A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Today I spent a while looking for my favorite commercial jingles for this post but I couldn’t find the old Autozone commercial or the National Tire Warehouse commercial so I decided to come up with something else. While searching I ran into a He-Man commercial and I thought to write up my favorite toys as a kid… but everyone knows about He-Man and Transformers and Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so I decided to talk about some of the more obscure toys that I played with. Unless you were born between 1977 and 1983 or had siblings who were you probably won’t have any idea what this stuff is… Keep reading to find out my favorites.

1. Bravestar
This show/ toys were pretty short lived so I never obsessed about these toys like I did He-Man or even the Ghostbuster Toys, but I am sure I would have. The toys were really cool, you should shoot lasers at things and their heads would pop off or something, I don’t really remember, but they were sweet. And they came with this red crystal stuff that they mined. It was based on the wild west and gold mining town except it was set in the future in space (On Planet “New Texas”)and you mined for red rocks and every one was scary but Marshall Bravestar represented fully. I did not have these toy guns in the commercial, but I wish I did. It was the only commercial I could find, but you can see the opening theme here.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5xmv3a2SY4[/youtube]

2. MadBalls
Most of these toys had a TV show released at the same time as the toy. Most of my favorite cartoons were just ads for the toys, but Madballs didn’t have a show until after the toys were popular. They were just these gross Nerf-esque balls that were so cool looking. I had like ten of them. They came with a poster and I still have it somewhere. I think it is at my parents house, but I am pretty sure I could find it. It was hanging up in my old room for nearly a decade. I never watched the show, but you can check it out here.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYQwQBJatjQ[/youtube]

3. M.A.S.K
Mask is slightly less memorable to me than the others. I remember playing with them on vacation with my parents and my best friend Michael (who by the way is married with a kid, which is terrifying to me). M.A.S.K. was an acronym for Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, but coincidently they all wore masks… and the masks were really chewy and probably a bad thing to give a 6 year old kid. Also things were not what they seemed, they were sort of like Transformers in that they transformed, but instead of turning from a car to a robot they turned from a car into a car with guns… or something like that. My favorite thing was the volcano play set which I found the commercial for below. Also, in keeping with the rest of this post, here is the TV show opening theme.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blm5mu6jJTI[/youtube]

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