I got a nice little pile of 1985 Calbees off Yahoo Auctions a little while back. I wanted to try to recreate their original 1985 environment, so I hauled out my Famicom and a 1980s vintage Sony Trinitron TV that I had in the closet.
If you aren’t a retro gamer, a Famicom is the original Japanese version of Nintendo’s NES. It was released in Japan in 1983 and looks nothing like the North American version on the outside, but has the same guts inside. It was massively popular here in the 1980s and odds are pretty good that the kid in 1985 who pulled these Calbees from packs had a Famicom in his living room.
I’ve got a Super Mario Bros cart in there, a game that like these Calbees was released in 1985 and was a must have game for kids here, as it was…..pretty much everywhere.
Sony Trinitrons were a pretty popular TV model in the 80s here. I bought this one twelve years ago, just after Japan’s TV broadcasting switched to digital, so I could play old RF game systems on it. I couldn’t resist the red color. Its turned out to be a major pain to keep it tuned when I hook games up to it so I’ve mainly been using a more modern AV version of the Famicom to play games on our regular TV. My wife has been urging me to get rid of this red TV for years now and I’m not sure how much longer it will be in that closet…
I think these old cards look nice with their contemporaries like this.
Man, I'd love to have that television! It's probably a good thing that I'm not in your situation, as the choice between wife and television wouldn't be as clear cut as one might think :)
ReplyDeleteit is a cool TV, but the choice between the two is very clear for me :) :)
DeleteMany years ago I got contacted by someone who was working on a documentary about a Japan Airlines flight that crashed in 1985. They wanted to show a little boy on the flight playing with baseball cards and asked me if I could scan some 1985 Calbees in for them. Apparently they were really aiming for accuracy. As far as I know the documentary never got made - at least I never heard anything more about it.
ReplyDeleteSeems to me that you could have helped them out a lot more.
Oh thats interesting, that JAL flight crash is very well known here, deadliest single airplane crash in world history. The annual memorial ceremony they hold on the anniversary usually makes the news still. Interesting that the film makers were going for that level of accuracy.
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