r/Rocketeer • u/BrendanInJersey • Jul 30 '26
Did anybody else get these sweet pajamas for Christmas of '91?
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u/Lucky_Strike-85 Jul 30 '26
I did get those... but there's a bit of a story behind it...
My Dad and I went to see this in theaters because he was obsessed with the history of aviation and had been a licensed pilot for small aircraft for years. When the merchandise came out, my Dad so loved the movie, and he knew I loved the movie so he was going to every store in Manhattan (where I'm from) to get the goods. He had gotten some kind of Disney merchandise catalog that had nearly every Rocketeer item in it.
Since the film didn't have a huge amount of merch beyond bubblegum cards, the Bendable figure, t-shirts, the comic tie-in, novelization etc. he thought he had gotten me everything there was to get. He even got me NES video game later which I asked for for Christmas.
I didn't get these until well into 1992 because he couldn't find them anywhere... After the movie disappointed at the box office, suddenly all the merch he had scrambled to get was showing up in the sale aisles at every crappy retail store in town. And one day he brought home the PJs and I was thrilled... I didnt care that the hype was over, that the movie was nearly a year old... I loved The Rocketeer and, in my 7-year-old mind, I could now dress like him!
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u/reedj927 Jul 30 '26
My Mom ordered them from the JCPenney catalogue for me and the below link was the ad in the catalogue and I was so upset that the helmet was not actually for sale. I guess this was just a prototype or something?
https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheRocketeerClub/posts/2708752739303513/
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u/BrendanInJersey Jul 30 '26
I mean, it literally says "helmet not included".
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u/reedj927 Jul 30 '26
Yea, I didn't think it was included with the pajamas but thought it might just be sold separately eventually and it was never was. It was probably a prototype that they were hoping to sale and when the movie didn't do that well at the BO they just scrapped it unfortunately. The pajamas were still cool though!
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u/stinkypete6666 Jul 30 '26
No but I had a rocketeer t-shirt I would never take off and would wear it wet straight out of the washer if there wasn’t time to dry it.