PICS: #TBT Tech Toys from the 1977 Sears Xmas Catalog

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… okay, Christmas 1977 to be exact, children everywhere were on the cusp of a digital revolution.

It was quite an exciting time, and yet none of us knew how the toys of our childhood would take a quantum leap and influence products & apps built mere decades later.

And so we harken back to a quieter time, and anxiously await Santa to fill our stockings with these lovely gems from the 1977 Sears Christmas Season Wishbook:

Amazon? Pagh! Dial it in, baby! Even better, CHARGE IT!

15) Burning Man Playa Playset

14) Nest

13) FitBit

12) Amazon Kindle

11) Vevo

10) StyleHaul

9) TasteMade

8) Twitter

7) Aeron Chair

6) Netflix

5) YouTube

4) X Box

3) PlayStation

2) The Apple Suite (keep in mind Tim Cook was 17 in 1977) —

iWatch

iPad

iPod

iPod Mini

iPhone

and the #1 top toy of 1977 is…….

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…..Mattel Handheld Football, of course!

And the most glaring omission from the 1977 Sears Christmas catalog?

All things Star Wars — Star Wars had just premiered on a select number of screens in late May that year, before a national rollout that dominated the globe all the way into the summer of 1978, when Grease would eventually dethrone the George Lucas epic from the top of the stack.

Turns out that even though Star Wars was released in 1977, the Christmas catalog was already in production, and no one had any idea what an international juggernaut the movie would be, so the best that toymaker Kenner could offer was an “Early Bird Gift Card” — basically, a cardboard diorama on which to place your action figures when they arrived in spring of 1978 (cue sad trombone music):

(Womp wommmmp!)