In my neck of the woods, the Christmas season always officially kicked off with the arrival of the yearly Sears Wish Book and JC Penny catalog, which was usually sometime in October. After you got to know the timeline as a kid, you started checking the mailbox after getting home from school every day to see if they had arrived. Once they did, you would spend days or weeks pouring over them and circling all the cool stuff you wanted your parents to know you wanted for Christmas.
We’re taking a trip down memory lane in this post to do a modern version of that very thing with the 1990 JC Penny catalog. What follows are some of the items I would have most definitely circled in that year’s catalog. This is just the most recent trip like this back in time. Be sure to check out all of the other Seas Wish Book posts I’ve done in the past:
Highlights From the 1984 Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog
Highlights From the 1988 Sears Wish Book
Highlights From the 1991 Sears Wish Book
Days of Thunder Pajamas
Even though I couldn’t go see it in the theater, I was all in on Days of Thunder in 1990. I was really getting into NASCAR at the time as it was a Sunday ritual in my family to either watch the race on television or listen to the radio broadcast of it while out and about.
I don’t want these pajamas for wearing to bed, instead, I want them to act as my race suit so my imagination could run wild as I emulated my NASCAR heroes.
Fake Dick Tracy Gear
I was also big into Dic Tracy in 1990. Again, I didn’t get to see the movie when it was out, but after seeing ads for it, I started learning about Dick Tracy as I had been previously unaware of who he even was. It didn’t take me long at all to come to the conclusion that he was pretty cool and had some great “gadgets”.
While this collection of stuff wasn’t official merchandise licensed from the movie, it certainly would have been everything I wanted or needed to be a crime-stopper in my mind.
Batman Toys
While everyone else was still riding high on the tsunami-sized wave of excitement created by the 1989 Batman film, I was still a huge fan of the 1966 Batman TV series that I was watching every evening on The Family Channel.
With that said though, even I can’t deny how cool these toys were coming out of the movie. The Batcave playset looks really fun, and I had a few of the figures so I know they were well done.
Marvel Comic Book Pack
I was still a couple of years away from jumping head first into the world of comic books, but I knew enough about them already to be enamored with the fantastic world of superheroes. A big pack like this would have given me plenty to latch onto, and would have started my comic addiction even earlier in life.
Wrestling Card Collector’s Kit
Back at this time, I was buying every pack of the WWF Superstars cards that I could afford. Seeing these collectors albums and knowing that they would have come with some of those cards would have put me over the moon.
Nintendo Game Boy
I ended up saving my allowance for quite a while and buying the Gameboy for myself, but I’m sure I was asking for it for Christmas. The ability to take Nintendo with you everywhere you went was quite alluring, and a thought that I couldn’t resist.
Nintendo Games
Most every kid I knew back then had a Nintendo. And a hot topic of discussion when we got back to school after the Christmas break was what new games everyone found under the tree. Pictured above in the top right is Super Off Road…one of my favorite games to ever grace the system. I got it for Christmas one year, and it very well might have been 1990. I’d also be circling the WCW Wrestling and Castlevania III games.
Nerf Fencing
While everyone else was asking for the Nerf Bow back in the day, my cousin Tim and I were asking for the fencing set so we could go to war with each other on a daily basis. The commercials were great and I still today lament the fact that I never got to play with this set. It gets circled in this catalog.
Hit Stix
Since I’ve already written at length about Hit Stix, I’m not going to say much about it here other than I remember giving this item numerous circles in the catalog back then.
See-Through Telephone
We all wanted phones in our rooms back in 1990. And if you were lucky enough to have one, your next want was for it to be a cool phone. Back in 1990, a see through phone was this was the epitome of cool to me, so I’m adding it to my list.
Deluxe Audio/Video Entertainment Center
We had a nice entertainment center in our living room back then, but that never stopped me from adding one of my own for my bedroom to my list every year. It never happened, but that isn’t going to stop me from circling this one in this catalog.
Thanks for joining me on another trip into the pat to look through an old Christmas catalog. It’s one of the little things I like to do these days to help remember when.
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