As a sort of advent calendar of kitsch, Pictorial will be counting down the final twelve days before Christmas by featuring some holiday presents of days gone by.
Look at this kid in his acid-washed jeans. He is absurdly proud of himself, because he’s tooling around his parents’ driveway in a battery-powered vehicle from Hedstrom, literally called “B.O.S.S.” He’s hot shit and he knows it.
This creation (featured in Women’s Day, December 1990) was, of course, not the only sick-ass battery-operated ride for kids of its time. Fisher-Price’s Power Wheels were probably better known.
The ultimate, of course, was the Power Wheels/Barbie collaborations. There was the Jeep:
But the Corvette reigned supreme. Did anybody’s parents actually buy these, or did they exist solely to encourage tantrums in the WalMart aisles and make the prices of Barbie-sized accessory cars seem reasonable?
Contact the author at kelly@jezebel.com.