One of the best parts of the Holiday Season is the store flyers that come in the Sunday papers. In November and December it is almost guaranteed that all the new toys will be featured in local and national store flyers. This page is dedicated to those stores and their flyers.

It might be impossible to find all the flyers in perfect condition. But most newspapers are put on microfiche to preserve the news – at the same time the flyers and ads are also included. The microfiche are black and white, and the projector that allow you print them, print very poor quality pages – so a lot of the outrageousness of these ads are long gone. But it’s still great to find a record of them.

If you’re interested in looking for other flyers your local newspaper or library should have the newspapers on microfiche. It very time consuming to go though the paper month by month, day by day, page by page – but as you can see it’s worth it.

So far I have only search though the Christmas Season, but I know there are other Jem ads from January to October – those toy ads are very hit and miss, so I thought it would be better to start with the Christmas Season.

I am missing Toys R Us, Children’s Palace and KB Toys. I can’t remember if KB Toys had flyers at the time, but we did have KB Toys in the local mall. I was shocked, I did not find the other two, as Toys R Us did have flyers in the local paper from time to time and both Toys R Us and Children’s Palace were within 45 miles.

In the flyers I found, I was shock to see that Jem was only in two flyers for Christmas 1987, and only in November. It would seem that Hasbro and the stores gave up on Jem and decided not to advertise her. Manufactures give Co-op dollars to stores for the space in the flyers, so it looks like Hasbro was not willing to spend any extra money on advertising for Jem. I can’t help but feel that this happened because Hasbro was canceling Jem, so they didn’t care. But this could also be because Hasbro felt like the money spent in 1986 did not produce sales, so they would not give as many Co-op dollars for Jem in 1987.

I included the flyers that had Barbie and the Rockers, so show how much advertising the Rockers got, along with the prices that Rockers were being sold for versus the price of Jem.