Child Of The 1980's

…but which is better? There’s only one way to find out! Fight!

Sorry, channelling Harry Hill there for a bit.

I wrote this week about the annual Christmas tradition of the big tin of chocolates, and back in the Eighties it was normally down to a choice between Quality Street and Roses, since these were really the only options available back then.

Long time readers of this site may remember I used to do a weekly “Saturday Survey”, so I thought I’d bring it back briefly to attempt to answer the question as to which brand of chocolates was the nation’s favourite in the Eighties.

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It’s funny how crazes for odd pieces of tat sweep the nation. These things come along and people go mad for them, despite the fact they are general useless. Think of Big Mouth Billy Bass, the singing fish, or those Dancing Hamsters (which I have to admit was one of the crazes I got swept up with…)

Another such craze from the Eighties (at least I’m pretty sure it was the Eighties) was for those metal balancing ornaments. Normally made from a few pieces of thick stainless steel wire bent into shapes and soldered together, with a few ball bearings to provide much needed weight, these things would rock, tilt, roll and spin seemingly for ever, so much so that they were often compared to perpetual motion devices (though of course they weren’t even close to achieving that).

Do you remember these? There were quite a few different designs, and were the kind of thing that was popular in gift shops, especially those is seaside towns. Did you ever have one?

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The compact disc was invented in the 1980s and can most definitely be held up as a bit of a world changing invention, even if it might not have been an overnight revolution.

The CD has changed the way in which we listen to music, store data on computer systems and even watch movies, first with the ill fated Video CD and then with DVD and Blu-Ray discs, both of which are really little more than compact discs which just allow a heck of a lot more data to be stored.

Do you remember when you first got a CD player? In our house my sister was the first to get a CD player, which would probably have been in the mid to late Eighties. I was never a big music fan so it wasn’t until the early Nineties that I got my first CD enabled device, and that was a CD-ROM drive for my Amiga!

So, to this weeks question, which is…

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Look in most UK High Streets these days and chances are there will be a burger restaurant, but back in the Eighties the US burger chains had yet to make big inroads into the UK, and home grown places such as Wimpy had more of a chance to claim their part of the fast food market.

For this weeks survey I’d like you to cast your mind back to the Eighties and think about which was your favourite burger chain back then, rather than what it is now, as that’s a little unfair on Wimpy who are now for the most part holding out in motorway service stations.

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In the past couple of months I’ve started to notice there seems to be something of a trend for dressing in Eighties style fashion. Admittedly I’ve only noticed a couple of people doing this, so it certainly isn’t a big thing at the time of writing this.

In each case it has been a young female dressed very much in that style of cropped lace edged leggings with an oversized, brightly coloured shirt worn with a large belt. They’ve even been sporting big hair to round it all off nicely.

Would you go back to wearing Eighties styled clothing? Let me know by voting below. Who knows, if it takes off it might even give some people a chance to dust off long forgotten items from the deepest recesses of their wardrobes, assuming they still fit of course!

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Writing about the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe reminded me of my old pedal car from when I was small.

It was a police car, and I loved it. I remember it had a little plastic walkie talkie on the dashboard, and the back featured a little shelf with some mini traffic cones on. I used to scoot all round the garden in it, although I don’t ever recall being all that good at actually pedalling it.

Instead of bicycle style pedals it had two pieces of bent metal joined with some kind of cam mechanism. Your feet rested in the nooks of these metal strips, and pumping them back and forth drove the car along. Once you got going they weren’t too bad to use, but getting started was nearly impossible so I used to use the Fred Flintstone method, pushing myself along using my feet.

Anyway, enough recollections from me. Did you have a pedal car? If so, why not let us know what your one was like by posting a comment?

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To round off Super Mario week I’m setting the obvious survey. What is your favourite Mario game of all time? I’ve listed possibly the core titles below, but feel free to add your own, even if it’s because you want to vote for a particular version of a title – for example, you might favour Super Mario Kart Wii over the original SNES Super Mario Kart.

The main reason I have listed every possible title is because there are way too many. Mario has appeared in over 200 games, so listing all of them would be quite a task!

For me, it has to be Super Mario World. It was the first Mario game I ever completed, and I still enjoy playing it today, which is more than can be said for some old games!

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There are some truly useless things bought out some times which kids just adore, and what better example than the Deelie Boppers. Little more than a plastic headband with two ping pong balls on springs attached to it, for some reason there was a big craze for these when I was growing up.

Admittedly it was really the kind of thing you bought when going on a seaside holiday, so you could wear them whilst making sandcastles on the beach or whilst strutting your funky stuff at the evening Junior Disco at the holiday park.

So, did you own a pair of these useless items (useless of course unless you wanted to make yourself look like an alien, for which they were perfect).

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