Child Of The 1980's

You just don’t seem to see many ventriloquists on TV any more, do you?  The main reason for this I suppose is the complete lack of variety TV shows, where you’d be entertained by a plethora of different acts including singers, comedians and magicians.  A really popular ventriloquist could even be given their own primetime TV show, but I think those days are well and truly gone!

So, if you were in charge of putting together a variety show line up in the 1980’s and you were after a ventriloquist, chances are you’d end up with Keith Harris.  Of course there were others, such as Ray Allen and Lord Charles, or Roger De Courcey and Nookie Bear, but they were more popular during the 1970’s.  Keith’s act tended to be a bit more child friendly (perhaps even too child friendly) so he was presumably often chosen as the safe bet.

Keith is best known for his puppet Orville, a green duck wearing a nappy who had a high pitched, screachy sort of voice.  As well as having moving eyes and beak, Orville could also flap his wings, although he was unable to fly, as we were too often reminded by the rather awful single “Orville’s Song“.  You know the one – I wish I could fly, right up to the sky, but I can’t.  You can.  I can’t.  Somehow this song made it to number four in the UK charts…

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For most people Raiders of the Lost Ark is still the best of the Indiana Jones films, and I think it’s safe to say that this is the case for Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, who devoted most of their summer holidays as teenagers in the 1980’s to making their own version of this classic film.

I know what you’re thinking. A couple of teenagers remaking a big budget Hollywood film set in a number of far flung locations – it can only be completely rubbish right? Well, I thought the same, but after seeing the first ten minutes or so, where Indy grabs the idol from the cave and is chased by the giant boulder, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, it can’t hope to live up to the same standards as it’s inspiration, but the boys sure gave it a good shot.

I’m surprised I haven’t heard about this before, since the adaptation is pretty much scene for scene complete, only missing a few bits which the lads were just plainly unable to shoot, and comes in at around 1 hour 40 minutes in length, about 15 minutes less than the original. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation was even given a cinema release in 2003, although admittedly only in a single cinema in Texas.

Many thanks then to the Big Stupid Idiot blog for bringing this to my attention, and for an in depth look at the making of this frankly astounding piece of amateur film making, there’s an article on the Vanity Fair website. Check out those first few minutes of the film below as well. I urge you to stick with it until the fun stuff where Indy steals the idol from the cave.

I wrote about Star Fleet earlier this week, which was an awesome puppet show in a similar vein to the classic shows created by Gerry Anderson, the most famous of which is probably Thunderbirds.  This weeks survey is therefore to discover which of these Gerry Anderson shows was the best.

OK, I know that, excluding Terrahawks, these shows were made well before the 1980’s, but all those listed were repeated during that decade at some point or another, so for me are the best known of Mr. Anderson’s shows.  I know there are more, such as Supercar and The Secret Service, but since I’ve never seen these I’m pretty sure they weren’t repeated when I was growing up.

I remember loving my Sticklebricks when I was but a toddler, and still enjoyed playing with them with my sister when she was the right sort of age for them. For little hands Sticklebricks were probably the best building toy out there, dare I say it even better than Duplo (or Big Lego as we always called it) as they were easier to push together. You didn’t really need to be too accurate with them thanks to their unique design.

Sticklebricks were made from a hard wearing but flexible plastic, unsurprisingly in a variety of bright primary colours. The faces of the bricks were covered in hundreds of little plastic prongs, which were sized such that when you pushed the prongs of two bricks together they stuck, yet were still very easy to pry apart if you wanted to change your latest masterpiece.

They came in a range of different sizes, from long rectangles through squares and triangles to thin fingers, which in our set were yellow and always reminded me of the toffee fingers in Quality Street chocolates. There were also rotating wheels which could stick on the sides of blocks in order to build cars and other vehicles, and little round plastic discs which made excellent eyes!

Sticklebricks disappeared from our shelves sometime around the early 1990’s if I remember correctly, but I’m pleased to say they’re available again now and look just as good as I remember them, plus they have some nice new bricks such as little human heads (which are cube shaped!). For a monster tub of these cool building bricks pay a visit to the Amazon or eBay links below.

Whilst doing the weekly grocery shop the other day I happened across a packet of caramel flavour Wagon Wheels. What especially caught my eye was that this variety was packaged in the old fashioned gold foil wrap that Wagon Wheels used to come in.

Now I’m quite partial to the odd Wagon Wheel (especially the jammy variety), so a pack soon found their way into my trolley because I wanted to find out if this Caramel variety were the same ones I remembered from my childhood.  You see, I distinctly remember there being a flavour of Wagon Wheel known as “Big Country”, but I remember them as having a brownish coloured mallow layer and having a butterscotch kind of taste.

Sadly, I don’t think the Caramel variety is the same thing as the Big Country ones, but they are still very nice and indeed are an old variety that used to exist at some point, as it says so on the wrapper.  It also says that Wagon Wheels were launched in the 1940’s when Western movies were still popular, and kids up and down the land still used to play Cowboys and Indians (or Interlopers and Native Americans as it perhaps would be called these days?).  Informative as well as tasty eh?

All this makes me wonder whether kids today still play Cowboys and Indians?  I would guess not, as I think that was beginning to go out of vogue when I was little.  I remember having a cowboy dress up costume and hat, and would run around shooting my cowboy revolver, which of course was loaded up with a string of pink paper caps – I wonder if you can even get those anymore?

Back when I was a kid I was always intrigued by these magical things called credit cards.  It seemed you could use this little slip of plastic to buy things, which seemed pretty cool to me.  I had visions of going out and buying everything I’d always wanted, but of course, I never realised at the time that at some point you had to pay for the things you’d bought.

One of the main reasons why I got the impression that credit cards let you buy things effectively for free was the adverts for one particular brand of credit card – Access.  These adverts were animated, thus increasing their appeal to me, and featured a rather timid, worried looking pound sign called Money, who went about various everyday tasks.  When it came to paying the bill, Money was always a bit short, so along came access, his flexible friend (as the slogan for the card stated), to settle the necessary payment on Money’s behalf.  Perhaps now you see why I thought credit cards were so wonderful back then!

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The Eurovision Song Contest has had a lot to answer for over the years, but one thing I won’t hold against the contest is bring Bucks Fizz to the world.  OK, the band may be looked back on now as being a bit cheesey, but at the time they were very popular and whilst I wouldn’t consider myself a fan as such I still remember many of their songs today, and hearing them always conjures up happy childhood memories for me.

Bucks Fizz were a manufactured band, put together to perform a song written by Tony Danter and Andy Hill as a contender for the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest.  That song was Making Your Mind Up, and the line up finally chosen to perform it were Cheryl Baker, Jay Aston, Mike Nolan and Bobby G (his surname is Gubby, so no wonder he shortened it to just “G”).

A dance routine was choreographed that featured the gimmick of the girls initially wearing long skirts which were then pulled off by the boys to reveal mini skirts underneath.  Apparently Baker favoured the longer skirts whilst Aston wanted something shorter, so this way both were satisfied, and who knows, if it were not for this gimmick maybe the song would not have done so well?

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Put simply, Star Fleet is the best puppet TV series never made by Gerry Anderson.  Sure, I love Gerry’s stuff, but Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Stingray and the rest of them were not of my era – Star Fleet was and when the series first aired on Saturday morning British TV in 1982 I was hooked.  Well, it featured space ships and giant robots!  What more could a young boy want?

Star Fleet featured an ongoing story line about Earth being attacked by the Imperial Alliance from the Thalian Zone, headed up by an imposing black helmetted guy (at least, I think it was a helmet) called the Imperial Master.  He sends Commander Makara (a batty female officer who looked like she had a mini extra head over her left eye) on a mission to find the mysterious F-01.

The Earth Defence Force uses X-Bomber, a heavily armed space ship to combat the alien invaders.  It is commanded by Dr. Ben who is assisted by pilots Shiro Hagen, Barry Hercules and Jon Lee.  Shiro is the hero of the piece, whilst Barry Hercules is the cool afro headed dude (if it were live action he’d be played by Samuel L. Jackson) and Jon Lee is the portly, ginger haired, easily spooked one.

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