast as far back as I can remember.  Except when I would stay the night at my grandmother’s house.  Oh, she had Fruity Pebbles in the house, but those were just for Stevie.  The rest of us kids couldn’t eat those.  We had to eat oatmeal those mornings while watching Stevie enjoy a big bowl of that multi-colored goodness.  To which sometimes he would pour Mountain Dew over instead of the traditional milk.  That kid was something else.

But anyway, these Dino Pebbles came out in 1990 and turned the breakfast game on its head.  Now there have been variations on the classic Fruity Pebbles theme in the past like when they change the colors to all red and green at Christmas.  But this was a huge departure from the norm.  The flakes were all one color and with a vanilla flavor instead of the multitude of fruit flavors.  Then, they went and added multi-colored marshmallows to it!  Think about that for just a second.  They added marshmallows to Pebbles cereal.  That’s a nearly unbeatable combination. 

Unfortunately, these Dino Pebbles didn’t stand the test of time.  However, the box art is still strikingly gorgeous and makes my mouth water just looking at it.  Man, I wish someone would hurry up and invent time travel so we could go back and have all these cool cereals again.  I know one of you out there reading this is smart.  Get started on that asap, please.