Who among us wouldn’t travel back to Christmas past if we knew we’d find a Rom action toy under the tree?

While the classic Rom toy was a clunky lump out of the box, it was a minor cultural touchstone, an early lesson in the power of licensing to flesh out a brand into more than the sum of its (inarticulate) parts. Parker Brothers, board game people to that point, took a risk with this dalliance into the cutthroat world of toys, and it paid off for them. And it wound up spawning a long-running comic, and giving me one of the treasured comic storylines of my youth, an unheralded Bill Mantlo penned and Steve Ditko drawn masterpiece that brought a Spaceknight’s journey to its bittersweet end. Hence Rom the Space Knight became a classic toy in spite of its Frankensteinian stiffness.

And Rom also had one of the greatest goddamn TV commercials in the history of the universe, an epic of the genre. So there’s that, too.

Basically what I’m saying is TICKLE ME ELMO AND FURBY, EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT. YOUR COLD, DARK HEARTS.