Gifts from family can be hit or miss, especially when you’re a kid. I think every person who would be reading this (all, you know, six of you) knows this. For the family members who know you, you can get some awesome presents (my mom, who got me this beloved piece of my childhood for christmas 1989 or my oldest brother got me this beauty for my 10th birthday). Sadly, you can’t always get Capcom’s Darkwing Duck NES game. Sometimes you get ALF Colorforms.
Colorforms, for the uninitiated, are apparently a “classic toy”. I say “classic” because they’ve been around since 1951 and have won honors, including a place on TIME’s 100 Greatest Toys list. If you’re really uninitiated, or just don’t want to read a Wikipedia article about Colorforms, they come in themes, often licensed ones). In each box, you got a laminated background and a series of vinyl cutout characters, props, and speech bubbles. The vinyl adhered to the laminated cardboard, so you could put your colorforms on the background and then... um... peel them off and stick them back on?
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| They'll do any license, evidently. |
I’ll be honest, I don’t get colorforms. Take that Real Ghostbusters one I linked to. Ray looks like he’s farting. And Ray will always look like he’s farting. He doesn’t move. Which leads to people doing this. Additionally, since the characters were designed to stick to the background, you couldn’t really move them around. I really just don’t get this as a “toy”. Maybe as a kid who drew lots of pictures (ahem...), I preferred drawing characters (I wish I still had any of my approximately googolplex of GB drawings). As an 8 year old, I could not draw a screen-accurate Ray, but I could make him do more than look like he had too many beans for lunch.
