The Top 5 Toys of the 1980s Christmas
A cube, a doll, a shape-shifting robot, a talking bear and a handheld: five toys the 1980s Decembers circled, and where to find the modern versions.
November 3, 2026 · ZABI LLC
Ask anyone who grew up in the 1980s what was under the tree and you tend to get a toy with a story attached: a cube that swallowed whole afternoons, a doll you adopted, a robot that was also a truck. The decade had no shortage of December favourites. This is our selection of five, each with a document behind it.
They are not a ranking. They are the ones whose stories hold up when you go looking for the paperwork, and they happen to be a good spread: a puzzle, a doll, a robot, a talking bear and a handheld game. For the doll, the long version of the December it caused is in our account of the 1983 shortage.
The five
National Toy Hall of Fame, 2014
Rubik's Cube
Erno Rubik, a Hungarian design teacher, assembled his first cube in 1974 and called it the Magic Cube. A toy agent pitched the puzzle to the Ideal Toy & Novelty Company, which renamed it and began selling it in stores in 1980. The Strong museum says 100 million cubes were sold within two years, which it describes as making this the most popular puzzle in history. That is the museum's worldwide figure, not an American one.
The same page lists the side effects of the early 1980s: "cube's thumb", "Rubik's wrist", and support groups for people who could not stop. Meeting a cube again, what strikes you is how little has changed. The click, the colours, the slow realisation that dinner will be late. It fits a stocking without effort, and a speed-solving scene, whose records the World Cube Association has governed since 2003, shows it never quite went away.
National Toy Hall of Fame, 2023
Cabbage Patch Kids
In the 1970s an art student named Xavier Roberts made fabric sculptures he called Little People and offered them for adoption, each with a birth certificate and adoption papers. In 1982 marketing executive Roger Schlaifer acquired the licensing rights, renamed the dolls Cabbage Patch Kids and, with his wife Susanne, wrote their legend. Coleco's design team, led by Judy Albert, made the first plastic-headed versions for the 1983 holiday season.
By the end of November 1983 a Christian Science Monitor brief described hundreds of shoppers battling in the aisles of a Maine department store over limited stock, some of them waiting at the doors for four hours. Coleco had told Time it expected to sell 2.5 million dolls that season, according to the Sinclair retrospective. The adoption papers were the clever part: the doll was presented as a person, which may be why an empty shelf felt so personal.
National Toy Hall of Fame, 2024
Transformers
Hasbro secured the rights to a line of shape-changing robot toys from the Japanese toymaker Takara and chose to release them under a single brand. In 1984 they arrived as Transformers, with a backstory developed by Marvel Comics about a war between robots. The heroic Autobots, peaceful transport vehicles led by Optimus Prime, faced the Decepticons under Megatron.
Each 1984 figure came with a Tech Spec chart and a Bio Card listing its abilities, which is the detail grown-ups tend to remember first. Meeting one again, the pleasure is mechanical: a truck becomes a robot through a sequence you have to work out with your hands, and you can still get it wrong. It is a toy that rewards a parent who sits down and fumbles through it alongside their child.
Documented in a Mental Floss history of the bear
Teddy Ruxpin
Ken Forsse, a former Disney employee, created the talking bear through his company Alchemy II, and Worlds of Wonder, led by Don Kingsborough, made it. Teddy played an ordinary two-track stereo cassette: one track carried the speech, the other carried signals that moved his face and head in time. It reached stores in September 1985 and sold 41,000 in its first 30 days, according to Mental Floss.
Mental Floss says ABC aired two live-action Teddy specials that November and December, that more than a million bears had sold by early 1986, and that Worlds of Wonder chartered jumbo jets from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong to bring more in. It adds that about 35,000 were returned after that first Christmas for faulty operation, and that the company filed for Chapter 11 just before the 1987 holiday season. These figures rest on that one history, so read them as its account. The bear that talked, in other words, had a bumpier road than the one in the advertisements.
National Toy Hall of Fame, 2009
Game Boy
Nintendo launched Game Boy in 1989 with Tetris bundled in the box. The Strong museum credits its success to a simple, efficient design rather than advanced graphics or processing power, and to head-to-head play over the Game Link cable. It says Tetris appealed to everyone from children to grandparents, which is rare for a gadget in a stocking.
The museum inducted Game Boy in 2009 as an innovator in handheld gaming, one of twelve finalists that year. A Moneywise roundup lists it as the craze of the 1989 holiday season, though that is a retrospective, not a contemporary chart. Meeting it again, the surprise is how little it asks for: a small screen, a cable and one very good puzzle.
What the decade tells us
Side by side, the five have little in common except a story that came with the box: an adoption certificate, a war between robots, a bear that read aloud from a tape. That is worth remembering when you are choosing a gift now. A toy with a story gives a parent something to say when it is opened.
Two of the five, the doll and the bear, also show how a December can turn on supply as much as on the toy itself. If you want to see how the next decade handled it, the 1990s list picks up where this one stops, and classic toys that outlived every craze looks at the ones that kept going.
Sources
Where the facts in this post come from. Rankings and lists belong to the people who published them; the selection and the stories are ours.
- Rubik's Cube, National Toy Hall of Fame, The Strong National Museum of Play — Rubik's Cube history, 1980 stores, 100 million in two years, 2014 induction
- Cabbage Patch Kids, National Toy Hall of Fame, The Strong National Museum of Play — Roberts, adoption papers, Schlaifer 1982, Coleco, 2023 induction
- Transformers, National Toy Hall of Fame, The Strong National Museum of Play — Hasbro and Takara, single brand, 1984 debut, Autobots and Decepticons, 2024 induction
- Nintendo Game Boy, National Toy Hall of Fame, The Strong National Museum of Play — Game Boy 1989 launch, Tetris bundle, design, Game Link cable
- Game Boy induction post, The Strong National Museum of Play — 2009 induction, twelve finalists
- A Bear Necessity: The Story of Teddy Ruxpin, Mental Floss — Teddy Ruxpin creation, cassette, 1985 launch, demand, returns, bankruptcy
- American shoppers tussle to buy some hot new dolls, The Christian Science Monitor, 29 November 1983 — November 1983 department-store scramble for the dolls
- Cabbage Patch Kids Riots: 40-year anniversary, Sinclair Broadcast Group (KATV) — Coleco's 2.5 million expectation, as told to Time
- Throwback: the hottest toys 35 years ago, WRTV Indianapolis — Turtles figures called must-have gifts of 1989
- Every year's top holiday toy craze since 1989, Moneywise (via Yahoo Finance) — Game Boy listed as the 1989 holiday craze (retrospective)