Captain Power is a perfect example of how toy manufacturers would exploit children's imaginations beyond normal limits. With this toy, they would have us believe that you could use it to shoot at your TV screen much like a video game of later eras. The only problem was that Captain Power's interface was a VHS tape, which has no capacity for interaction.
I distinctly remember playing this "game" for the 3rd time and realizing that the same bad guys were blowing up each time we played. If the company was smart, they would have made a bad guy explode at least once per second to at least make the kid believe he was having some sort of effect on the whole process. Yet, there were hardly a dozen bad guy explosions for the duration of the video (which had to be at least 10 minutes long).
Furthermore, the TV could presumably shoot back at you, as the toy had a light sensor built in to respond to bright flashes. I don't remember if this happened or not because we were too smart for the whole enterprise and covered our light sensor with tape.
All this being said, you could still use the toys in a laser tag style game with each other, provided your sibling/friend owned another one. This was more fun and actually interactive. When you got shot, your action figure was catapulted out of the ship with a violent vibrating action. I remember that I owned the bad guy ship (pictured above) and it was pretty bad ass.
I feel that the main reason we bought these toys was because of the VHS tape and the lure of interactive television based playing. Unfortunately for us, it was a big hoax and we fell for it.
The 2nd commercial has a little gem for our good friend CH
My mother still believes that it was real. - Andy
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