80s-90s gifts

Travel brochures always promise the moon. Tatooine promises you two suns. The desert planet may not exactly be a preferred vacation destination - s...

In Super Mario, the best surprises hide behind those yellow question mark blocks – coins, power-ups, or extra lives. You never know what's inside u...

"I am the one who knocks" - one of the most iconic sentences in TV history. But what if the most famous plumber in the video game world had decided...

With the Pokémon Pokéball sandwich maker, your snack ends up where it belongs: neatly caught between two slices of toast. Shiny black on the outsid...

Anyone who drinks sake like a warrior from the world of Dragon Ball should do so in style. The Dragon Ball Z Blue Shenlong Sake Set made of ceramic...

In 1954 a man in a rubber suit stomped through a model city made of balsa wood, and cinema was never the same afterwards. Godzilla was never just a...

You run through level after level, jump over chasms, dodge turtles - and then, just before you give up, it glows: the green mushroom. A 1-UP. An ex...

If your breakfast deserves a special treat that doesn't sound like "standard toast", this gadget is practically a little kitchen companion from Kan...

Chrome, Formica and a counter where the refill arrives before anyone asks: the American diner of the eighties ran on a fixed inventory. Somewhere i...

In the Mushroom Kingdom the important things hang in mid air anyway: the Question Block that spits out a coin after a solid headbutt from below, an...

Let's be honest: The Empire's white soldiers are famous for many things. For their spotless armor. For their unwavering loyalty. For their… well, a...

In the 1960s, they hung in travel agencies: bold posters that made distant destinations tangible with a single image. NASA has embraced this tradit...

Red or Blue? Since the first Pokémon games on the Game Boy, the choice of starter Pokémon has divided friendships and schoolyards. Bulbasaur fans, ...

Steven Rhodes is the illustrator behind these delightfully dark retro images that look like harmless 1970s schoolbooks – until you take a closer lo...

Who hasn't dreamed of turning to Shenlong with a wish? While the dragon himself may be difficult to summon, you can at least treat yourself to a li...

"ThunderCats, Ho!" – if you grew up with this battle cry, you know: the Sword of Omens is no ordinary sword. It carries the Eye of Thundera, a red ...

88 miles per hour: no other number in film history sounds quite so much like a departure. Below it, the silver runabout is just a car with a stiff ...

In Minecraft you know: when the sun goes down, it gets dangerous. Torches quick! In real life, this little guy now takes care of that for you. The ...

On October 21, 2015, Marty McFly lands right in the middle of the future in Back to the Future Part II, marvelling at floating hoverboards, self-la...

Back then, when Star Wars was still recorded on VHS, "new" was a feeling that smelled of plastic cassettes and heated tube TVs. And then came the p...

The Pokémon Pokéball Toaster is the kind of kitchen gadget that makes even morning grouches look like they've just stepped out of the Pokécenter. I...

No villain has lost as often and lost his temper as rarely as Skeletor. The lord of the underworld has been marching against He-Man in front of Cas...

By the power of Grayskull! Prince Adam raises the sword, the lightning comes down, and the bored courtier turns into He-Man. The series Revelation ...

In the summer of 1975 the beaches stayed empty, because one film had convinced half the world that something with a great many teeth was waiting in...

At some point the last pizza box is empty, the television is only hissing away to itself, and things go quiet under the streets of New York. That i...

There is one moment in the Mario games when the music suddenly rattles off at double speed with no warning at all. For a few seconds the whole scre...

A hundred coins and the counter flips over into an extra life. Hardly any game has made collecting loose change as satisfying as Super Mario, and a...

A summer job at an ice cream parlour sounds like sunshine and chocolate sprinkles until you see the uniform: a blue and white striped sailor dress,...

In the eighties a black band shirt worked a lot like an ID card. Walk across the schoolyard in one and you never had to explain what was sitting in...

When Joyce Byers tapes the alphabet to her living room wall and hangs a string of lights above it, half of Hawkins writes her off as unhinged. Yet ...

A desk is basically a straight line: the start on the left with the first coffee, the finish on the right with the end of the working day, and in b...

In these games a single golden ring is your entire life insurance: take a hit while you still have one and you get straight back up, with the rings...

His real name is Miles Prower, but everyone calls him Tails, after the pair of them that spin like rotor blades and lift him off the ground. He is ...

Mario has rammed his head into those yellow cubes from below countless times, always trusting that a coin, a mushroom or something even better woul...

Three rules, that is all it takes: no bright light, no water, nothing to eat after midnight. Break them and instead of one cuddly Mogwai you sudden...

Ray Stantz dug the car up as a rattling old ambulance, complete with a fault list running from the shock absorbers to the transmission, and bought ...