2. The best photographic evidence (so far) that Skids was a 1984 release
    Posted by: "crazysteve"
    Date: Wed Sep 17, 2008 8:44 pm ((PDT))

(I crossposted this to Alt.Trolls.Transformers, though I don't know why)

Sometimes the old G1 Transformer catalogs are considered the final
authority on matters of year of release for particular figures. I
think the fandom takes the catalogs as canon because there is just no
hard evidence otherwise. If Jetfire, Skids and Shockwave debuted in
the 1985 catalog, then that's good enough for everyone. Although many
people can provide firsthand eyewitness accounts of getting those for
Christmas of '84, that goes against what the catalog truth is and
their evidence is oftentimes ignored by the various toy listmakers on
the internet. The catalog canon has too strong a hold on the minds of
the fandom at large.

Uncovering evidence by way of old newspaper ads to prove Jetfire and
Shockwave were 1984 releases was easy enough, but Skids' 1984 release
has been extremely difficult for me to prove. The newspaper ad
technique depends on finding a retailer somewhere in the US who
included Skids in their toy ads sometime during 1984. Skids being
shortpacked makes the likeliness of this happening extremely remote
and even if that evidence is buried in some public library's microfilm
archive somewhere, not everybody has immediate access to it. The best
way of finding an ad like that (if it even exists at all) is to go
through every city in the US with microfilm archives of old newspapers
and spend hours looking for that one ad with Skids in it. And then
even if you document it to the best of your ability, the internet may
not believe you because that microfilm roll isn't exactly peer reviewable.

But what I have found is proof by way of the People Weekly magazine
website that Skids was released in 1984. This is great because anyone
can visit the site freely and see it for themselves. What I want to do
here is outline the steps so anyone can see the evidence for
themselves, kind of like I did last time with the original G1 TF logo
mock up.

Go to the People Weekly's archive page for the December 03, 1984 issue: 

http://www.people.com/people/archive/issue/0,,7566841203,00.html

There is an option to download the whole issue via PDF. Do that
because clicking on the link for the individual article on the archive
page only gives you the raw text without the article's accompanying
pictures. You're after a picture here.

Once the PDF is downloaded, the name of the article that has the
picture is "Deck the Halls with Squads of Robots: Hasbro Takes on
Tonka in the Toy Wars of 1984". I think this article is already
somewhat well known in TF fandom circles because many fans either have
a copy of this magazine or know someone who does. But the advantage of
the PDF format from People's site is that the pictures can be
magnified several times over without losing a lot of information like
the print version.

The black and white picture in question is on page 175. In it, a man
and two women are standing in front of a fantastic display in FAO
Schwartz' toy robot aisle. The man and first woman to his immediate
right are standing in front of a section with a bunch of GoDaiKins
(and a Diakron Multiforce 14). The woman to the right of them is
standing in front of a buttload of Transformers, most of which are
Soundwave. But if you look closely at the area just above her coat
belt, at 200% magnification it is clearly discernible that the box
she's partially obscuring has Skids boxart. 

This is the best, most widely accessible evidence I've come up with
supporting all the old Christmastime memories of people getting Skids
in 1984. Judging from the date of the issue, Skids was on shelves at
least as early as the first week of December of '84. I don't think
this'll change the catalog-centric canon that countless TF toylists on
the internet ascribe to, but I thought I'd throw it out there.