Child Of The 1980's

I always loved watching the Amazing Adventures of Morph, the cool little plasticene guy created by Aardman Animation and made famous thanks to appearing on Take Hart.  You might not have been able to understand a word he said, but to watch him get completely frustrated when all his plans fell apart around him (usually thanks to Chaz getting in the way) was guaranteed to raise a smile.

You may have come across the My Own Morph kit by now, and indeed it was featured as part of my list of eighties themed gifts a little while back.  One of the stockists of this kit is Firebox, who are now running a competition for you to put this kit to good use.

The Morphmation Animation Competition tasks you with making your very own stop-motion animated film featuring Morph. It’s up to you what the little fella gets up to in the film (well, within reason) but they must be less than 2 minutes in length. You have until April 30th to send in your entries, when five finalists will be chosen and posted on Aardman’s YouTube channel. Aardman Animation will then pick a winner based on viewing counts and comments left on YouTube.

Firebox have some of the initial entries on their website already, and whilst they are pretty simple it’s worth taking a look to see the quality of Morph model making on show, which ranges from the quite good to the freak of nature… Just follow the competition link above to take a look.

Just a quick reminder that today is the last day of our competition to win tickets to the 80s Rewind Festival.  If you haven’t entered already then click on the big icon at the top right of this page.  You’ll need to answer a simple question (hint: read the blog post mentioned on the competition page for the answer) and provide your e-mail address so that we can contact you should you be the winner.

Go on, give it a shot.  Best of luck!

When I was at primary school there were a set of drawers which contained pieces of stationery equipment that you wouldn’t necessarily have in your own personal tidy tray.  Round tipped scissors and pairs of compasses for drawing circles were two of the items, but the one item that you needed nearly every day was a ruler.  The ruler drawer contained a mixture of wooden and plastic rulers, and of these I far preferred the plastic variety.

The wooden rulers were good and solid (great for slapping other kids on the back of the legs) but I always found the plastic ones easier to read and more fun once you got back to your desk.  These rulers were normally made of clear or white plastic, though sometimes the clear plastic was tinted.

They were made by a company called HELIX, and on one end they had the words Shatterproof or Shatter Resistant printed in a font that looked like it had had a large electric current passed through it.  They normally had metric measurements (centimetres) down one side and imperial measurements (inches) down the other edge.

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Is there something that you always wanna do? The one thing that you always wanted to?

Did you write a letter to Jim’ll Fix It then?

Bub-buh-baaaa, bub-buh-bub-buh-bub-buh-baaaa.

Now I’m normally one to think that the world is going mad when it comes to being politically correct about what things are called, but I have to personally agree with whoever decided that Sweet Cigarettes should be renamed to Candy Sticks. After all, whether you smoke or not everybody knows smoking is bad for you, and so giving children something called cigarettes is not really a good idea, is it?

That said, when I was a kid I remember eating many a pack of these hard white sugary sticks and pretending to smoke them, and it never turned me into a smoker, so perhaps we should give kids a bit more credit.

However, it wasn’t just the name that changed when Sweet Cigarettes became Candy Sticks. No, we also lost the little bit of red colouring on one end of the sweet that was supposed to look like the cigarette was alight. Strange they chose red as the colour, since I would say most cigarettes glow a more orangey colour when they are being smoked.

Oh well, they may have a new name but they’re still just a tasty and just as hard to break with your teeth, and you can sample them again for yourselves thanks to A Quarter Of.

In a bid to entice readers newspapers have run many different types of games within their pages in order to get people hooked into buying on a daily basis.  Crosswords and more lately Sudoku are popular, and for a time every tabloid newspaper was running daily Bingo competitions (I’m surprised given the current interest in bingo websites that they haven’t brought this particular idea back).  One competition that seems to have died off now though is the Spot the Ball competition.

The idea of Spot the Ball was quite literally to spot the ball!  A picture taken usually from a football match was printed in the paper, but the ball had cleverly been removed from the image.  You had to mark where you thought the ball might be with a cross, and you could send the image into the newspaper to try and win a prize.  Whoever got closest to the centre of the ball was declared the winner.  Sometimes a grid was overlaid on the picture and to enter you just had to say which square contained the ball.

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When I first saw the advert on TV for the Play Doh Mop Top Barber Shop I really, really wanted one.  Trouble is, I was really too old for Play Doh by then, so instead I kept urging my younger sister to ask for one so that I could have a go with it.  I think she would have liked to have had it too, but ultimately we never quite convinced Mum to buy us one, and instead we had to settle for her homemade play dough instead.

The Mop Top Barber Shop was most appealing because of the way it squidged the modelling material through tiny holes in the heads of some round headed plastic figures.  Having filled the initially bald figure with dough you screwed it into the barber shop chair which pushed lots of little wiggly worms of the modelling material out the top of the head to look like hair.  It really was quite amusing to watch.

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Thinking about Bird’s Ice Magic reminded me of when the ice cream van used to come round and all the kids in the neighbourhood would rush out to buy a Strawberry Mivvi or a 99. Personally I was quite partial to Oysters – I loved the marshmallow bit at the bottom of the shell. Yum!

Sometimes though it was nice to just have a little tub of the soft whippy ice cream drenched in one of those runny yet incredibly sticky ice cream sauces. Most ice cream vans had a selection of these for you to choose from, and all would offer chocolate and either strawberry or raspberry as a minimum. So, which flavour of this sugary goodness was your favourite?