This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

1984 was a banner year for sci-fi and fantasy.

Iconic villains like Freddie Krueger and the Terminator

hit the big screen for the first time.

William Gibson's Neuromancer,

turbo-charge, the cyberpunk genre.

Plus franchises like the Transformers and teenage

Mutant Ninja Turtles burst onto the scene and quickly took up residents on TV in

comic books and on toy store shelves. Our friend Eric Malinsky noticed this

cambrain explosion of creativity that happened 40 years ago and produced a

fantastic series of episodes about it for his podcast Imaginary Worlds.

This episode is about the aforementioned Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,

two cultural forces that came about just at the time in 1984 when business people fully recognize that the toys and the media

that accompanied them were influencing each other in a constant back and forth conversation,

whether the creative people working on them liked it or not.

You're listening to imaginary worlds, show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.

I'm Eric Malinsky.

I have often talked about how much I love action figures.

When I was a kid, they were my gateway to another world. After

while I didn't even have to play with them. I just hold my Luke Skywalker action

figure and go into a catatonic state. My parents used to say I was

...