Trick or Treat! (Barbie: The Magazine for Girls - Vol. 1, No. 4)

This Halloween post is a bit different than my usual video game magazine scan or photos of action figures. Earlier this year I found three issues of my sister's Barbie magazine, which is subtitled "The Magazine for Girls." Every issue has a column called "The Barbie Drama," where a story is told using photos of the toys, and from the Fall 1984 issue is this rather short Halloween tale. All of the stories are simplistic, which is to be expected for a kid's magazine. It's great that the staff chose to use photos instead of drawings, which must have taken a fair amount of time to create. Many magazines for kids at that time, such as G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe. featured story pages too, but they typically used a comic strip format.

Happy Halloween!

FAO Schwarz: The Holiday Book 1999

I typically scan an old video game holiday catalog near the end of each year but this time I'm going with a toy catalog from FAO Schwarz. This 1999 holiday book features Stuart Little on the cover and is just over 100 pages when counting the front cover and foldout. However, I only scanned 39 pages, focusing mostly on holiday items, electronics, and popular brands, such as G.I. Joe, Star Wars, and Barbie. Skipped items primarily include toddler toys and plush. Also, one page is out of order as I placed page 50 at the end because it helped make the side-by-side pages match better and it made more sense to have the Furby product scans next to one another. If you're not familiar with FAO Schwarz, it is a toy store founded in 1862 with a flagship store in New York City, which can be seen in the film "Big," where Tom Hanks dances on the floor piano. It sells a variety of toys, some on the pricey side, and numerous exclusives with many marketed as limited edition collectibles. 

Barbie (White's Guide to Collecting Figures 1996/97)

I wrote in the July update yesterday that I was going to check if I had anything related to Barbie that I could post and so I scanned some pages from three issues of White's Guide to Collecting Figures. Although the magazine's title may give the impression that it was only about action figures, it actually covered a wide range of topics with monthly columns about things like Disney, Coca-Cola, Hallmark, and Barbie. The scans include each issue's monthly Barbie column as well as a couple of other articles. While I didn't take the time to re-read what I'm posting and am not too interested in the subject matter, I'm somewhat familiar with Barbie toys since my sister had them, my mother collected them, and I worked in a couple toy stores during the '90s.

November 1996 (#23)

February 1997 (#26)

July 1997 (#31)