25th Anniversary

The other night I was walking through the toy section at Target, looking for a birthday present for someone else's kid, and I saw that they had replicas of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures for their 25th anniversary. Cabbage Patch and G.I. Joe have already done replicas too, so it's not noteworthy for that concept. It's just that I can't believe it's been 25 years. And it hasn't. You see, the Turtles action figures were my youngest brother's toys, not mine, and he hadn't even been born in 1984. What's actually been around for 25 years is the concept, since the black and white comic started in 1984. The Turtles action figures and animated series came a few years later, along with The Real Ghostbusters action figures and animated series, not to be confused with their 1984 original movie. What else has been around 25 years? Apple Computers (which I never used until college), Transformers (which I didn't know much about until the recent live action movie), and as I mentioned in "My '80s TV Shows" post (9/1/08), The Cosby Show. Since Thanksgiving, my wife's been watching every episode from every season of Friends and now that she's done, she told me she wants to go back through the entire Cosby run. I didn't watch Friends with her, but I'd like to revisit The Cosby Show, as it started around the same time as my earliest memories. 1984 was the year I started Kindergarten. When I turned 25, it didn't feel too weird to think that I was a quarter of a century old. But to think that Kindergarten was a quarter of a century ago for me and so was Ghostbusters - now that's weird.