It’s been a little while since I sat down and dissected an awesome pop culture bedroom so I thought I’d dive back in by taking a closer look at Josh Baskin’s childhood room in the 1988 movie Big. First off I love this movie to death, and love all the little details and weird merchandising (like the wacky comic book adaptation.) This movie is literally bursting at the seams with amazing 80s toys, I mean between all of the Masters of the Universe, Bravestarr, and ThunderCats posters up in the cubicles where he works at MacMillan Toys, all of the stuff in the Photon Showdown scene in the toy store (Fireball Island, StarCom, Pound Puppies and giant kid-sized Lamborghini’s), the plethora of stuff in his office (including MOTU, Silverhawks, G.I. Joe and M.A.S.K.), or all the junk in his apartment (Thundercats sheets, Inhumanoilds and giant Gumbys) you can kind of go numb trying to spot all the cool stuff. Matt over at Dinosaur Dracula did a fantastic job of breaking a bunch of that stuff down. But I’m gonna concentrate on some of the stuff in Josh’s bedroom in his house at the start of the film…
The flick opens up with some great shots of Josh’s room and in the mess there is some pretty neat stuff…
1). Galoob Power Machines Flex
2). Bravestarr Stratocoach from Mattel
4). Garbage Pail Kids school folders
I had a few of those GPK folders and man I wished I’d hung onto them. For awhile it was the only way I could get a glimpse at some of the 1st series John Pound artwork since those stickers were near impossible to find when I started collecting back when the 2nd and 3rd series were just coming out. Also, you gotta love that Galoob Flex motorized truck. From the same folks that brought us The Animal and Leader 16 (aka Truckapiller!) But, from a slightly different angle we can see Josh also had some Masters of the Universe stuff…
**UPDATE**
So it was killing me the entire time I wrote this post. There were a couple of toys that I just could not place for the life of me. But finally after an exhaustive search I finally found them!
13). Gold Chrome Variant Laser Force Spaceship from Gay Toys 1983
14). Green Laser Force Tank from Gay Toys 1983
These were apparently available in many different color schemes with various colored attachments and canopy colors. There, now I can rest easy tonight… :p
5). Laster Tag bed sheets and comforter
6). Masters of the Universe Bashasaurus
Josh was also a fan of Spider-Man as we can see in this next shot…
7). Power Tronic Secret Wars Spider-Man Walkie Talkie
8). The Amazing Spider-Man light switch cover
What I totally forgot was that Josh shared a room with his baby sister, and thanks to my girlfriend Jaime I now know that, that huge toy in the crib with her is a Pillow Person!
9). Pillow People Sweet Dreams doll
There are a couple of other things I wanted to mention from Josh’s house, namely his super rad taste in, um, undergarments…
10). Kellogs Strawberry Squares cereal
11). M.A.S.K. Funpals/Underoos
You know, I’ve wanted to do an advertising retrospective on Underoos for years. I have a bunch that I’ve found in old issues of McCalls and Woman’s Day from the 80s, but do you have any idea how hard it is to write and article about kid’s underwear, no matter how freaking awesome the branding might be, without feeling like a skeezy perv? It’s next to impossible. I mean just putting all the imagery from the advertisements together, all the kids prancing around super happy in their underwear, well it’s more than a little weird. Sigh. At least this movie gives me a good excuse to finally talk about it a little. And now that I am, um, how mind-meltingly awesome is it that we live in a world where a two-time Oscar winning actor has been caught on film sporting a pair of Underoos featuring one of my favorite cartoons of all time?!? And people wonder why I love the 80s…
12). Silverhawks Underoos
15). Tyco Zero Gravity Cliffhangers Slot Car Set (which you can see under his bed in the first screen shot above…)
16). Etch a Sketch
**UPDATED**
So, thanks to The Navigator for pointing out that there are more shots of Josh’s bedroom in the recent Extended Edition of Big which features 20 minutes of additional scenes Penny Marshall added back in to her director’s cut of the film! In a screen shot from the below scene we can see that Josh had more Bravestarr toys than I first realized…
17). Bravestarr Neutra-Laser
18). Bravestarr 30-30 action figure
There’s also some sort of boxed robot toy underneath the bed in the light blue/teal box. I can’t make out the text completely, but it looks like “… Man” and it appears to be some sort of gold Gundam-esque mecha or robot. Anyone have any ideas on what this might be?
Also, after watching the Extended Edition for the first time last night I was trying to be hyper aware and for the first time I noticed a rather awesome piece of pop culture ephemera in Josh’s supremely UN-awesome NY hotel room. I’m labeling this as “negative one” because that room sucks!
-1) Mr. T Air Freshener
Last but certainly not least, I wanted to leave you all with this other neat item that I think gets overlooked in the movie. In the famous boardroom pitch scene where we’re introduced to the delightful if rather pointless transforming skyscraper (“I don’t get it…”), there is another interesting and totally pointless prototype transformer in the background…
The Car-nimal! Seriously, it’s a car that transforms into a car with legs instead of wheels. The irony isn’t quite as astounding as a transforming skyscraper, but it’s still pretty silly and dumb. Love these little details in the film. You know, now that I’m thinking about it, is the Sky Scraper Bot really all that dumb? I mean, we did have Fortress Maximus and Metroplex. Think about it…
Other Awesome Bedrooms I’ve covered…
Sara’s Room from Adventures in Babysitting
Eugene’s Room from The Monster Squad
David’s room from Flight of the Navigator
Robbie’s room from Poltergeist
Pee Wee’s room from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure