Not quite a video game, but... (Captain Power)

[Ed Oscuro]

http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6213/history.html

Last night I was presented with (heh, how ostentatious of me...okay, I was given) something that Kellogg's had been working on circa July 23rd, 1987: support for Mattel's Captain Power series of toys, backed by a television show.

In short, it was a (apparently awesome, or at least very good) action show that you could go buy toys that would "interact" with the show itself. So there you go - after this venture failed (not high enough sales of toys, not enough viewers of the program, and a lot of controversy over the "buy the toys to watch the show" aspect, played up by a bunch of dour killjoys) it would be safe to assume Mattel was leery of anything with the letters "TV" in it for some years after.

I'm sure some of the forum members knew of this, but for me, it helps fill in a piece of the post-crash puzzle.

[Phosphor Dot Fossils]

http://www.digitpress.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34595

[rolenta]

Captain Power is mentioned in all 3 editions of Phoenix.

[Ed Oscuro]

http://www.digitpress.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34595

:D

Awesome!

A note on what that guy with the Jared av said about Star Trek: NG having problems around its first season: It had trouble 'cuz it sucked in its first season. :P

I suppose if anybody's dying to see it, I could scan some of the stuff in this packet.

[SegaAges]

so is it anything like battlevision.

battlevision was kinda cool (i own 1 fortunately). you just had this base that was he size of a g.i. joe base, and you needed to use certain weapons at certain times or else the middle of your base would come up and you would lose.

[rbudrick]

Wow..these sound very odd. And gimmicky, like ROB the robot. Kind of cool though....are they like the ActionMaxx or something? I'm surprised I don't remember these...

-Rob

[swlovinist]

yeah Im 28 so I remember these well. I always run across the videos, and sometimes you see them at goodwill stores

[petewhitley]

I bought that crap the day it came out back in the 80's. It was insufferably boring from the first play.

[DStriemer]

I had the main captain power ship with Captain power.....it sucked. It was this big white ship with a pistol grip that shot out a signal like any other videogame gun. The signal would "interact" with the weird metallic coloured parts of any of the enemies in the tv show.

You also got a couple lame targets you could place around in your house to practice shooting at. I suppose if you lived among a bunch of rich friends and they all had one you could have a pretty cool war for about twenty minutes before the batteries died.....and they ate battery juice like nuts. The figurines were basically "GI-JOES".

One cool thing is somehow the tv show would actually shoot back at you. You knew you were hit because a siren would go off and you couldn't shoot for a certain period of time. This was also the case if you were to get shot by a friend with one too.

Overall, neat idea....but the tv shows were horrible...even for a kid....it was like watching dukes of hazard(EXTREMELY CAMPY). It's great if you're four or five years old, but no older. And the "gunships" were way to heavy for any four or five year old to handle. So basically it had a bunch of good concepts done poor-average that didn't fit together all to well.

[Neil Koch]

Yeah I remember CaptainPower being fun for about 5 minutes -- the guns never seemed to work...

http://www.captainpower.com/

[SegaTecToy]

I bought one of Lord Dread's (I think it was the name) ships, a black one. It was beautiful and slick but the damned thing never worked.

I think I gave the ship some time later to one small kid or another.

[SegaAges]

wait, i remember this thing now. my parent's good friends (who were rich too), had 2 of those ships. i just remember it because i remember some stupid tv game with cool looking ships that interacted with the tv (hey, when you are 8 or 9, those ships look pretty cool).