Child Of The 1980’s

Spirograph is one of those enduring toys that will probably go on forever. It was originally invented by Denys Fisher in the 1960’s, and is one of those simple but elegant designs that you take a look at the components involved and it’s immediately obvious what you are supposed to do with it. Basically, it’s used to draw thousands of intricate mathematical curves in the name of art.

The basic set consists of some toothed rings which you pin to a sheet of paper. You then select one of the many different sized wheels, each of which was surrounded in more little cog teeth, and had a number of holes drilled in them. You place the wheel inside the ring, lock the teeth together, then place a pen or pencil in one of the wheels holes. With firm pressure you then repeatedly rotate the wheel around the ring using the pen, performing loop after loop until the line you’ve drawn meets up again with the beginning of the line. The result, a beautiful swirly design, which you could use as a decoration as it was, or you could colour bits of it in if you wanted to.

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Arriving in the late 1970’s, the Sony Walkman revolutionised the way people listened to music, and as a side effect must have also boosted the sales of cassette tapes both prerecorded and blank. The idea was simple, a tape player small enough to hold in your hand or clip on your belt which then allowed you to wander around doing whatever you wanted to do, listening to whatever music you wanted to, inside or outside the house.

Prior to the introduction of the Walkman playing cassette tapes meant using your stereo system or a stand alone tape player. Obviously the former would be too large to carry around and of course needed mains electricity, whilst the latter, although smaller, were still too large due to having built in speakers, and were too cumbersome for you to carry about and do something else. The solution to these problems were simple and obvious. First, stick a clip on the back so you could hook the Walkman on your clothing, freeing your hands. Secondly, reduce the size by pulling out the loud speaker, and replacing it with a set of small plug-in headphones.

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Ladybird books are a bit of a British institution, and have been instrumental in teaching generation of kids how to read for many many years, and I am glad to report are still going strong today. The first Ladybird branded book were published way back in 1940 and was called Bunnikin’s Picnic Party, so I’m definitely too young to remember that one, but chances are it may have been one of the books my parents read as a child!

Probably the best remembered Ladybird books are the Peter and Jane learn to read series. These were divided up into groups for teaching reading skills to different age groups, from those just starting until around 9 or 10 years of age. The stories they told followed the lives of Peter and Jane as they played, shopped with their mother and did many other normal day to day things. Each book finished by having a couple of pages listing all the “New Words Learnt This Book“, which was quite exciting when you were five years old!

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One of the big problems with the home computer boom in the 1980’s was that you needed to have a TV set to plug your Spectrum or Commodore 64 into. Nowadays of course every kid from the age of 3 upwards seems to have a 14 inch colour TV and DVD player in their bedroom, but not so back in the 1980’s, as colour TV sets still cost a fair amount of money.

In our house we had our main colour TV set in the front room, and a little 8 inch black and white TV that my Dad had bought years ago. It was so old it had inputs on the back to allow it to be powered by a car battery as well as the mains. I received a Commodore Vic 20 for Christmas one year, and whilst I was allowed to use the colour TV on Christmas Day, by Boxing Day my Mum wanted to watch TV so the black and white set was got down out of the attic. Obviously it wasn’t as much fun playing games in black and white, but never mind, I wanted to use the computer, so that was my only option.

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Being interested in computers at an early age, as most young boys growing up in the 1980’s doubtless were, meant that you were probably also desperate to own a Big Trak. This was another of those toys that instantly made you Mr. Popular at school, as it was pretty expensive so not many kids owned one, and even fewer owned the add on trailer for it either, of which more later.

Big Trak itself looked a bit like some kind of futuristic lunar rover, but what made it really special was that you could program it to do whatever you wanted, well within reason anyway. The keypad on the back allowed you to enter a sequence of simple commands such as move forward or turn right, a bit like the computer language Logo that you could use on your schools BBC Micro at the time. You entered in your commands then hit the GO! button to set Big Trak on its way, and just hoped that you had got the instructions right so that it avoided the door frame and didn’t run into the sofa.

The most useless, yet still the best thing about Big Trak was the laser gun at the front of the machine. This could be programmed to fire, which just meant it made a laser sound and flashed the lights on and off, but it was still great fun trying to get Big Trak to sneek up on the family pet and pretend to blast it with the lasers.

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I have to confess that I never ever saw D.A.R.Y.L when it was released in 1985. In fact, I only watched it last week when I happened to notice it was on Sky Movies. When I was at university several friends had mentioned that they had enjoyed this film as a kid, so I finally took the chance to see what I had been missing.

The film opens with a car being chased by a helicopter through some mountain roads. The car stops whilst out of sight of the helicopter and a young boy gets out and runs into the trees. The car starts off again at high speed, forcing an elderly couple of the road in it’s haste. The elderly couple then come across the boy, who doesn’t know what he is doing there, only that his name is Daryl.

The elderly couple take the boy into town, but since they are unable to look after him, he is sent to a child welfare hostel. From here he is fostered by construction manager Andy and his wife Joyce, a piano instructor. It soon becomes apparent that whilst Daryl may be suffering from memory loss, he is also an extremely fast learner and more than capable of looking after himself. Daryl makes friends with Turtle, the boy from across the road, and also becomes Andy’s secret weapon in the little league baseball team he coaches.

Eventually though, Daryl’s real parents track him down, and they come to collect him. We soon find out however that they are not really his parents, but two scientists from a military research base. They fly Daryl to the base, but after returning from a quick lesson in how to fly a plane from the pilot, he overhears the two scientists, Dr. Stewart and Dr. Lamb, and realises they are not his parents after all.

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