Child Of The 1980’s

Funny, it was just a couple of weeks ago that I wrote about Fraggle Rock, and what should I spy today in the paper but news that there’s a Fraggle Rock movie in production!

There wasn’t much revealed about the film but it sounds as if the Fraggles may be leaving the safety of their caves to follow Uncle Travelling Matt into the world of the Silly Creatures of Outer Space, or our normal everyday world as we know it.

I’m not sure what to make of this really.  It’s not like today’s kids will probably have much of a clue as to what a Fraggle is, and if the above plot is true then I have some concerns.  What about the Gorgs, the Doozers and the Trash Heap?  Will they come along for the ride too?  I hope so because I always liked those characters more than the Fraggles themselves.  My other fear is that the Fraggles end up befriending some annoying bowl cutted child actor who explains the world of the humans to them.  Please God!  Anything but that.

One thing that will be interesting to see is if they bother to film different bits for different countries, given that the caves connected to a lighthouse in the UK version, but an inventors workshop in the US version of the series, for example.  My money is on it being none of these, with the Fraggles finding a new entrance to our world.

There can’t be many people who haven’t played or at least heard of Tetris. The game is such a simple idea that anybody can play it, even if they might not be very good at it.

The premise is simple. Starting with an empty screen, different shaped blocks fall from the top one at a time. The player can move the blocks from side to side as the fall, and also rotate them through 90 degree turns. When the block reaches the bottom of the screen, or lands atop a previously dropped block it stops moving. The idea is to slot the pieces together in order to build an unbroken horizontal line, which will then disappear causing all blocks above it to move down a line. The player must continually perform this task with the blocks gradually falling faster down the screen, not allowing the screen to become filled to the top. If this occurs the game is over.

Tetris originated in Russia, created by Alexey Pajitnov, and whilst it isn’t the only game to have emerged from there it sure does feel like it sometimes. Over the years the various versions of the game have capitalised on the games origins by using Russian imagery such as pointy domed buildings and Cossack dancers, and by featuring music with a Soviet feel. Whilst it certainly wasn’t the first version of the game, the original Nintendo Gameboy version is often held up as being the perfect version of Tetris, and is surely the reason why Nintendo’s handheld gaming device was initially so popular, given that it shipped with a copy of the game.

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I know that my friend Philip will be smiling broadly when he sees the image accompanying this post, if only because it features ace 1980’s puppet series Star Fleet (note to self: must write about Star Fleet properly sometime). Today’s post is actually concerned with Look-In, the magazine for which this image was once the front cover.

Look-In, also subtitled as The Junior TV Times, was initially conceived in the 1970’s as a way for children to find out about all the TV programmes that might be of interest to them over the coming week, with a particularly heavy emphasis on any show that aired on ITV. Given that TV Times magazine initially only contained TV listings for the ITV channels, this is hardly surprising.

The magazine was quite often given a plug at the end of childrens TV programmes, especially if there happened to be an article in that weeks issue about the programme that had just aired, using the catchy phrase “Look out for Look-In! Every week!“. The typical issue consisted of TV star interviews, competitions, and features on TV shows. It was also chock full of cartoon strips detailing further adventures of your favourite shows, or even more documentary style strips detailing the history of bands and pop groups.

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The pictured set may be a little fancier than the one I had when at school, but the contents haven’t changed a bit. As soon as you went to secondary school the first thing your new Maths teacher told you was to get hold of a geometry set for future lessons. All the kids would go home and tell their parents about this new requirement, and after your Mum had moaned a bit about “more expense” a trip to WH Smiths would follow to pick one up.

Most kids would end up with a geometry set made by stationery company Helix, which contained the following items:-

• A pair of compasses
• A protractor
• A 15cm ruler
• Two set squares
• Some pencils (if you were lucky)

You’d proudly take your new set into your next Maths lesson, only to find you didn’t need it that day, and wouldn’t actually need it for weeks to come. The poor old geometry set then sat at the bottom of your bag for the next few months, until it was finally required. Scrabbling around in the bottom of the bag you’d find the geometry set, plastic lid broken and the contents chipped and scuffed, covered in mud from your sports kit. It was now next to useless…

…for its intended purpose that is. The pair of compasses was normally pretty sturdy, and the point made an effective weapon. The corners of the set square were also good stabbing implements, assuming they hadn’t broken off already, and the protractor could be quite an effective saw for cutting your mate’s giant pencil eraser in half as well. Ah, the innocence of youth, eh?

SuperTed was one of those cartoons that straddled the strange grey area between cartoons for little kids and cartoons for teenagers. Primary school children would definitely have enjoyed SuperTed’s adventures, but given that the hero of the show was basically a teddy bear by the time you reached around 10 years of age you would probably consider it a bit childish, but would probably watch it anyway if there was nothing better on.

The cartoon was first broadcast in 1982 on Welsh TV channel S4C, and was indeed a Welsh speaking show. It was soon dubbed into English to be shown in the rest of the UK where it initially aired as part of BBC1’s afternoon childrens line up. Derek Griffiths, a favourite from Play School provided the voice of SuperTed, whilst the great Jon Pertwee of Doctor Who and Worzel Gummidge fame was the voice of Spottyman, SuperTed’s alien friend.

SuperTed himself was originally a normal teddy bear, who was rejected from the manufacturing line for some reason and tossed into the factory basement. By lucky coincidence Spottyman, a yellow humanoid with green spots, came across the bear and sprinkled some magic cosmic dust on it, bringing the bear to life. Spottyman took the bear to visit Mother Nature, who gave the bear secret powers, making him into SuperTed. Quite a convoluted set up it has to be said!

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Yay!  I’m pleased to say the my own personal choice for 8-bit home computers, the Commodore 64 was the winner of our last survey, although I’m not surprised to see the ZX Spectrum coming in second place with just one vote less.

 On to this weeks survey then, which I’m sorry to say has been a bit late making it on to the site (it’s a Sunday Survey I suppose).  This week we want to know which TV channel was the most often watched in your household for children’s TV.  I know some people had parents who were adamant that their off spring should only watch TV by the British Broadcasting Company.  This being a 1980’s site of course, you’re limited to just the two broadcasters.

Teddy Ruxpin first appeared in 1985 and was intended as an educational toy that would help and encourage young children to learn to read. The toy took the form of a cute and cuddly teddy bear who could actually read stories to a child, with it’s eyes and mouth moving in time with the words of the story.

How did it achieve this magical feat? Well, inside the bear there was an audio cassette tape player. The books that Teddy Ruxpin could read also came with an audio tape that slotted inside the bear, and obviously provided the required speech. The tapes contained signals which instructed the bear to blink or open or close it’s mouth, thus giving the effect of the bear reading the story. This was achieved by using the fact that an audio tape can store stereo sound, so one channel of sound was the speech and music, and the other channel (which was not played by the bear) contained the mouth and eye information. Any tape could actually be played in the bear, but the mouth and eyes would not move unless the tape was specially made for the toy.

Extra books and tapes could be bought, although I believe they were all about the adventures of Teddy Ruxpin and his pal Grubby, a second character also available as a toy that could be connected to the main toy allowing the two to interact with each other as the stories were told. Grubby was a strange orange thing with eight legs (two of which could be arms I suppose). I guess he was meant to be a caterpillar, but I really don’t know.

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If you went to school during the 1980’s the chances are your school computers would have been the big beige slab that was the BBC Micro. This home computer was incredibly popular with schools due to it’s incredibly sturdy construction, and the fact that the British Broadcasting Corporation put their name to it which led to it being adopted as the default computer on any BBC produced show about computers. This then meant that all the posh kids at school got a BBC Micro instead of a Spectrum or Commodore 64.

The BBC Micro was originally launched in two forms, the model A, sporting 16K of RAM, and the model B, which had 32K. To all intents and purposes this was the main difference in the two machines (the A also lacked some of the connector ports on the back), and it made the model A almost redundant, since you couldn’t even use certain graphical modes on the model A due to a lack of available memory. You think a PlayStation 3 is expensive today, but the model A cost £299 and the model B a whopping £399, and that kind of money had significantly more value than it does today!

The BBC Micro had 7 different graphical modes, each with a different number. These ranged from 640×256 in monochrome through to 160×256 in a choice of 16 colours. One note about the number of colours though. The BBC could only display 8 different colours (the usual suspects of Black, White, Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue and Magenta) but you could set up another 8 colours which could flash at different speeds between any two of the available colours.

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