One of the best parts of
the Holiday Season is the store flyers that come in
the Sunday papers. In November and December it is almost
guaranteed that all the new toys will be featured in
local and national store flyers. This page is dedicated
to those stores and their flyers.
It might be impossible to find all the flyers in perfect
condition. But most newspapers are put on microfiche
to preserve the news – at the same time the flyers
and ads are also included. The microfiche are black
and white, and the projector that allow you print them,
print very poor quality pages – so a lot of the
outrageousness of these ads are long gone. But it’s
still great to find a record of them.
If you’re interested in looking for other flyers
your local newspaper or library should have the newspapers
on microfiche. It very time consuming to go though the
paper month by month, day by day, page by page –
but as you can see it’s worth it.
So far I have only search though the Christmas Season,
but I know there are other Jem ads from January to October
– those toy ads are very hit and miss, so I thought
it would be better to start with the Christmas Season.
I am missing Toys R Us, Children’s Palace and
KB Toys. I can’t remember if KB Toys had flyers
at the time, but we did have KB Toys in the local mall.
I was shocked, I did not find the other two, as Toys
R Us did have flyers in the local paper from time to
time and both Toys R Us and Children’s Palace
were within 45 miles.
In the flyers I found, I was shock to see that Jem
was only in two flyers for Christmas 1987, and only
in November. It would seem that Hasbro and the stores
gave up on Jem and decided not to advertise her. Manufactures
give Co-op dollars to stores for the space in the flyers,
so it looks like Hasbro was not willing to spend any
extra money on advertising for Jem. I can’t help
but feel that this happened because Hasbro was canceling
Jem, so they didn’t care. But this could also
be because Hasbro felt like the money spent in 1986
did not produce sales, so they would not give as many
Co-op dollars for Jem in 1987.
I included the flyers that had Barbie and the Rockers,
so show how much advertising the Rockers got, along
with the prices that Rockers were being sold for versus
the price of Jem.
November and
December 1986
Venture
11/9-11/15
9.99
Misfits, Jem or Holograms
Black & Co.
11/13-??/??
11.99 Jem Doll, 10.99 Holograms, 19.99
Back Stage Case
