PRESENTS YOU PESTERED YOUR PARENTS FOR

TV CREAM

TOYS

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Friday Books

Text © 2007 Steve Berry

Line illustrations and colour illustrations © 2007 Phil Arnold (www.formerairline.com) All photos © 2007 Steve Berry, except: Mattel Slime by Jodie Nesbitt; Adventure 2000, Denys Fisher Dr Who by Paul Vought (www.vortx-productions.co.uk); Johnny Seven by Mike Evangelist (www.writersblocklive.com); Rubik’s Cube by Lars Karlsson; Swingball by Andrew Finch; LEGO and the LEGO logo are trademarks of the LEGO Group, here used with special permission © 2006 The EGO Group (page 93 Magna Doodle ® is a registered trademark owned by the Pilot Pen Corporation of America (page 99); ETCH A SKETCH and associated trademarks are owned by Bluebird Toys (UK) Limited and used under licence from Matte Europa B.V., an affiliate of Bluebird Toys (UK) Limited and Mattel, Inc. © 2006 Mattel, Inc. All Rights Reserved (cover image); © 2005 Rubik’s and Rubik’s Cube used by kind permission of Seven Towns Ltd UK (cover image).

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781905548279

Ebook Edition © MAY 2009 ISBN: 9780007328512

Version 2016-08-11

For Joanna, who would like her spare room back

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Just what is TV Cream anyway?

Introduction

Part 1 - The Toys

Chapter 1 - ‘A La Cart Kitchen’

Chapter 2 - Action Man

Chapter 3 - Airfix Kits

Chapter 4 - Armatron

Chapter 5 - Backgammon

Chapter 6 - Barbie

Chapter 7 - Battling Tops

Chapter 8 - Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 9 - Big Trak

Chapter 10 - Big Yellow Teapot

Chapter 11 - Binatone TV Master

Chapter 12 - Black Box

Chapter 13 - Boglins

Chapter 14 - Buckaroo!

Chapter 15 - Cadbury’s Chocolate Machine

Chapter 16 - Cascade

Chapter 17 - Chemistry Set

Chapter 18 - Chic-a-boo

Chapter 19 - Chopper

Chapter 20 - Chutes Away

Chapter 21 - Cluedo

Chapter 22 - Commodore 64

Chapter 23 - Computer Battleship

Chapter 24 - Connect Four

Chapter 25 - Corgi 007 Lotus Esprit

Chapter 26 - Crossfire

Chapter 27 - Cyborgs

Chapter 28 - Domino Rally

Chapter 29 - Downfall

Chapter 30 - Dr Who TARDIS

Chapter 31 - Dungeons & Dragons

Chapter 32 - Electronic Detective

Chapter 33 - Electronic Project

Chapter 34 - Escalado

Chapter 35 - Escape from Colditz

Chapter 36 - Etch-A-Sketch

Chapter 37 - Evel Knievel

Chapter 38 - Finger Frights

Chapter 39 - Fisher-Price Activity Centre

Chapter 40 - Flight Deck

Chapter 41 - Fuzzy Felt

Chapter 42 - Galaxy Invader 1000

Chapter 43 - Game and Watch

Chapter 44 - Girl’s World

Chapter 45 - Guess Who?

Chapter 46 - Hangman

Chapter 47 - Haunted House

Chapter 48 - He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

Chapter 49 - Hornby Railway Set

Chapter 50 - Hungry Hippos

Chapter 51 - Johnny Seven

Chapter 52 - Junk Yard

Chapter 53 - KerPlunk

Chapter 54 - LEGO

Chapter 55 - Little Professor

Chapter 56 - Lone Star Spudmatic Gun

Chapter 57 - Magic Robot

Chapter 58 - Magic Rocks

Chapter 59 - Magna Doodle

Chapter 60 - Magnetic Wheel

Chapter 61 - Mastermind

Chapter 62 - Matsushiro Knight Rider Radio-Controlled Car

Chapter 63 - Meccano

Chapter 64 - Mercury Maze

Chapter 65 - Merlin

Chapter 66 - Monopoly

Chapter 67 - Mousetrap

Chapter 68 - Mr Frosty

Chapter 69 - My Little Pony

Chapter 70 - Newton’s Cradle

Chapter 71 - Operation

Chapter 72 - Othello

Chapter 73 - Palitoy Cue Ball

Chapter 74 - Paul Daniels TV Magic Tricks

Chapter 75 - Perfection

Chapter 76 - Peter Powell Stunter Kite

Chapter 77 - Petite Super International Typewriter

Chapter 78 - Play Doh Monster Shop

Chapter 79 - Pocketeers

Chapter 80 - Racing Bike

Chapter 81 - Rainbow Brite

Chapter 82 - Raving Bonkers Fighting Robots

Chapter 83 - Remus Play-Kits

Chapter 84 - Ricochet Racers

Chapter 85 - ROM the Space Knight

Chapter 86 - Rubik’s Cube

Chapter 87 - Scalextric

Chapter 88 - Scrabble

Chapter 89 - Screwball Scramble

Chapter 90 - Sea-Monkeys

Chapter 91 - Shaker Maker

Chapter 92 - Shrinky Dinks

Chapter 93 - Silly Putty

Chapter 94 - Simon

Chapter 95 - Sindy

Chapter 96 - Six Million Dollar Man

Chapter 97 - Slime

Chapter 98 - Slinky

Chapter 99 - Smoking Monkey

Chapter 100 - Sonic Ear

Chapter 101 - Sorry!

Chapter 102 - Spacehopper

Chapter 103 - Speak & Spell

Chapter 104 - Spirograph

Chapter 105 - Squirmles

Chapter 106 - Star Bird

Chapter 107 - Star Wars

Chapter 108 - Stay Alive!

Chapter 109 - Sticklebricks

Chapter 110 - Stop Boris

Chapter 111 - Strawberry Shortcake

Chapter 112 - Stretch Armstrong

Chapter 113 - Stylophone

Chapter 114 - Subbuteo

Chapter 115 - Swingball

Chapter 116 - Tank Command

Chapter 117 - Tasco Telescope

Chapter 118 - TCR

Chapter 119 - Terrahawks Action Zeroid

Chapter 120 - Test Match

Chapter 121 - Tin Can Alley

Chapter 122 - Tiny Tears

Chapter 123 - Tip-It

Chapter 124 - Tomytronic 3D

Chapter 125 - Tonka Trucks

Chapter 126 - Top Trumps

Chapter 127 - Transformers

Chapter 128 - Trivial Pursuit

Chapter 129 - Twister

Chapter 130 - Up Periscope

Chapter 131 - Vertibird

Chapter 132 - View-Master

Chapter 133 - Walkie-Talkies

Chapter 134 - War of the Daleks

Chapter 135 - Weebles

Chapter 136 - Whimsies J

Chapter 137 - Yahtzee

Chapter 138 - Zoids

Chapter 139 - ZX Spectrum

Acknowledgements and thanks

How to use this book

About the Author

Praise

About the Publisher

Just what is TV Cream anyway?

In short, it’s a website. You want it shorter? Try www.tv.cream.org then. Flung online in 1997 as a memorial to great TV, it has since snowballed into an online repository of all things retro from the past four decades–mucho ephemera, therefore, from comics to crisps, adverts to annuals, films to fashion. Oh, and toys, naturally.

Updated woefully infrequently considering the sheer number of people who work on it, the website does at least play host to a couple of regular ‘e-zines’ and occasional definitive lists of key pop culture touchstones (top TV themes, popular presenters, media movers and shakers).

Its slightly sarcastic, often sweary approach has won many admirers, most of whom have contributed to this book.

Introduction

‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

So wrote St Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians (Chapter 13, Verse 11). Wise words from a wise man. Or so you’d think, it being the New Testament and all It’s just that, when we came to put away our own childish things, we thought ‘Hang on, there’s a complete Matchbox Race And Chase in here, and a Big Trak with working transport. And there’s a first-edition My Little Pony. We could get quite a bit for that on eBay. Let’s not stick ’em up in the loft just yet, eh?’¹

Back in 2004, TV Cream – the UK’s most popular and award-winning nostalgia website² – celebrated the top one hundred toys of yesteryear, from the tiniest 50p rubber novelty to the many bulky Bakelite candidates that vied for hallowed ‘main present’ status at birthdays and Christmases. Or rather, we celebrated those toys that were lusted after but never actually received because – time and again – parents would mistake their offspring’s fervour for overexcitement and ignore the repeated pleas, the letters to Santa or the tantrums.

You see, we used to want for things too. Before Amazon wish-lists, online ordering and ‘add to basket’ buttons, we relied on the catalogues: big, chunky, glossy bi-annual volumes with a dozen or so pages at the back brimming with toys, games, crafts and novelties. Special wishing books just for kids: Littlewoods, Kays, Grattan, Freemans, Marshall Ward, Great Universal, Argos. They were our Internet. That was where we learned to ‘browse’, circling toy after toy with red felt-tip, carefully planning imaginary shopping trips but never really believing we’d go on them.

Never forget, there are entire generations for whom giant stores like Hamleys and Toys ‘R’ Us were unimaginable fantasies on a par with space cars, food pills and robot butlers. The rear sections of the catalogues were a 2D vision of some incredible future where thousands of toys might be gathered in one place in a tableau of pastel colours. It was a hypnotic, limbo-state where girls were subtly encouraged to take up crafts and think about a life of domesticity, while boys were pointed towards combat toys and things that could be kicked.

Then, as we grew up, we also started to explore some of the other pages (and yes, thanks, the adolescent jokes about the underwear section have already been done – in 1996, by Frank Skinner, so let’s leave it there, eh?) Girls tended to graduate to jewellery and – for the poor are always with us – occasionally the clothes. As far as boys were concerned, however, it was usually the digital watches that were first to attract attention, followed shortly by the posh ‘scientific’ calculators. Nowadays, it’s all mobile phones, ringtones and 3G video clips.³ But what is a mobile phone if not a portable toy for grown-ups?

Back in what we fondly call the Cream era,⁴ the summer holidays were longer and hotter, sweets were cheaper and bigger, and toys were there to be played with – abused, battered… broken, even. They weren’t bought as an investment, to be squirreled away in storage for collectors and completists, or auctioned off thirty years later, ‘mint on card’, ‘brand new in box’ or ‘factory sealed’. The toys you’ll find in this book are the ones that had us wide-eyed with anticipation, tearing down the stairs at five in the morning on Christmas Day; the toys we hoped to find among a mountain of wrapped-up boxes; the toys we’d rip recklessly from the packaging and put straight to work.

What we’ve tried to do is capture at least some of that experience⁵ but without being too earnest about it. They are only toys, after all. On the one hand, there’s the catalogues and, on the other, there’s cataloguing (in the most dry, joyless way imaginable). We hope the next couple of hundred pages will illuminate the difference. Along the way, there’ll be some mildly interesting trivia (did you know that the original Sooty was just a mass-produced Chad Valley bear puppet?), some weak observational jokes (such as: why is it that Monopoly is only made by one company?) and far too many references to Doctor Who. If that’s not your cup of tea, we’ll chuck in some tortuously extended metaphors, just for good measure.

Why? Because what we’re trying to do is reclaim our childhoods, like so much silt from the fens. Rising from the wetlands of that original online top one hundred, this book examines in detail the seven score or more toys we most yearned for as youngsters (plus a good couple of dozen others that get a mention in passing). These are the peerless playthings of a nation’s youth, the ones that encapsulate a time and place to which we can never return, no matter how many mini-desktop versions The Gadget Shop churns out. Neither a definitive history of the toy industry nor a stat-packed collector’s price guide, TV Cream Toys is the Christmas morning you should have had when you were young enough to appreciate it.

And that’s it really. All you need to know to use this book. So hold firm, St Paul, as it’s now time to unpack those childish things for one last circuit around the living room carpet.

1 None of this is true. In fact, in common with much of this book, it’s an old stand-up routine we pinched (in this case, with permission, from the very lovely Richard Herring). We’re hoping that the quote from The Bible is out of copyright. Mind you, what the hell does ‘spake’ mean? We can’t find that on our Speak & Spell.

2 The award was Yahoo! Find Of The Year 2003 (they found us after six years, bless ’em). What’s with all this ‘we’ business? Well, we’ll come to that in a bit. In the mean time, get used to these footnotes; the book is riddled with them. They’re the paper equivalent of a director’s commentary.

3 Gawd, how dated is that sentence going to look in two years’ time? Don’t get us wrong, we’re not trying to be curmudgeonly or wring our hands at ‘the youth of today’ (although, c’mon, they really don’t know they’re born, do they?). There are plenty of future classic toys and games for twenty-first-century children. They’ll just have to write their own nostalgia book, that’s all.

4 Your own Cream era is the period in your life that created the most vivid and enjoyable memories, the ones that conjure an indescribable yummy feeling and that don’t need to be validated by Kate Thornton gurning away on some godawful TV talking heads compilation Alternatively it’s that year – any time from the ’60s to the ’90s – when you hit ten years old. Whichever definition suits you best… Watch out for 1977, though. That’s the year Star Wars (and a flood of merchandise spin-offs) changed the toy business forever.

5 This book is a collection of shared experiences. No single person can claim them. You can’t claim them. Steve Berry can’t claim them. Even TV Cream itself can’t claim them. They belong to us all. Just look at the list of contributors for one thing! The toy and game floor of TV Cream Towers is inhabited by a sort of gestalt creature. So, because we’re all in this together, this book has been written in the first person plural (or, as our Queen would prefer, the royal ‘we’).

The Toys

‘A La Cart Kitchen’
Training the housewives of tomorrow

This is how it begins–with a none-too-subtle reinforcement of gender stereotypes for the Daily Mail readers of the future. Many are the generations of little girls that were saddled with ‘minimum’ plastic ironing boards and carpet sweepers from an early age (all the better to brain your little brother with), and many the house that was cluttered with all the paraphernalia of pretend cleaning without any real cleaning actually getting done.

Reminding us once again that a woman’s place is in the home, this particular primary-coloured party-pooper was a complete kitchen set comprising oven, hob, sink and, erm, washing machine on a handy moveable cart–hence it’s ‘A La Cart’, geddit? Quite why the more predictable inclusion of a kitchen fridge was omitted is anyone’s guess.¹ However, the toy was successful in ingraining itself on the nation’s collective memory primarily because of an extremely enduring TV advert. Briefly, this featured a small girl who got up unfeasibly early in order to potter around for a few hours, knocking together bits of plastic in a brisk but pointless way and eventually arriving in the parental bedroom to feed her dad cold baked beans and arctic roll from a plastic saucepan (Wake up Daddy, breakfast’s ready!’). He at least had the unshaven grace to pretend to look happy–we can only imagine how a genuine parent might’ve reacted.

Although this sorry display surely says something rather serious about the division of household labour in the late twentieth century, we’re not quite sure exactly what (although we’d love to know the whereabouts of ‘Mummy’). Besides, if that child is so keen on household chores, surely ‘Daddy’ can find a chimney to shove her up?

Manufacturer Bluebird continued to expand its range of authentic, though slightly strangely juxtaposed, culinary workstations on wheels with the Walford-inspired ‘East End Market Stall’,² one side a fruit-and-veg trader’s stand, the other a burger bar. All the major food groups well-represented there, then. Conspicuous cuckoo in the nest this time was a bright-red telephone stuck in the middle. Even in those pre-mobile days, we can’t envisage a market trader installing a landline on their trolley. Presumably they used it to phone in bulk orders of beans and jam roll to the cash and carry.

Bluebird’s founder, Torquil Norman, retired in 1994 a multi-millionaire. He has since spent £30m turning London’s Camden Roundhouse Theatre into a Big Yellow Teapot.

See also Mr Frosty, Petite Super International Typewriter, Girl’s World

1 Check out the miniature branded groceries, though. Daz, Mr Kipling’s cakes, Ryvita. Yum

2 The inverted commas were actually part of the name. Not so with the Bluebird Café Royale, however, despite the flamboyant use of French. Brands represented in this deliberately unisex fast-food restaurant training kit included Heinz Beans, Saxa Salt and Bisto. The eggs and sausages supplied were made of plastic, much like in yer real greasy spoon.

Action Man
Military mannequin

There’s nothing wrong with boys playing with dolls!

But just in case there’s the slightest chance that doing so could turn ’em a bit…y’know, make sure the dolls are butch soldier types who look good in a buzzcut and military uniform.¹ So went the thinking, we assume, when Palitoy imported America’s GI Joe and rebranded him Action Man for Brit kids in the–ahem–swinging ’60s.

See also Cyborgs, ROM the Space Knight, Six Million Dollar Man, Barbie

Initially available with only painted-on hair and combat fatigues, the range was soon augmented by a whole wardrobe of snazzy outfits (including frogman, pilot, sailor, traffic cop and Red Indian)² and cybernetic extensions to Mr Man’s physiognomy (‘gripping’ hands, ‘real’ hair, ‘eagle’ eyes). And, much like Barbie, the big fella got his own fleet of personal transports–although not for him the pink limo treatment. Our favourite was actually the fairly unsophisticated, thumb-operated backpack-copter (which enabled us to re-enact the best bit of Thunderball), although it must’ve been cool to have owned its full-size army hospital helicopter cousin. There were, we recall, two tank varieties (a Scorpion and, erm, whatever the bigger one was called), a jeep or two, plus inflatable and outboard motor-powered dinghies.

Frankly, there wasn’t anywhere our hero couldn’t go, except perhaps somewhere that required him to stand on an uneven surface (a deep-pile carpet, anywhere on grass). Basic instability problems could be avoided with the application of a child’s fertile imagination (which would require that members of the Grenadier Guards always adopt an insouciant, leaning-against-a-wall attitude to their sentry duties, or that the 21st Lancers conduct their parades lying down). In the 70s, more poseable joints were added to the basic model, including one around the neck that enabled Action to adopt a ‘sniper’ pose with one or more rifles from his impressive armoury.

Endless battles could be enacted with this almost limitless selection of plastic weaponry in a war of attrition the ’80s superpowers would’ve boggled at (particularly given the unusual prospect of witnessing a fight between Taking Commando Action Man and Captain Zargon). Rumour has it that classic Dr Who adventure The War Games was written entirely while Patrick Troughton’s young sons were pitching German paratroopers into combat with the Queen’s Horse Guards.

The biggest hostilities Action Man encountered were, of course, brought about by his owners. Sad to say, Action Man abuse was rife in the Cream era. Bangers, matches, caps, magnifying glasses, fireworks–all were employed in creating ‘realistic’ battle scars to show off to friends or maiming him beyond recognition.

So, although we know that nearly everybody owned an Action Man, the important thing is that everyone we knew wanted more.³ By virtue of the fact that the combined forces of our street could never amass a platoon of even Dad’s Army strength, Action Man remains on our wish list.

1 Yes, there were wars, and violence, and bloodshed, and tea, and medals. But at least we were learning something. Military history, for one. The Paras, US Marines, SS Stormtroopers, or (dialing down the testosterone) the RNLI. Action Man had proper guns that actually looked like they might hurt people. Nowadays, he’s either a neutered Extreme iPod Eco-Warrior or wishy-washy Skateboard Surf Ninja.

2 Altogether now: ‘It’s fun to stay at the YMCA.’ Action Man never ran out of outfits as long as your granny had enough green wool

3 Palitoy’s token-collecting system meant you had to send off for exclusive extras (on offer in the 70s were a Canadian Mountie outfit or a pit-bull). Then there were the additional figures: Tom Stone, the first–gasp!–black Action Man; the Intruder, a muscle-bound, dwarf Liam Gallagher-alike enemy with white eyes and grabbing arms; and Atomic Man, with bionic limbs, plastic clicky pacemaker and a light where his left eye should’ve been.

Airfix Kits
Inch high club

Rather like a box of cotton-wool buds that warns ‘Do not insert into ear canal’ and the punter replies incredulously: ‘But what else are they for?’ So it was with Airfix–loudly proclaimed to be ‘display models’ and not ‘toys’, and yet toys they so obviously were. Paint? Bah! We wanted to play with the bloody thing, not wait overnight while the Humbrol enamel dried on the still-unassembled pieces! Even the decals were an annoyance.

But, oh, there’s a word. Decals.

It’s hard to imagine a time when we hadn’t heard of them. A time, perhaps, when we could see an RAF livery without immediately picturing one. A time before we soaked one in a bowl of warm water, slid it off its backing paper and placed it on the wing of a Spitfire or a Wellington Bomber.

For the purposes of this entry, we’re limiting our examination to model planes. Because it was only the model planes that came in such a ridiculously varied range of scales and classes. Because you couldn’t hang a miniature replica vintage Darracq from a piece of fishing line thumbtacked to the ceiling. Because the big ships had annoyingly fiddly tacking rigging and plastic sails.

See also Hornby Railway Set, LEGO, Flight Deck

And because the planes had a truly aspirational hierarchy (which we seem to recall was based largely around the number of moving parts. Pretty much all the model cars had proper moving wheels, but it was only the bigger and badder model aircraft that included moving propellers, rotating gun-turrets and tyres, or fully opening bomb-bays and cockpits). Therefore, they win.

The decals, of course, were one of many hobby-threatening booby-traps designed to scupper your enjoyment, getting forever crinkled or folded before they could be applied properly. Here’s another: polystyrene cement–which could be guaranteed to coagulate into crusty white flakes all over your fingers and tabletop without ever acting as a useful plastic adhesive.¹

Worse still was discovering a missing part. You then had to fill out a flimsy form, send it off to Airfix and wait an interminable amount of time for the spare to arrive in the post.²But the biggest disappointment with any Airfix Kit was the huge disparity between the size of the box and the size of the finished model. We’re looking at you, Hawker Harrier.

1 It was also handy for adding an unwanted ‘frosted’ bathroom window effect to the previously clear cockpit covers.

2 Dick Emery, comedian and then president of the Airfix Modellers Club, ran his expanded polystyrene empire in the pages of British comics. In January 1975, he rather excitingly revealed the launch of the company’s new 1:12 scale construction kit of Anne Boleyn. That’ll get ’em gluing, Dick!

Armatron
Programmable robotic arm

While the foreign car factories were laying off staff in favour of this toy’s older brothers, kids across the land were celebrating their new-found ability to remotely move objects around the kitchen table. By twiddling around a couple of joystick levers on the base, Armatron’s various shoulder, wrist and elbow joints could be manoeuvred to pick up anything within it’s admittedly limited reach. In theory. Anything slightly more delicate than the plastic canisters, cones and globes included (an egg, say) would break under pressure between the rubberised jaws, and so any notions of performing David Banner-style laboratory experiments were soon similarly shattered.

Although the lab-coated ginger kids on the box photos hinted otherwise, Armatron was actually intended as a race-against-time game of skill and coordination. Bright-orange ‘energy-level’ indicators on the console acted as a kind of countdown: when the gauge reached zero (‘total discharge’), Armatron turned itself off. Although this probably conserved some of that D-cell battery life, it wasn’t half annoying if you were just seconds away from tightly gripping on to your sleeping cat’s tail.

Armatron was manufactured in Singapore by Tomy and imported by Radio Shack, inspiring loads of knock-off versions in the ’80s.¹ A veritable miracle of engineering, it shipped with a single electric motor and a mass of nylon gears and clutches throughout the entire base and arm (as anyone who opened it up would discover). A late addition to the range was the Mobile Armatron, which came on caterpillar tracks (though the remote control wire was only half a metre long). Quite what this added to the game is anyone’s guess.

Robotics enthusiasts delighted in ‘hacking’ the toy (i.e. ‘tricking it out’ with motion sensors or a steam-powered engine), which makes a complete one hard to track down these days. In any case, poorer kids had to make do with the manually ratchet-operated Robot Arm, a Terminator-esque Robot Hand or Robot Claw, each of which–though less impressive–could be secreted up the sleeve of a Parka to aid in the pretence of the owner having been transformed into some kind of futuristic human cyborg. Pop into Hamleys and you’ll find a new version of these going by the name Armatron. But we know the truth.

See also Tasco Telescope, Electronic Project, Slinky

1 Radio Shack eventually acquired the manufacturing rights and re-released the toy in the ’90s under the new name Super Armatron, even though it was mechanically exactly the same.

Backgammon
Pork-soundalike dice ’n’ counters game

There are two reasons why this venerable strategy game leapfrogs those other most austere of board games, chess and draughts, into our list. First, its sheer perverseness. There it was–the backgammon board–always hiding on the other side of the travel draughts, stubbornly resisting comprehension. Not for backgammon the patchwork of squares. Oh no! This thing needed a whole new board with ‘quadrants’ and a ‘bar’ and everything.

Second, the whiff of maturity, the wisdom of ages. Backgammon carried the weight of millennia and, though we didn’t know it at the time, we could sense it. The ancient Egyptians, the Byzantine emperors of Mesopotamia and now us–the great unwashed of suburbia–all staring at the pointy triangle things. At the very least, it proffered a vacant seat at the big table–a proper conversation between adult and child as the rules were explained.

Yet also it was accessible, but not too indiscriminate. Unlike the untouchable ivory chess set in your best mate’s dad’s study, you could get your hands dirty with the backgammon counters. Those green, snot-sleeved draughts players with their petulant ‘crown me!’s kept their distance. Backgammon had a vocabulary of its own: bearing off, kibitzers, the gin position, double bumps and mandatory beavers…Hang on: maybe they were just making this up as they went along after all.

See also Othello, Connect Four, Yahtzee

Oh, and we lied up there. There was a third reason why we wanted a backgammon of our own: the huge surge in popularity it underwent in the 1970s. Rather like snooker in the ’80s and football in the ’90s, backgammon suddenly became trendy. Leading players jetted from tournament to tournament, wrote bestselling books (about backgammon, obviously) and made the front pages in ‘my hotel sex-romp roast hell’ tabloid headlines.¹

However, we come not to damn the game but to praise its Cream-era maker. Before Paul Heaton and his mates were a twinkle in a skiffle-humming Hull milkman’s eye, the name ‘House Martin’ was already a stamp of quality thanks to the Hackney-based games factory. Specialising in no-nonsense, phlegmatic renderings of popular post-war games, House Martin unashamedly embossed every box with the legend ‘Made in England’. No wonder they went under.

1 One of Graham Greene’s last novels, The Captain and the Enemy, is about a boy who is won from his father by a con man in a game of backgammon. Possibly one to omit from the bedtime story selection for the little ones, there.

Barbie
Whore next door¹

Barbie had been knocking around since the arse-end of the ’50s in one permatanned form or other, but we’re most interested in the so-called ‘aspirational’ late ’80s when manufacturer Mattel realised they could sell the dolls as collectors’ items as well as mere playthings. Or, as the marketing speak of the day put it: to improve profitability and maintain consistent revenue streams, Mattel began a strategy of maximising core brands while simultaneously identifying new brands with core potential. Ah yes! There’s the insipid corporate message at the heart of your Dream Glow Barbie.

But then she’s always been one for the commercial tie-up, has Barbie. From the days of her first-run adverts during the Mickey Mouse Club to Barbie couture and those straight-to-DVD CGI-saturated movies, she’s monetised every innovation, trend and fashion in search of global dominance. In fact, she’d probably use a word like ‘monetise’ without blushing. If she wasn’t wearing so much blusher in the first place.

See also Sindy, Rainbow Brite, Girl’s World

Fair play to the girl, though–always impossibly glamorous and immaculately turned out, Barbie has proved to be a role model to a million all-American, body-conscious Diet Coke heads. And she sure shifts some units, taking upward of three billion dollars over the counter each year.² What could be more upwardly mobile than that?

As Mattel’s trademarked mission statement solemnly avows, Barbie is ‘more than a doll’. What exactly she wants to be, though, is still unclear. Model, gymnast, fashion designer, rock star–Barbie’s had a punt at every job under the sun, presumably packing each one in after a few days in floods of tears before settling down in front of Trisha with a packet of milk-chocolate digestives ‘consider her options’.³

Call her anything you like, but don’t call her unpatriotic. There is a Barbie doll in a time capsule due to be opened in 2076 to celebrate 300 years of the American Revolution: she is dressed in a stars-and-stripes dress featuring a line of soldiers in uniform on the hem. Cut her down the middle and she’d have the letters ‘U’, ‘S’ and ‘A’ stencilled through her like a stick of rock. Blow her head off and the blood on the wall behind would be red, white and blue.

1 Just as a matter of record, we’d like to point out that no-one at TV Cream thinks that Barbie is a whore (nor, indeed, that she lives next door). We’re just being flippant, based on perceived notions of the doll’s proportions as being just that bit too anatomically unrealistic. Christ, we’re only three words in and already there’s a footnote.

2 Initial profits from Barbie allowed Mattel to become a PLC in 1960. Goodbye garage-based workshop, hello stockholder-pleasing listings on the Fortune 500

3 In recent years, Barbie’s fortunes have seesawed, as she suffered declining sales in the face of the Spice Girl-indebted Bratz dolls.

Battling Tops
Gyroscopic gladiators

Battling Tops? Why, ’tis a grand olde European folk game, sir, as famously depicted in sixteenth-century paintings by Brueghel and his ilk. However, we suspect his Battling Tops weren’t housed in a blue-plastic arena, presumably didn’t go by such wrestling-ring monikers as Super Sam, Tricky Nicky, Twirling Tim, Dizzy Dan or, erm, Smarty Smitty, and certainly were far from Ideal.

Yep! Since 1968, the company that invited you to wind up Evel Knievel had been dishing up more red-plastic crank-powered fun with their repackaging of an old wooden favourite. With defiantly un-medieval box art depicting various ’50s-type kids and their worryingly Barry Cryer-like dad enraptured by the centrifugal tournament taking place under their noses, this was the tabletop arena game to end all tabletop arena games. Wind the spindle with string, give a yank on the starting cord and away you go!

See also Crossfire, Raving Bonkers Fighting Robots, Hungry Hippos

A similar game, Space Attack, was an air-hockey variant on the rotating theme. Crank the red handle with all your tiny might and stop the spinning top being knocked into a trough with a plastic slider. Or, as they put it, ‘Fight off the lightning alien attacks!’ The ‘space’ theme was provided by a piss-poor ‘galactic’ backdrop on the field of play, with a pointless concentric red ring design overlaid. They might as well have written ‘Look, it’s in space, all right? Use your bloody imagination, you ungrateful little sods!’ and been done with it. Ideal at least went the whole hog and–in the wake of Star War s mania–launched a rebranded Battling Spaceships game, which also included some extra, Monopoly-inspired round-the-board progression.

Space Attack and Battling Spaceships shared one gameplay drawback–the frequency with which one of the spinning combatants would be knocked right out of the ring. Frequently the victorious top would be the one that found its way under the radiator, still merrily buzzing away on the lino long after the rest had limped to a standstill.

Although the original is still out there, produced under licence from Mattel,¹no additional TV Cream points will be awarded for spotting that this game and its various spin-offs over the years have left us with the legacy that is Beyblades. Now those things really do look like you can take someone’s eye out with them. They’re like Chinese throwing stars. Seriously, they’ve even got ‘blade’ in the name. Why hasn’t someone reported them to Trading Standards?

Space Attack On the rebound

1 You won’t be astounded if we tell you that the arena of this new game is bleedin’ tiny now, will you? This isn’t just a case of ‘the memory cheats’–we know Wagon Wheels and Creme Eggs are the same size and our hands just got bigger. But with these games, they’re deliberately shrinking our childhood!

Bermuda Triangle
Makes people disappear

See also Up Periscope, Computer Battleship, Chutes Away

Way before The X Files, back in the mysterious 1980s, part-work magazines such as The Unexplained and telly shows like The Crazy World of Arthur C. Clarke¹–he invented satellites, you know–cashed in on our periodic fascination for paranormal phenomena. Strange how, in cycles of almost exactly 20 years, ESP, spontaneous combustion, spoon-bending and all that bollocks inexplicably suckers in an entirely new generation. One might say that the regularity itself is almost…supernatural. Woooo!

Further back in the mists of time, in 1974 to be exact, Charles Berlitz wrote a book called The Bermuda Triangle. Then, in 1981–by complete coincidence–Barry Manilow had a Top 20 hit of the same name. Spooky, huh? In the intervening years, MB had cashed in handsomely with this ships ‘n’ storm cloud ludo variant.

Yet even at a young age, when our experience of triangles was limited to early maths lessons, school band practice and Quality Street,² we spotted the one thing lacking from this game. The board was square. The cloud was–erm–acoustic-guitar-shaped (and we’d love to have been sitting in on the design meeting for that one). Even the ‘shipping route’ around the game was just some random meandering.

That aside (and ignoring the very fundamental imprudence in setting up a merchant-shipping operation in the middle of an area renowned for strange disappearances), it was a fun game. Move your fleet around the board, trading for bananas, oil, timber and sugar, and try to avoid the ominous, foreboding, magnetic cloud that wants to eat your ships. Simple.

Various ‘spoiler’ tactics could be employed (blocking your fellow players’ ships from each dock), but none was more effective than bribing whoever was moving the cloud to spin it just that bit too fast, thus preventing the ominous ‘click’ of magnet on magnet and keeping you in the game for another go. Many Top Trumps and sticker collections would unaccountably vanish under the table when the Bermuda Triangle rolled into town.

Incidentally, theories that the strange occurrences of the real Bermuda Triangle are caused by aliens sucking boats and planes out of the sky with giant magnets have not yet been disproved. But then, as the great Arthur C. Clarke himself said, ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’³

1 You must remember it, surely? No? Oh, alright, it was actually called Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, but we’d love to have seen the auld fella fetch up on Top of the Pops singing ‘Fire’. That would’ve been fab!

2 The green ones. You can also buy posh chocs in triangle-shaped boxes Toblerone doesn’t count–technically, it’s a prism.

3 He’s the president of the H.G. Wells fan club, you know.

Big Trak
Futuristic battle tank and apple cart

See also Star Bird, Speak & Spell, Armatron

Resembling nothing more than a vehicle from Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons redesigned by Clive Sinclair, Big Trak was controlled, as the presenters of Tomorrow’s World breathlessly related, by that all important ‘silicon chip’.¹ With just a few taps on the keypad, this fully programmable beast could be instructed to move and turn in different directions, fire up its ‘photon canon’ and make a couple of modish electronic noises. It was, of course, used mainly to frighten the family pet. Pretty good value for £20.

The novelty was that it was ostensibly capable of navigating a path around cumbersome household objects–assuming no-one had actually moved any of them while you were busily punching in the required sequence of movements–usually a case of trial and error. Big Trak worked best when its route avoided shag-pile carpet, inclines and anywhere outdoors. According to the manual, programming distance travelled was calculated in noncommittal units of ‘roughly 13 inches’, while the angle of rotation ‘may not be enough to make the turn you want. Or it may be too much.’ You want vagueness? MB Electronics delivered it in spades (which themselves were probably of wildly indeterminate size).

Used in conjunction with the Big Trak Transporter (yours for only another £15), Big Trak was rumoured to be able to ferry objects around the house–maximum load: ‘about one pound’.² Promised innovations that never materialised were voice synthesis and additional accessories (there was a mysterious unassigned keypad button marked ‘IN’ on the keypad for just this purpose).

Not to be outdone, Kenner Toys came up with Radarc, another twenty-first-century-esque remote-controlled tank. The gimmick with Radarc was that, instead of being programmable, it was operated by ‘muscle control’–a radio transmitter that strapped to your forearm, with buttons on the inside that made contact as you worked your hand and wrist (stop sniggering at the back!).³

However, with six chunky traction tyres, sticky labels ‘to add exciting detail’ and a camp little signature tune that played before and after every, erm, motion, Big Trak was much coveted and seldom seen–the dictionary definition of toy envy.

1 A 4-bit Texas Instruments TMS1000 microcontroller running at approximately 0.2 MHz, chip fans. That’s just 64 bytes of RAM to you.

2 A fabulously complicated and tortuous process for carrying out otherwise simple household tasks? Clearly this was a toy aimed at men.

3 There was also TOBOR, a robot from Schaper that looked like a cross between R2D2 and Darth Vader, was operated by a ‘transmitter’ that was nothing more than a tin clicker, and was utterly defeated by any carpeted surface.

Big Yellow Teapot
It’s big and it’s yellow, but there’s no tea in it

Now-defunct toy manufacturer Bluebird was founded on two very solid principles. Small girls like doll’s houses. Small girls also like plastic tea sets for serving cups of invisible tea to their dollies.¹ Then someone fell into a filing cabinet at the office Christmas party and came up with the bizarre idea of crossbreeding the two. Yes, this was a doll’s house, but made of yellow plastic and shaped like a huge teapot.

Why was this? No reason was ever given. The house was inhabited by small plastic peg-like people (somewhere between stunted Playmobil folk and Weebles without the wobble) with welded-together legs, all the better to slide them down the chimney or make them ride round and round in the roundabout-cum-teapot lid (the latter 20 seconds of entertainment–lots of fun for everyone’–also forming the most memorable moment of the accompanying ad). This delightful pied-à-terre was furnished throughout with a small quantity of monolithic red and blue teacup chairs and tables, with the further appointment of additional decor simply printed on cardboard walls (where it floated slightly above the floor in an unconvincing fashion).

See also Weebles, My Little Pony, ‘A La Cart Kitchen’

A rival effort came courtesy of Palitoy, whose Family Treehouse obeyed the same basic design principles and yet had the added bonus of a trunk-based elevator (which presumably attracted a better class of tenant than the average council-estate teapot). Another was Matchbox’s School Boot, adding a whiff of academia to the old ‘woman who lived in a shoe’ routine and thus robbing it of much appeal, although there was at least a variety of playground-themed accessories.² Live-in chimneys and pumpkins caught the tail end of the trend.

Basically, Big Yellow was a doll’s house for the Duplo generation: those who required everything to be large, unbreakable and safe to chew, yet were still innocent enough to refrain from shoving the little plastic people down (or up) the cat for a change (or indeed, trying to create a teapot tropical monsoon by actually pouring boiling water on them).

1 if you were unlucky enough to be a boy and wanted one of these? No chance. You’d get boxing gloves instead and a stern talking-to from Dad.

2 Matchbox had another crack at real estate with the Mushroom Playhouse, a four-floor fungi flat, but Bluebird had already moved on. Their mobile Big Red Fun Bus continued the primary-coloured fun. Sadly, the property market collapsed before the range could be completed with the release of the adult-oriented Big Blue Hotel.

Binatone TV Master
Blip…blip…blip…blip…

The Binatone TV Master was the first computer-game experience witnessed by many Cream-era households, nestling as it did in the Argos catalogue alongside the portable black and white TVs (with which it shared a parasitic relationship). Radio Rentals would even lend you one for the night. Aeons before kids sat hypnotised in front of the latest Grand Theft Auto clone, sacrificing great chunks of their lives to completing the next level, this slab of circuit-based entertainment dragged us in off the streets to watch a box-shaped pixel zigzag its way across the screen. What a choking irony, therefore, that this gatekeeper of the soon-to-be-ushered-in console era attempted to mimic a selection of sports games.

Pre-SCART cable connections, the Binatone would have you scrabbling behind the family telly to plug in the RF aerial lead. That is, if you were lucky enough–in the days before a plasma screen in every room–to be allowed to use it in the first place. Typically, you’d be pushed to squeeze in a game of Binatone tennis between dinner and the start of Nationwide (and only then if your parents didn’t want to watch the News At 5.45). Otherwise, play meant sacrificing valuable Swap Shop or TISWAS time–oh, how we wished for a week-long bout of chickenpox.

See also ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Galaxy Invader 1000

As for the games themselves, they were clunky interpretations of bat ’n’ ball favourites such as squash or, erm, football (actually more like doubles tennis)¹ on the basic, easy Jet-orange model. The beige variant promised some capacity for Tin Can Alley-style shooting games with a so-called light gun’, which inevitably didn’t work unless you were holding it so close to the telly you left scratches on the screen.² The two standard controller ‘bats’ were chunky boxes with Etch-A-Sketch-type knobs that, fantastically, could be packed away into the Binatone’s battery compartment for storage.

The TV Master was superseded almost immediately by brasher, more state-of-the-art TV games such as Mattel Intellivision and Colecovision and then, fatally, by the home computer. How very British. The Binatone logo (was it pronounced By-na-tone or Bin-a-tone?) was a lovely crown-bedecked affair that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the bass drum of a ’60s Merseybeat band. Those sporty games icons, however, were a constant reminder of the local leisure centre and the fact that they had a proper sit-down Galaxians game that you could go on when your mum was having her badminton class.

1 The lack of ‘play against the computer’ option meant that a lot of Binatone-generation kids grew up ambidextrous.

2 If the gun broke, you could still turn the sound off and watch the silent cube ‘target bounce sss-softly off the imaginary walls of your TV set. A nice precursor (hem hem!) of the Windows screensaver, we feel. Plus, the gun itself, cable tucked neatly into your snake belt, made for an excellent Blake’s 7 ray gun.

Black Box
Atomic mass

Way before Nintendo DS Brain Training and Carol Bloody Vorderman jumping on the Sudoku express, we already obsessed about our IQs. There was always a smart-arsed kid who’d decided to enrol into that original smug-bastards club, MENSA, and would parade his or her certificated ‘intelligence quotient’ of 160 or whatever around the classroom.¹ Strangely, rather than resulting in a beating for the boffin, this would actually instigate a school-wide outbreak of competitive puzzle-testing and problem-solving as each pupil sought to out-IQ his or her peers.

While the juniors struggled with such 2D conundrums as spotting the odd one out in a list of prime numbers or reorienting dice from the sides you could see, seniors graduated to proper spatial-awareness posers and brainteasers of the Who was two to the left of the person three to the right of the queen next to the seven of clubs?’ variety. Oh yes, The Krypton Factor had a lot to answer for.

All of which must have alerted the really big brains at the country’s centres of higher learning who–let’s face it–were slouching about in the refectory waiting to appear on University Challenge and wishing someone would hurry up and invent computers so they could practice their FORTRAN and COBOL. Weren’t they?

See also Mastermind, Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons

Well, one such affable graduate was Eric Solomon, already knee-deep in diplomas and employed in civil and structural engineering but, vitally, with a bit of atomic-research work experience under his belt. His game invention, Black Box,² required players to ‘fire’ X-rays into a darkened vessel in order to determine the positions of ‘atoms’ positioned by an opponent. Hellishly complicated rules governing the behaviour of these beams and their direction apparently revealed the hidden squares, but it was all carried out with coloured pawns and ball-bearings, of course.

Solomon’s other games rejoiced in such fashionably abstract names as Entropy, Hexagrams, Thoughtwaves and, erm, Billabong. Each was clearly intended to be played with a furrowed brow and semi-religious solemnity (except, perhaps, Billabong, which possibly required a corked hat). Widely pirated since (particularly by jealous FORTRAN and COBOL programmers), Black Box’s most recognisable successor is probably the Minesweeper game on your work PC.

1 A hugely impressive score for a teenager–right up there with Sir Jimmy Saville and Lisa Simpson.

2 The game acquired its name not from the flight recorder of a jumbo jet but from a term used by scientists to describe an object or system that operates in an unknown way Although can it be merely coincidence that those Who knows the secret of the Black Magic box?’ Rowntree’s choccie ads were on a lot in the 70s? They should bring those back.

Boglins
Hand-puppets from hell

You have to hand it to some big brain at Mattel: once they’d hit on the brilliant consonant-swapping simplicity of the name, the Boglins story must’ve written itself. Essentially near-relatives of the Finger Fright family these fist-powered fuckers sprung seemingly full-armoured from the ground and on to toy shelves back in the late ’80s. Packed into caged boxes that doubled as display cases (replete with faux bent bars and plenty of ‘do not feed’ warnings), Boglin lore borrowed quite heavily from that other mischievous monster hit of the era, Gremlins.

Apparently fashioned from more old retreads than an ITV Saturday-night lineup, these clammy rubber collectables initially arrived in one of three flavours (Dwork, Vlobb and Drool) and were marketed as pets with puppet pretensions. Given that the average kid had only two hands, we doubt that very many people owned all three. Simple operation (and large glow-in-the-dark eagle-eyes) made for almost instant ‘alien voice’ ventriloquism practice and plentiful under-the-bed ankle-biting assault tomfoolery. Woe betide the little sister who mocked a Boglin.

A worrying element of the Boglin box-top back-story (at least for sensitive souls with a penchant for thinking too much about such things) was the implication that humans had somehow descended from them and the originals had remained–until now–buried in the primordial slime. The non-biodegradable nature of Boglin parts means that they probably will be dug intact from the decaying sludge of human remains when the aliens finally do arrive.

Plenty of other Boglin subspecies were released to cash in on the success of the initial range, including Soggy, Baby, Hairy and Glow Boglins, with astonishingly swift diminishing returns. By 1990, when Matchbox launched a competitor, Monster in My Pocket, Mattel’s lumpy swamp offspring had already decided to take the hint and, well, bog off.¹

See also Finger Frights, Squirmles, Slime

1 Ah, but it was good to see one turn up on Fantasy Football’s parody of Toy Story. The Boglin played former Northern Ireland international Ian Dowie (which isn’t fair, as Dowie looks a lot more like a Vogon off the Hitchhiker’s Guide TV series). Although dropped by Mattel, Boglins re-emerged in the mid ’90s under the aegis of none-more-Cream-era toy company Action GT (since absorbed into the uber-family of LIMA licensee of the year 2003 and 2004, Vivid Imaginations).

Buckaroo!
Saddle-stacking balancing game

Does it not now seem that in the 70s the marketing people were trying to sell to parents, not the kids? What else can explain the prevalence of TV ads throughout the decade saturated with cowboy imagery–the likes of Golden Nuggets, Texan Bars, the Milky Bar Kid…and Buckaroo!?

The thing is, mums and dads had most likely been children themselves in the post-WWII era and would’ve been brought up on Saturday matinees, John Wayne flicks and Wild West adventure serials. Somebody, somewhere decided that these were the folk who had the disposable incomes (nobody having yet invented the concept of ‘pester power’). Thus, we have a decade-long obsession with everything whip-crackin’, rootin’, tootin’ and animal abusin’, pardner.

See also Tip-It, Mousetrap, KerPlunk

At least Buckaroo! was blessed with simple gameplay. Easily snapped plastic mouldings (ten-gallon hat, pitchfork, grappling hook, billycan and all that) are gently lowered in turn by players on to a 2D bucking bronco.¹ As the ad explained: ‘Put on a shovel, try a pick–if the load’s too heavy the mule will kick.’ Words to live by, we think. Too much weight causes Buckaroo!’s hair-trigger to release, sending the aforementioned implements flying across the living room, under the settee, into the dog’s mouth and so on.²

Later variations cashed in on Spielberg’s Jaws (the eponymous game was Mr a neat reversal of the same conceit: remove skulls, anchors, bits of boat, etc. from mouth of shark before it snaps shut) and, we presume, Cleese’s Fawlty Towers (Don’t Tip the Waiter employed a cardboard waiter on to whose carefully balanced tray players were required to add counters depicting pizza, cakes and sandwiches). Note the use of the exclamation mark in the title to imply excitement and/or surprise. Therein lies an unspoken suggestion that, at the climax, we might want to cry out the name of the game in a moment of catharsis and delight. This is a favourite device of toy manufacturers (see also Sorry! and Stay Alive!, although strangely not Yahtzee), pretentious restaurateurs (Fish!) and musical theatre impresarios (Oliver!, Hello, Dolly!). On a not entirely unrelated note, the phrase ‘fuck right off!’ works with an exclamation mark too.

1 The latest commercially available version of Buckaroo! is rendered in 3D as if, until the advent of CGI, children wouldn’t previously have been able to cope with anything quite so real. Alongside yer bog-standard Buckaroo! (with a design clearly riffing on the donkey from Shrek), you can also buy a seasonal Buckaroodolph! (‘the mule who doesn’t like Yule’).

2 If you’re so inclined, you can also play a variant of the game with your drunk friends. Once they pass out, pile on as many empty cans, fag packets, ashtrays, frozen sausages and shaving-foam squirts as you can until they wake up.

Cadbury’s Chocolate Machine
Obstacle to chocolate

It’s bizarre that this should even make it into a children’s wish list of most desired games or toys, being the very definition of the anti-toy Ostensibly a cross between a savings bank and a chocolate-dispensing machine, it actually fails to live up to the promise of either. But that is to underestimate its novelty.

Although in reality it amounted to a deferral of pleasure, no more than a tuppenny barrier between the chocolate and your mouth, there was still something of the faintly exotic in getting hold of a load more of those mini-Dairy Milks and Bournevilles than you would ever find in a box of Roses.¹ In the days before washing-powder tablets and digital cameras, the fascination with anything miniaturised was not to be underestimated.

See also ‘A La Cart Kitchen’, Mr Frosty, Whimsies

The classic dispenser was designed and moulded in ’50s-throwback red plastic (leading us to fancifully imagine that the Fonz himself would dish out his chocolate from one) with properly embossed gold Cadbury’s branding, plus it came preloaded with a dozen baby chocs.² In theory, a 2p piece slotted in the top would, with a twist of the hidden knob within, release a single, fully wrapped miniature that could then be enjoyed in isolation. In truth, and in part because not only was the chassis of the dispenser made of plastic but also the lock and keys, it took about ten seconds for greed to overcome the flimsy workings of this metaphorical chocolate chastity belt.

With the contents therefore devoured in their entirety (and not so easily replaced, at least not until the next Argos trip), what essentially remained was a moneybox and, given that it generally wouldn’t contain more than about 14p, not a very good one at that.

1 Oh, and Terry’s Neapolitans fitted too, didn’t they? Want to know what happened to Terry’s, once the pride of York, now just a Dawn French-perpetuated brand extension of Kraft Foods Inc, Illinois? The corporate giant bought the 1000-worker-strong factory in 1993 and closed it down in 2005. York Fruits? Produced in Slovakia, mate. Chocolate Orange? Czekoladka pomarañczowy more like. Where’s Michael Moore when you need him, eh?

2 Chocoholics, masochists and fatties rejoice! The freely available Chocolate Machine Money Box from Humbrol is a fair enough modern approximation of the old Peter Pan version. And guess what? The chocolate miniatures are actually bigger than the ones that used to fit in the old machine.

Cascade
Bouncy castle for ball-bearings

Many board games–Othello springs to mind–usually bear a trite slogan on the side of the box along the lines of ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’. Surely then, the motto for Cascade was ‘A lifetime to set up, a minute to play’. But what a minute it was!

Made by mini-car kings Matchbox, Cascade was bizarrely addictive, totally pointless and definitively uncompetitive–one of those games where eventually no-one really played by the rules, a bit like just reading out the questions from Trivial Pursuit without the board.

See also Crossfire, KerPlunk, Domino Rally

So the set-up, then: an acid-yellow plastic mat had spaces marked out for the five pieces of Cascade furniture. At one end there was a towering Archimedes screw that sucked up ball-bearings and launched them off a short ski-ramp. Then came the bam-bam-bam bounce across three taut red timpani thingies, before the balls hit a mini-pinball table and fell into several scoring slots. Certain balls would be returned to the screw via a three-foot track for another go around the system. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

Of course, lest the gradient tolerance of your bedroom carpet be suboptimal, the little metal buggers would scatter to either side and roll under your bunk bed (we imagine Barnes Wallis felt similarly disheartened in that bit from The Dam Busters). The best improvement via improper game play was to put the launch tower on top of your wardrobe and let the balls really bounce. Constructing little obstacles between the trampolines, such as piled-up Subbuteo team boxes, would assist in efforts to test how high the ball-bearings would really go. A Mars-Staedtler rubber under the edge of each trampoline thingy helped angle them perfectly for extra distance too.

No-one had any idea what the scoring system was, but in the same way that someone can win ten grand on Better Homes without wielding so much as a staple gun, you could ‘win’ Cascade without any personal involvement whatsoever. And it was fun, so who cares?

Chemistry Set
Kitchen-based catalysis

Common-or-garden chemistry set box lids always featured a boy with brown hair in the pudding-bowl style, wearing a white lab coat and peering intently at a few cubic centilitres of vaguely blue compound in a test tube. The over-serious look in his eyes said it all: Why won’t this explode?’

Yes, the substances you’d find inside one of these were always disappointingly dull. An average set included that dependable stalwart, bloody copper sulphate,¹ followed by a rack of anonymous-looking off-white powders (‘slaked’ lime, tartaric acid, etc.²) and rubbish like iron filings and litmus paper. C’mon guys, where do you keep all the fun stuff? The red lead? Arsenic? Silver nitrate? A lame spirit burner provided the only hint of impending danger, and there were usually only enough chemicals to do about ten experiments. And one of those was ‘growing a crystal out of sugar’ on a string. (On a string, for crying out loud!) Heaven only knows what we were supposed to do with the mysterious ‘watch glass’. Just sit and watch it, perhaps?

See also Electronic Project, Magic Rocks, Tasco Telescope

But at least the chemistry sets marketed by the likes of Salter and Merit made some affectation towards proper school lab learning. Dreary they may have seemed, but they didn’t patronise us youngsters like the modern-day National Curriculum-approved ‘yukky science’-type sets. Chemistry isn’t fun, no matter how much you dress it up with ‘slimy’ green food colouring and ‘funky’ fizzy sherbet. Write that down. On those earlier sets you’d find abundant warnings of the ‘adult supervision recommended’ kind in the instructions, even though every single kid in the land threw them away. If you couldn’t bang out a batch of stink bombs, then it was hardly worth the effort. The sole experiment conducted thereafter could be noted down thus: ‘Just bung a bit of everything in one test tube; then heat it up to see what happens’ (results: lame fizzing and stuff that glued itself to the kitchen table). As if we were hoping to drink the stuff and then transform, Dr Jekyll-style, into a horrible monster and eat our own parents. No, really…as if!

1 In the presence of water, anhydrous copper sulphate turns blue. To test for reducing sugars (aldehydes), a solution including blue copper sulphate will turn red. So there you have it: the most exciting thing you can do with copper sulphate is watch it change colour. It is the chemical-compound equivalent of a traffic light.

2 Off the top of our heads? Probably ammonium chloride, calcium hydroxide, sodium carbonate, sodium hydrogen sulphate, aluminium potassium sulphate, phenolphthalein, zinc, calcium carbonate, ammonium iron sulphate, iron sulphate and sodium thiosulphate. All that, and a tiny bog-brush for cleaning out test tubes!

Chic-a-boo
Monkey-faced brown-noser

If ever there was a warning about genetic experimentation, then it was Stephen Gallagher’s 1982 debut horror story, Chimera, a prophetic tale of a half-human, half-primate creature developed by scientists for use in slave labour and organ harvesting. In the end, the titular creature went crazy-ape bonkers in the Lake District and killed everyone.

Although slightly less violent in intent, the original Chic-a-boo dolls might as well have been spliced together in that same laboratory. This baby-faced bear/monkey hybrid was created by Japanese boffins back in the 70s, apparently to ‘bring a message to children about the beauty of love’.¹ Well, only a mother could love a face like that. Originally marketed in pairs (boy and girl–my God, they could mate!) and sold naked, it was the accompanying Hanna Barbera TV series in 1980 that brought the dolls to international attention.

Alternatively named Futagonomonchhichi, Monchhichi or, in France, Kiki, the popularity of Chic-a-boo helped launch a whole raft of accessories (mainly clothes) and merchandise for girls (mainly stationery). Most notably, the early ’80s saw a huge number of knockoff ‘gripping monkey/bear’ pencil-toppers designed to exploit the hitherto unexplored toy potential of the bulldog clip.²

See also Tiny Tears, My Little Pony, Smoking Monkey

Perhaps in a bid to inspire empathy in preschoolers, Chic-a-boo constantly sought comfort–witness the opposable digit perpetually jammed in its gob. Clearly, though, the toy’s appeal lay largely in its pleading expression. Taking the Disney style–those reassuringly Aryan juvenile features–and exaggerating it to a natural conclusion, Chic-a-boo was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked, button-nosed freak, the forerunner of Japanese Anime characters. What little girl could ignore that cutesy ‘love me’ expression, caught halfway twixt happiness and tears? (What adult fella could ignore the same on imported ‘naughty schoolgirl shags betentacled space monster’ Hentai cartoons?) Chic-a-boo was probably the first truly anthropomorphic toy to break through into a young child’s wish list, although it was swiftly superseded by similarly short-lived, dough-faced progeny (Cabbage Patch Kids, Pound Puppies, SnuggleBumms and many, many more).

Still popular in their native Japan (latest variety: Rasta-man Monchhichi an’ t’ing), the thumb-sucking fun carries on to this day, although you’ll be hard-pushed to find a vintage example that hasn’t had its brown nose rubbed clean away ‘with love’. In the mean time, we wait with bated breath for Stephen Gallagher’s next horror opus, The Tiny Tears of Blood.

1Monchhichi was originally created by Sekiguchi Ltd after the founder spotted a doll in a market in Germany So goes the official story. It could have been a really hairy baby Particularly if it was East Germany.

2 The “monkey grip”, as many unsuspecting kids would find out to their cost, could also mean being pincer-grabbed by the school bully just above the knee, thus trapping the nerves in a very unpleasantly ticklish way.

Chopper
Think once, think twice, think bike!

Okay, we know this book is supposed to be about toys you wanted but never got, and we’re prepared to concede that pretty much everyone owned a bike as a child. Indeed, given our obsession with catalogues, we’d put money down that plenty of ‘em were bought at a rate of a pound a week for fifty weeks from the subs lady who came round on Wednesdays. But the 1970s opened our eyes to the potential of something new–the designer bike–and, in particular, the Raleigh Chopper.¹

Possibly the last bike ever to adopt that penny-farthing-inspired differently-sized wheel ratio, the Chopper was (as designer Tom Karen has gone on record saying) intended to reflect the power and style of a dragster. Those ‘apehanger’ handlebars mimicked the customised Californian motorbikes of the ’60s–think Dennis Hopper’s Harley in Easy Rider. The overlong banana seat and spring-mounted saddle conjured up the desired ‘hot rod’ image. It sounds impressive but doesn’t quite explain where the goolie-knackering crossbar-mounted gear shift was supposed to fit in. Nevertheless, about two million of the frigging things were sold (and there are two million adults with the healed-over grazes to prove it).

See also Racing Bike, Spacehopper, Peter Powell Stunter Kite

The colour of Chopper you owned would reflect your personality–if not at first, then soon enough by means of customisation with reflectors, spokey-dokeys, mirrors and lights (chunky boxes of battery-powered plastic or sleek wheel-rim-driven dynamos), bottle-carriers and panniers–and be invested with great dedication and pride (except maybe when it came to cleaning it). Mainly, though, a Chopper (like any bike) would unlock a world of adventure beyond the end of your own street; going to your mates’ houses, picking up comics from the corner shop, stickleback fishing, popping wheelies, giving backies, racing–it was all for the taking.² Well, as long as there weren’t any hills en route. Choppers were not good with incline ratios. Your legs weren’t strong enough to pedal uphill and any pressure on the brake going downhill invariably sent you over the crossbar.

The advent of the BMX in the early ’80s put paid to the simple pleasure of owning a bulky, rusty, aggressively designed death-trap and turned the bike trade into a genuine, even respected, sporting industry As sales plummeted, the previously distinctive Raleigh brand saw out the era it helped to define making run-of-the-mill mountain bikes, city bikes and something now referred to as a hybrid, whatever that is.

1 Believe it or not, the kids’ bike industry in the Cream era was virtually a closed shop; Raleigh alone manufactured the Budgie, Tomahawk, Striker, Chipper, Chopper, Boxer and Grifter, so all that brand rivalry and envy kids wilfully engaged in was just a false war perpetuated by The Man. The likes of Elswick, Dawes and Falcon–the other independent British kids’ bike makers of the day–have since been absorbed by bigger companies or gone to the wall.

2 What do kids have now? Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell? Shove it up your fat, sofa-bound arse. Nothing beats the thrill of riding a bike without stabilisers for the first time. For crying out loud, does anyone even bother with the cycling proficiency test any more?

Chutes Away
Discreetly named air-war leviathan

‘Chutes’ be damned! This was, to all intents and purposes, Carpet Bombing For Fun, as evinced by the explosion noises made by playing kids as they dropped the ‘chutes’ on the revolving target, curiously painted up to look like some presumably inconspicuous fictional landmass, although it did resemble a sort of pre-continental-drift Africa, now we come to think of it.¹

Anyway, the stout bomber–sorry, troop carrier²–was mounted on a robust gantry and controlled by one of those initially-exciting-looking, dial-heavy flight-deck consoles that, on closer inspection, turns out to have just two actual controls (three, if you include the off switch), the rest being useless stickers.³ Ah well.

As the ground spun relentlessly beneath, you would position your plane fore and aft, look through the crosshairs, wait for a target to come into view, and then bombs–er, chutes–away! Get all ten in the waiting cups below and you win.

In a desperate attempt to reinforce the liberation-not-annihilation element, a lesser-known sequel game was eventually introduced–Night Rescue Chutes Away- although the good intentions were slightly undermined by its description as a ‘target’ game. The difference here? Your paratroopers could be dropped in the dark because there was a spotlight stuck under the plane.

In theory, this exciting development could have been a major USP, allowing as it did for the possibility of covert, post-curfew playtime. Unfortunately, the clockwork turntable that drove the thing made so much bloody noise, we might as well’ve had an actual plane in there with us.

Anyway, it was all good clean Dresden fun, brought to you by the good people of Gabriel. Gabriel?! No, us neither.

See also Vertibird, Up Periscope, Flight Deck

1 So much so that we’ll put money on it that the Chutes Away landscape is directly responsible for the look and feel of every British safari park since the 70s. Those of a more political sensitivity could also flip the card over and draw in their own Falkland Islands-themed felt-tip topography, natch.

2 A twin-prop yellow-and-white airbus that could’ve just roared out of the opening titles for Tales of the Gold Monkey.

3 One of which was a red Important! Read instructions first!’ label that might as well’ve been stuck there by your parents. Along with the ones that said ‘Don’t break it, it cost a lot of money!’ and ‘Let your brother have a go! It’s for sharing!’ Cuh! Talk about the nanny state–as if anyone reads the instructions first anyway.

Cluedo
After-dinner Agatha Christie

Cluedo seemed to appear out of nowhere as some murdery-mystery rival to Monopoly. In fact, it was devised by a solicitor’s clerk from Birmingham (the home of many unsolved crimes, we’re saying–the Bullring and Spaghetti Junction to name but two). Posh kids had it first, probably because it featured a ‘study’ and a ‘drawing room’, but it wasn’t long before the whole street was testing their detective skills with miniature tools of death and cards that you had to keep in little wallets like After Eights.

Essentially a glorified board version of 20 Questions (just keep asking until you guess whodunit, where-they-dunit and with what) but featuring murder, it stirred the nascent serial killer in many a small child. Show us a grown-up who claims they didn’t secretly want to see Mrs White bludgeoned to death with the lead pipe in the bedroom, and we’ll show you a suspiciously new-looking patio out in their back yard. (Of course, this almost-amusing observation conveniently ignores the fact that the actual murder victim–Dr Black–couldn’t simultaneously be one of the players. Neither could you record a verdict of suicide or accidental death. No wonder we grew up to be such a distrustful generation.)

See also Monopoly, Electronic Detective, Escape from Colditz

Quite where the stereotype characters were drawn from remains unexplained, although we suspect some play on words implicit in Mrs Peacock and Col. Mustard. Popular opinion had it that one of the suspects in the French version was a Welshman called Jack Hughes (j’accuse, geddit?), but sadly that’s just a grand old urban myth. 1986’s Super Cluedo Challenge did introduce three new characters–Captain Brown (just nervous, we expect), Miss Peach and Mr Slate-Grey but, like new-formula Coke, it never caught on.¹.

Although it must be said that both Rev. Green and Prof. Plum weren’t exactly marketed as teen heart-throbs, Miss Scarlet stirred more than just violent urges in the fellas, appearing as she did on the cards as a bright red pawn with a mane of flowing blonde hair and a saucy-yet-sophisticated smile. Thinking about it, any game that prompted a prepubescent sexual frisson from a chess piece, or educated young Crippens as to which household items could best be used to kill, should probably have come with some form of parental advisory warning. But this was in the good old pre-PC days, so we had free rein to don our imaginary balaclavas and go a-garrotting. With the length of rope. In the kitchen.²

1 Neither did the ratings haemorrhage of a TV show that broke through on ITV primetime in the ’90s. Although they managed to churn out four series, host Chris Tarrant (later replaced by Richard Madeley) claimed it was his ‘all time low…fucking bollocks…I just hated it’.

2 Another crime is the literal bludgeoning in the past decade of the Cluedo franchise, with the original game beaten to fit into travel, card, PC, junior and Simpsons-branded versions. Hasbro has also introduced a nostalgia edition (whatever that means), which comes in a wooden box. Which is where we’d have to be before you’d find us playing the animated Cluedo DVD Game.

Commodore 64
Breadbin-shaped family computer

Often, the first computer to grace the family home would not be bought as a present for the kids but would be borrowed as another toy for a tinkering dad. Commodore Business Machines had already dangled their PET, one of the top ‘take home from work for the weekend’ computers, in front of inquisitive parents across the globe, but it was with the introduction of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 in the very early ’80s that they cornered the younger (i.e. games-obsessed) micro market.¹

More eccentrically named than their closest competitors, Commodore computers also pretty much outclassed any in their price range. As any owner wouldn’t tire of banging on about, the C64 had much better–that is to say, more arcade-like–graphics than the Spectrum, thanks to something called ‘sprites’.² Its sound chip was also more sophisticated, leading some very zingy music to accompany the on-screen action rather than the usual bleeps and boops.

On top of that, the C64 also had a purpose-built matching cream lozenge colour-scheme tape deck or floppy disk drive, a ‘proper’ keyboard and that extra wodge of actually-not-very-important-in-the-event DRAM memory (a full 16K more than the 48K Spectrum–still some 6000 times less powerful than the average 3G mobile phone). But it did mean that a few classic programs were unique to what modern technologists would deem ‘the platform’: Dig Dug, Gilligan’s Gold and the assault-on-Hoth-apeing Attack of the Mutant Camels to name but three.³

The BBC Micro Computer programming

More than any other micro, though, the C64 was positioned as a grown-up’s office tool with all kinds of spreadsheet, word-processing and accounts applications available. All that processing power! However, once computer and accompanying colour portable telly took up residence in the spare room, so did we. Come on, it was 1982! We could close the curtains, watch the first edition of The Tube on Channel 4 and then play Defender’til bedtime. You can catalogue your record collection later, Dad.

See also ZX Spectrum, Binatone TV Master

Worthy, wealthy households instead chose to purchase the distinctly public service remit BBC Model B, which at least had a couple of Sunday-morning computer-literacy TV shows to back it up–although precious little in the way of games at first. Price wars and a failure to keep up with the increased specifications in the industry did for most of these machines in the end. Time has been kind, however, and a thriving retro scene keeps emulated versions of the C64 and all its contemporaries alive online somewhere out there on the Internet⁴

1 Atari and Apple were starting to enter the home-computer market in the States, but in the UK it was pretty much a straight fight between Commodore and Sinclair. Largely ignored pretenders to the throne included Oric, Dragon and Jupiter. They were right ones for making their products sound like something out of The Lord of the Rings, these computer manufacturers, eh?

2 We could come over all technical now and go on about attribute clashes and scrolling, but our workable knowledge of C64 BASIC begins and ends with the PEEK and POKE commands. To be honest, we don’t really know what they’re for either, but they sound funny.

3 In fact, rumour has it that the C64 was initially developed to serve as a simple reusable arcade cabinet engine–i.e. an upgradeable games machine–and not intended for the home market at all.

4 And in the real world. A ‘plug and play’ joystick-sized version of the C64, with thirty games included, will set you back less than £15 at Amazon. Age 5+. Bah.

Computer Battleship
Find-the-square military tactics game

Milton Bradley (which we’re still not sure wasn’t the name of that comedy alien bloke off Fast Forward) had tried before with a plastic push-peg version of the pen-and-paper grid-based classic. But it was with the addition of flashing LEDs and whistle-boom! sound effects that they hit upon the deluxe, truly sought-after edition.

For some reason as rare as hen’s teeth in your actual Christmas stocking (maybe it was overpriced–we can’t remember), Computer Battleship was memorably marketed (although we suspect that whoever it was that came up with the ‘You’ve sunk my battleship!’ dialogue for those Oxbridgean navy-ponce-themed telly ads wasn’t exactly bordering on genius), seemingly during every commercial break of our childhood.

The set-up? A plastic grid–a Siamese variation on the original analogue cases with flip-top lids–split vertically and separated into two playing areas (grid-squared maps of an unnamed ocean manufactured in the regulation James-Bond-film transparent plastic) plus assorted miniature gunships, boats, aircraft carriers, etc. Batteries, natch, were not included and at any rate would have lasted only until Boxing Day.

There were drawbacks, though. The limitations of the titular computer meant that, far from containing the imagined intricate sensors to automatically locate the position of your fleet, every single occupied square on the board had to be laboriously ‘programmed’ in before a game could start. For both players! The slide-rule-like apparatus had a tendency to be a bit glitchy, too, so unless every input coordinate was millimetre-perfect, your guess at C6 could easily register as D7, throwing your whole strategy out of whack. Plus, the reversal of the board meant that player one’s A1 position was actually player two’s K1 position, and so on, and so complicatedly forth.

See also Up Periscope, Chutes Away, Tank Command

But, for sheer literal bells and whistles, Computer Battleship couldn’t be matched. MB later rechristened the game Electronic Battleship and, later still, it was joined by the less successful refurbished version, Talking Battleship.¹ Nevertheless, the original remained a popular staple of end-of-term games days–often, its owner would have to instruct potential opponents to form a queue. The enduring playability did not go unnoticed by BBC bosses, either, who adapted the game for a Richard Stilgoe-fronted children’s programme, Finders Keepers.

1 In the late 1980s, there was another variant called Blow Up Battleship. Instead of calling your guess out loud, you would use a small set of bellows to send a jet of air to your opponent’s fleet and blast away a section of ship.

Connect Four
Tic-tac-toe, four in a row

Traditionally the arena of combat wherein eldest son would beat Dad (as depicted on the front of the box) in some gaming rite of passage (‘Look Dad, diagonally!’), Connect Four was the insanely addictive board game destined to split families asunder across the globe. Originally marketed as The Captain’s Mistress on account of a rumour traditionally linking it with Captain Cook (he was playing it, not shagging it, so the story goes), the definitive 70s edition is part-owned by–and why are we not surprised by this?–David Bowie.

A fiendishly simple premise–it’s basically noughts and crosses¹-you’d drop coloured counters into a vertically positioned seven by six-holed board and compete to see who would be first to get four colours in a row.² Launched in the early 1970s by MB Games, ‘the vertical strategy’ game had an ace climax wherein upon winning the victor could shout ‘Connect Four!’ and then pull a flap out from under the board causing the stacked counters to clatter out all over the melamine surface of the kitchen table.³ Although there were other ‘vertical strategy’ games available (cf. the safe-cracking style of Downfall), Connect Four had an alluring purity to it that made it seem all the more desirable. This was a thinker’s game, frill-free.

See also Downfall, Pocketeers, Othello

Rather as in poker, you could judge the ability and personality of your opponent by the way in which they played with the ‘chips’. One who stacked their counters into a tower would most likely be loath to commit, worried that making a move might cut off other opportunities. Whereas your counter-fiddler would be more liable to drop ’em into the grid like lightning, hoping to set the pace of the game and win by forcing an error in their opponent. The Apprentice would’ve been a much shorter TV series if they’d just got all the wannabe business tycoons to play a quick game of Connect Four on day one.

Like a family-friendly bright-blue plastic backgammon or Go, Connect Four was for your chin-rubbers and that boy genius about to take Dad out diagonally. And David Bowie. It’s still heavily marketed by MB, but we’re advised that current editions are rather smaller than the mid 70s definitive set (with the exception of those annoying gigantic pub versions), taking a good few inches off all aspects of the game–and a couple of decibels off that all-important victory clatter too.

1 Some people are just never happy with three, are they eh? Although why let your ambition stop at four? Why not Connect Five or Six? Because that would be for madmen, that’s why.

2 It’s way beyond the scope of this book to calculate the statistical probability of a stalemate result within all the Connect Four outcomes, but, let’s face it, there are Nobel Prize-winning mathematical theses written on less frivolous subjects.

3 Additional strategy point of order: older brothers were wont to ‘accidentally’ knock the flap out and cause a counter cascade whenever they sensed they were within a whisker of defeat. No, actually, we won’t just call it a draw’, you cheating bastard.

Corgi 007 Lotus Esprit
Reinventing the wheel

Much has been written about the British die-cast toy industry, most of it in better-researched books than this one, but here’s a quick summary. Dinky were first to retool their WWII ordnance machinery, initially making scaled-down cars as background detail for Hornby trains (courtesy of a shared parent company in Meccano Ltd.). Lesney’s Matchbox brand hit the shops next, famous for tinderbox packaging, various classic car series and, later, the Superfast and Superking ranges. Then Corgi, setting up shop in Swansea (hence the name) and introducing separate plastic windows for their cars–an innovation that had passed the other two businesses by.

In the end, all three collapsed under pressure from a corporate US giant (Mattel and their bleedin’ Hot Wheels),¹ but that’s a lesson history keeps teaching us over and over again. So much for facts. Most of the cars made by Dinky, Matchbox and Corgi have now ended up in dusty display cabinets, in museums and–the horror, the horror!–private collections. Was that really the point after half a century of miniature motoring? What happened to all the fun? Surely cars were made to be played with?

See also Tonka Trucks, Matsushiro Knight Rider Radio-Controlled Car, Hornby Railway Set

In fact, short of creating a traffic-jam on the lino by the patio doors, play scenarios were hard to come by. What really interested the Cream-era car buff–embryonic Clarksons all–was the toy that had an unexpected extra feature. Yer 70s’ Matchbox roster read like a roll-call at the Wacky Races (Blue Shark, Dodge Dragster and Turbo Fury to name but three), including dune buggies that the Monkees wouldn’t look out of place driving. Perennial favourite, the green hovercraft, remained and although Matchbox had experimented with S400 Streak Racing (plastic strips with loop-the-loops), the Adventure 2000 set was the real eye-opener. The vehicles themselves were a mishmash of sci-fi rip-offs (including Rocket Striker, which looked suspiciously like Dinky’sSHADO mobile), but you could also send off for a poster of the toys…which would come back with your name on it in big, blocky letters! Now that was impressive.²

Corgi, meanwhile, hitherto known for modern nuts-and-bolts stuff (branded articulated lorries, Routemasters, Land Rovers–especially for the Tarzan fold-out box set), aimed for a classier market with official film tie-ins. Yes, that does mean the camp Adam West Batmobile, but let’s not forget Bond. 007’s Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 cemented Corgi’s reputation for attention to detail, with faithfully reproduced battering rams, bullet shield and that all-important ejector seat. Their Spy Who Loved Me Lotus was even better (but mainly ’cos the Esprit didn’t actually look like any car we’d ever seen before, even when it was in the film).

Stock cars Collectors’ catalogues listed new toy ranges, such as Adventure 2000 (below) and Space 1999 (bottom).

Dinky, thinking on their feet, had thrown their lot in with Gerry Anderson, creating tie-ins to his younger-demographic-skewed Supermarionation shows. A shrewd move, it turned out, as the mammoth success of their Joe 90 range in 1968 proved–they became the top-selling toys of that Christmas. Spectrum SPVs and Thunderbird 2s capitalised on the F.A.B. vibe. Even Space 1999 got the Dinky treatment, the Eagle Transporter mopping up some of T2’s leftover metallic green paint (‘cos ver kids don’t like ‘all white’ toys, right?).

Eventually, it was simplicity that did for the die-cast dinosaurs. The stoic, some might say plain, British brands simply didn’t inspire excitement (where were the go-faster stripes, the flame decals or the ability to transform into a fighting robot, say?). They weren’t big enough to have action figures in ’em (MASK) or small enough to hide in your mouth (Micro Machines). In fairness, Matchbox did have a desperate last attempt to liven up their standard car range by introducing the Motorcity packages (bumper-value multiple-car pile-ups and elaborate multistorey playsets), but it was all to no avail.

It all went tits up for Matchbox in 1982 (perhaps their equipment was requisitioned for the Falklands?), and the others soon followed in a great mess of mergers and acquisitions. The companies may be dead but the brand names live on. Never say die.

1 It’s as if we never learn, isn’t it? Maybe, just maybe, we Brits aren’t good enough at this stuff. That’s something to ponder over a Starbucks latte and a Krispy Kreme donut, eh?

2 The poster (inspired by those similarly personalised ‘El Cordobes’ bullfighter one-sheets, we’re saying–perhaps Mr Matchbox had been sunning himself on the Costa Brava in ’77?) was a poisoned chalice. You could request three names to be printed, presumably to keep siblings happy, but one had to be credited under the threatening alien baddie also pictured. Two heroes, one enemy. Oh, the arguments!

Crossfire
Junior Rollerball for trainee snipers

See also Stop Boris, Battling Tops, Hungry Hippos

There’s something about the sheer size of so many toys and games of our era: they weren’t just played in the house–they took over the house. Nowadays, everything’s been reissued in petite ‘coffee-table’ versions on sale at Firebox.com¹ Back then, you needed French windows just to get the likes of Crossfire indoors.

Basically a combination of pre-Pac-Man arcade favourite Air Hockey and a fairground rifle range, this two-player combat game required the steady aim of an SAS-trained marksman and the ruthless determination to win of an American athletics coach. The object of each round? To score goals against your opponent by firing a constant stream of steel ball-bearings–that’s steel ball-bearings, folks–against a rolling puck (also steel) until it passed through his net (incidentally also made of steel). Any ball-bearings that fell into your half became your next round of ammunition (to be loaded into the top of chunky red firing pistols at either end of the long chipboard playing area).²

Crossfire could be a fast and furious game (to paraphrase the advertising spiel, The only game as exciting as its name’) and, by crikey, it was certainly a noisy one. In addition to the endless chime of ricocheting steel on steel, the pistols themselves had a stiff and clunky trigger mechanism that not only discharged each ball with a loud crack but also had a tendency to jam mid-game (calling for a swift and strident blow to free the offending ammo). If nervous relatives felt the need to leave the room, who could blame them? In any case, the footprint required for both game and players to play in comfort (i.e. lying full stretch on the floor) meant that the settee had to be moved, so good riddance.

Two other important words to bring into the mix here: agonising blisters. Never mind the potential for RSI, endless chafing of fingers on a red-plastic trigger made for a certain unforeseen amount of bloodshed. The problem could be alleviated mildly by the application of a plaster or insulation tape around fingers or gun, but Crossfire would inevitably end up a messy game. Still, there’s no such thing as hygienic warfare.

As with all ball-bearing-dependent games, some would be lost over time. Had it been possible to detach the pistols from the field of play, however, and brandish them, airgun style, in the street, we concede that they would’ve gone missing a hell of a lot sooner.

1 Case in point: you can still buy Crossfire in the shops although now it boasts a so-called ‘giant playing field’ of just two feet New manufacturers FEVA are British though so we’ll let them off.

2 Given the fundamentally two-player nature of this game why any parent would buy this for an only child a mystery. An alternative Crossfire scenario for such unlucky kids was to create a Roman-style combat amphitheatre for woodlice by lobbing a few of them in the middle and blasting off a random bombardment of balls.

Cyborgs
Sci-fi figurines with interchangeable limbs

See also Action Man, ROM the Space Knight, Dr Who TARDIS

This early 70s Strawberry Fayre range–actually Takara Henshin originals imported from Japan by Denys Fisher–beats later incarnations developed around the same theme (including Timanic Cyborgs and Micronauts) by virtue of being constructed to a larger scale. In playability terms, that meant they could be pitched in interspecies war with Action Man, Dr Who and the Bionic pair

Cleverly manufactured in a combination of clear plastic, chromed parts and die-cast metal, they were very cool-looking toys (in two flavours, Muton and Cyborg). There was, naturally, some comic-strip business on the back of the boxes setting up an interplanetary war back-story,¹ but kids just make up their own, don’t they? Chief factors in their appeal: you could see their internal organs and pull them limb from limb (what kid could resist that?).

There was also the slightly scary implication, not exploited by the later brands, that we would all one day become part human, part machine, with plastic or metal replacing what once was flesh. Which, when you were a youngster conversant with the plot of the Six Million Dollar Man (the TV series was based on Martin Caidin’s 1972 book Cyborg), seemed eminently plausible.² Forget the rubber-suited Cybermen or the monotone Borg–here’s a frightening notion: when the Queen Mum had her hip replacement, she technically qualified as a Cyborg. A PR opportunity missed there, we feel.

As with the later figure collections, there was an abundance of accessories, in this case, weapons sets (various arm-replacements for Cyborg, including the Cybo-Liquidator– a water pistol–and the Cybo-Eliminator), flying discs a la the Green Goblin and the prohibitively expensive CyboInvader spaceship. Muton even had actual outfits to wear, known as ‘subforms’ and comprising Torg (a horned demon thing), X-Akron (a red roboty thing) and Amaluk (a green fishy thing). Third member of the team and Johnny-cum-lately Android, seemed cast in a different manner, being more ‘brittle’ and lacking the rubber head. His chest panel popped open to reveal a four-missile launcher, which could be fired by pressing a button on his back.

Sadly, the only real-life cyborg we know of is the University Of Reading’s Kevin Warwick, who seems to make a living by implanting microchips in his forearm and telling newspapers that he’s turned into C3P0. This should not reflect too badly on the university’s robotics department as, before this, it was most famous for building Sir Jimmy Saville’s special Fix It chair.

1 Muton was an intergalactic space-parasite-type who’d decided that it was Earth’s turn to be laid to waste. Humanity’s best scientific minds got together to create the ultimate defender of the human race, Cyborg. Android was designed later as an extra ‘hero’ toy to gang up on poor of Muton. A million bullied kids sighed in recognition: two against one.

2 Bloody Hazel O’Connor and her cha Eighth Day misanthropy didn’t help matters much either. This 1980 tune wrapped quasi-religious bunkum in with ‘machine becomes sentient’ lyrics, while the video featured O’Connor herself going mental in a TRON-inspiring neon skeleton suit. Proper worrying.

Domino Rally
Chain re-ACTION!

Yet another thing the Yanks did bigger and better than us. For the Cream-era child, hardly a week would pass without kids’ telly showing yet another colour-saturated videotape of record-breaking domino topplers in a Milwaukee aircraft hangar. Thereon, jaundiced-looking Spielberg-alikes would spend days setting up elaborate domino displays under hot sodium lamps (usually suffering a cataclysmic setback when a stray grasshopper knocked over a 10,000-tile Flags of All Nations set-piece overnight). America, Holland, China…you name it, everyone had a crack at the record books.

Just not the UK. What hope of government funding for a would-be domino athlete, eh? You’d just about scrape together enough cash for one wooden, slidey-top box of those Bakelite buggers. The carefully positioned mosaics and pixellated patterns (albeit created by teams of Stateside nerds) may have lent the domino an exotic air it never would’ve acquired from years as an old man’s knock-on-the-table game in murky brown pubs. Plus, with only the living room to experiment in, future British domino topplers would be lucky to get together a run of ten, never mind an entire course of dominoes sliding down chutes, setting off rocket launchers and swinging across mini-ravines.

Confidently stepping into this gap in the market came Action GT and its Domino Rally sets (mark 1, mark 2 and, perhaps inevitably, mark 3), featuring masses of brightly coloured tiles¹ plus all kinds of gimmicks, stunts and tricks for them to perform (loop-the-loops, elevators, steps, slides and ‘sunbursts’). Domino Rally also had one extra-special ace up its sleeve: most of the dominoes were fastened along flat, perfectly spaced lengths, so resetting them was a quick flip of the wrist away.

See also Cascade, Mousetrap, Guess Who?

However, the unique selling point of domino toppling (not much more than ‘set them up, knock them down’ as the box blurb reiterated) started to feel a little like too much effort after a while and, as the young player him/herself tumbled inexorably towards adolescence, the plastic set took up final residence in the loft.² Nowadays, if you hear someone say they fancy dominoes, you’re more than likely expected to get the pizzas in.

1 The technical term is apparently not tiles but ‘stones’, which makes them sound very rock ’n’ roll, doesn’t it? Hence, we suppose, why Eric Clapton chose the pseudonym Derek and the Dominos to record Layla. And, erm…well, there’s also Fats.

2 You can, however, book now for the annual Domino Day in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. They need 80 volunteer domino-setters. But beware–according to their website, ‘It is hard work, often on hands and knees, and requires an enormous amount of concentration.

Downfall
Upright counter-based safe-cracker game

This 70s entry ticks nearly all the boxes required of a board game. First off, even before the lid was lifted, you had the double-meaning implicit in the name (successfully exploited by the burglar-centric telly ads) insofar as not only did the red and yellow counters of the opposing sides ‘fall down’ through the vertical playing construct but also, while you were trying to win, you could have been assisting your competitor in their attempt to plot your ‘downfall’.

Second, it required only minutes to understand how to play, set up and go. For the record, the counters–two sets of five, numbered and in different-coloured sets to vary the manoeuvring difficulty if required–were loaded into feeder chutes and all the combination-lock-inspired dials were set to a required start position. Then, in turn, each player made a single spin of any dial in an attempt to pass the counters through the dials and down to the waiting tray at the bottom.¹Most satisfying was being able to navigate a full set of counters into the bottom dial for the final turn, before watching the crestfallen reaction of your opponent as they tumbled out en masse.²

More recent versions of the game have ditched the original board’s institutional blue and grey in favour of the usual kid-friendly acid colours or, in one case, stripping out the board altogether and leaving just some key-operated tumblers floating in midair. Call that iconic? Pah!

The aforementioned mid ’80s ads played on the addictive qualities of the gameplay: apparently, even housebreakers would find it impossible to resist just one more go, giving the police plenty of time to turn up and arrest them. ‘You’ve won!’ ‘I think we both lost!’ If only there’d been one of these set up in Tony Martin’s Norfolk farmhouse, he could’ve avoided a lot of silly bother.

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