I Remember…PAC-MAN Fever!

Day 107

Anyone who was around in the early 1980s probably remembers that one of the biggest fads, the biggest sensations was something called…PAC-MAN!! And there was definitely a PAC-MAN craze going on! I’ve already posted about PAC-MAN cereal, but today I want to reminisce about the whole PAC-MAN phenomena!

I remember what started the whole “PAC-MAN Fever” - the video game, of course! It seemed like everyone who had an ATARI game system (future blog post on that) had this game, and that included my family. In fact, Josh played this game all the time and was awesome at it! Me? Not so much, but I enjoyed watching the game.

For my 10th birthday I got this really cool PAC-MAN card from my Uncle Dwayne and Aunt Betty, which I still have to this very day! This was a card worth saving!

I remember one time when I visited my Aunt Margo for the summer. She took me and her kids out shopping, and while we were out and about she bought me a shirt with my name in black, western-style lettering on the back. On the front of the shirt was a PAC-MAN iron-on (anyone remember those?); she also got me a baseball cap that also had a PAC-MAN iron-on. Totally radical, huh?!

I remember that there were thousands of different toys and merchandise attached to PAC-MAN. I remember these exact figures of PAC-MAN and MS. PAC-MAN, and I also remember playing with them one time while watching some old movie on The Disney Channel, down in the basement of my home in Orem, Utah. Just a random memory here.

Speaking of toys, I remember that we used to have this PAC-MAN wind-up toy; the feet moved up and down and the mouth opened and closed--you can see that inside the mouth is a “ghost”; this was one of the things that PAC-MAN would eat while going around the grid in the video game.

Besides toys and merchandise there was a--wait for it!--song about PAC-MAN, called “PAC-MAN FEVER” (I suppose that “PAC-MAN LOVE HANGOVER” was already taken). I liked this song a lot, and in the 2nd grade my class did a dance to this song during the school Field Day. On July 2nd 1983 I attended a 4th Of July Program as a Cub Scout, called America’s Freedom Festival At Provo: The 1983 ‘Glory Of America’ Panorama Extravaganza (now that’s quite a mouthful!) Anyway, all of the scouts performed in a musical number. During this festival/extravaganza one of the Osmonds, Jimmy Osmond himself, performed the song “PAC-MAN FEVER” - sheesh, even the Osmonds were infected with this fever!!