Toys | Child Of The 1980's

Archive for the ‘Toys’ Category

Clip Ons

Posted by Big Boo on March 8th, 2010

clip on toys Today’s post is all about a toy which my sister collected when we were kids. We always referred to them as Clip Ons, though whether they went by any other name I no longer recall. The basic Clip On was a little furry toy that had two arms that clasped together. When you pressed on the shoulders the arms opened and the toy could then be clipped on to other narrow objects.

Clip Ons came in all sorts of guises, and my sister’s collection was extensive. Some were just little animals like rabbits or bears in various colours (be they realistic looking greys and browns or brightly coloured variations), but you could also get pretty much anything you care to think of.

Whilst some were fairly generic, such as clowns, dolls, snowmen or Father Christmas, others were created in the form of well known cartoon characters. Amongst my sister’s collection she had Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, The Get Along Gang, E.T. and many more. In total she had around 130 of them, surprisingly no two of which were the same.

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Posted in Toys - Dolls and Action Figures | No Comments »

3D Monster Maze

Posted by Big Boo on March 5th, 2010

3D Monster Maze What is the first thing you think of when someone mentions the Sinclair ZX81? Blocky black and white graphics? No sound? Flat keyboard? Or perhaps, if you’re from the PlayStation generation, what on Earth is that?

All the above are common and understandable responses, but if I said “The herald of the 3D videogames” you might think I was crazy. How could such a lowly powered piece of silicon and plastic be a forerunner in 3D gaming? Well, in a way, it was, when you consider the landmark game 3D Monster Maze.

3D Monster Maze was really a very simple game. You were placed in a randomly generated maze and had to find the exit before being eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. What was unique for this game at the time was that your (admittedly blocky) view of the maze was from a first person perspective, as though you were actually standing in the maze. You saw the corridors of the maze stretching away in front of you, and with no birds eye view to show your position, that made the game far more difficult.

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Posted in Toys - Videogames | 1 Comment »

Trick Stick

Posted by Big Boo on March 1st, 2010

trick stick Here’s a nice obscure one for you. So obscure in fact that I ended up having to create my own image to go with this post!

The Trick Stick was a rod of yellow plastic, about 3 feet long, with a big red ball of plastic on each end. Attached to the middle of the rod was a length of thin plastic cord, which had a ring on the other end. Sound exciting, doesn’t it? You slipped the ring on your finger and voila, you became a master magician, able to make a plastic stick seemingly float in the air around you!

The idea was obviously based on the floating wand tricks performed by many stage magicians over the years, but being made of primary coloured plastic it never looked quite as cool as a magicians black cane. Couple that with the fact that getting the stick to do anything that looked remotely realistic was near impossible, and you end up with a toy that severely failed to deliver on the promises of the TV advert.

Yep, on TV the person demonstrating it could do more than just spin it round their arm. This guy made it float between his hands and whizz around his head, things which were really not a good idea to attempt in the comfort of your own home, unless you liked having a lot of broken ornaments and a smashed TV set, which is what you wanted to do with the Trick Stick the next time the advert came on.

In the end, after trying to look all mystical with it and failing miserably, my Trick Stick normally ended up being held in the middle and spun round and round as fast as I could get it to go, like a majorette twirling her baton in a carnival procession. It wasn’t even very good at that though, as you had to watch that you didn’t get whipped in the eye by the plastic cord and ring.

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Posted in Toys - Tricks and Jokes | 2 Comments »

Transformers

Posted by Big Boo on February 22nd, 2010

It was the mid eighties (1984 to be precise) when Transformers toys first appeared in toy shops across the world, and they’ve stuck around ever since, becoming one of the most popular toy lines ever.

I distinctly remember them arriving, and whilst I never have actually owned one of the toys, I really really wanted to. The reason I didn’t was because I was around secondary school starting age when they appeared, so I felt that they were perhaps a little too childish for me to ask for. That and the fact that computers had become “my thing” so all my pocket money and present requests tended to be directed in that area.

Transformers didn’t actually start off with that name however. The original toys were made by Japanese company Takara and were actually part of two different ranges known as Diaclone and Microman. The almighty Hasbro saw these toys and immediately snapped them up, combining both series and rebranding them as the Transformers. Thus the courageous Autobots and the dastardly Decepticons were born.

Whoever came up with the original idea for these toys was surely a genius. These were two toys in one, the first being a mighty warrior robot, the second being an object of some other kind. Primarily these other objects were normally vehicles, with the Autobots tending to become cars or other wheeled vehicles, whilst the Decepticons were airplanes. That said, Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, turned into a pistol!

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Posted in Toys - Dolls and Action Figures | 5 Comments »

Big Trak Back On Track

Posted by Big Boo on February 10th, 2010

big trak is back If, like me, you desperately, desperately wanted a Big Trak during your younger years, but never got one, then you may be pleased to hear that this brilliant toy is going to be making a comeback!

Big Trak was a sort of futuristic looking tank which could be programmed with simple commands such as go forward, turn or the ever popular “fire phasers“. If you ever used the languages Logo or Delta on a BBC Micro at school then you’ll be familiar with the kind of movements you could make Big Trak perform.

The revamped Big Trak appears to be almost identical to the original, the only major change being that the keypad appears to have been made a bit larger and less colourful. The only other enhancement is being able to store up to 32 programs in its memory (I believe the original only allowed a single program).

You’ll need to be patient for a little while yet though, as the new Big Trak is not due to be released until Summer 2010, priced at around £40, which is probably less than it used to cost when it first came out. There are also plans for digital camera and rocket launcher add ons to follow, so now you can’t just flash little blue lights at the dog, but take a picture of it jumping into the air as you shoot it with a plastic missile. No word on the rather pointless trailer that the original had though, but that’s no great loss!

Many thanks to my mate Al for bringing this to my attention! Its quite possible my daughter will be getting one of these for Christmas… Ahem!

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Posted in Toys - Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

Stick On Garfields

Posted by Big Boo on February 3rd, 2010

stick on garfield Today’s post is about another one of those strange fads that seem to come out of nowhere and are popular for a short time before everybody suddenly finds the idea ironic and ridiculous.

Adding a little something extra to your car to personalise it a bit has always been popular. In the seventies it was those “TREVOR and TRACY” visors for the front windscreen, or perhaps a pair of fluffy dice, whilst these days it tends to be neon strips or those weird spinning hub cap things. Not sure which of those looked worse to be honest…

In the eighties though one of the crazes for decorating your car was to have a Garfield soft toy with those suction cup thingies on each of the arms and legs stuck in your rear window. I think this craze must have originated in the US, where Jim Davis’ Garfield cartoon strip is far more popular, since I don’t remember knowing who Garfield was when these toys first appeared in the UK.

It didn’t matter though that people didn’t know who Garfield was. It was fairly obvious he was a cat and for most people that was probably enough.

So when did this craze die out? I don’t know exactly, but it was probably about the time people realised that the suction cups were rubbish and that Garfield normally spent most of his time rolling around on the back seat and floor of the car, picking up lint and dirt on the suction cups which then made them even worse as a method of attaching a soft toy to a piece of glass.

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Posted in Toys - Dolls and Action Figures | 1 Comment »

Top Trumps

Posted by Big Boo on February 1st, 2010

For a long time as a child I was quite puzzled by exactly what Top Trumps was. Apart from the slightly giggle worthy name (trump being a childish word for the passing of wind) I wasn’t sure why I had what appeared to be a pack of playing cards that just had a lot of different pictures and a load of numbers on.

I remember having a pack depicting various sports cars, and I used to enjoy flicking through the set looking at the pictures and reading the statistics and picking out my favourites. Then, one day a friend of mine said did I want to play Top Trumps. “Play?“, I thought, “I didn’t know it was a game!”

Turned out that those statistics were actually the core of the game. The cards are divided equally between all the players, and the lead player chooses a statistic on their top most card that they think will “trump” their opponents card. For example, it might be the top speed of a car. Whoever has the best card wins all the other cards from that round, and gets to choose the next statistic. You are out of the game if you lose all your cards, and the game ends when one player has all the cards.

From that day on I had a renewed interest in my Top Trumps cards, and even got myself a couple more sets with my pocket money, including a set of dragsters and another of dinosaurs, which quickly became my favourite as like most kids the world of dinosaurs seemed fascinating.

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Posted in Toys - Miscellaneous | No Comments »

Mattel Intellivision

Posted by Big Boo on January 22nd, 2010

mattel intellivision In the late seventies the Atari 2600 was the videogame console that ruled the roost. Sure, it may have had terrible graphics and sound capabilities (certainly by today’s standards) but it had the most important thing going for it, that being loads of games.

As the eighties were about to dawn toy manufacturer Mattel took a look at this market that Atari had all sewn up, and decided they wanted a slice of the pie, so they set their brightest boffins to work and in 1980 the Mattel Intellivision made it to general release in stores all over the US.

The Intellivision, which was a contraction of the term Intelligent Television, looked somewhat similar to the 2600 what with its black plastic and wooden veneer along the front, but inside it was a far more powerful machine than its arch rival. Both graphics and sound were much improved (although still terrible as we look back on them now) and Mattel used this point as its main advertising point, literally comparing games of similar types on the two systems to show how much better the Intellivision versions were.

The unit had a cartridge port on the right hand edge of the machine, the cartridges protruding slightly when inserted, and came with two hard wired controllers which slotted tidily away into the top of the Intellivision when not in use. The pads had a strange circular pad for directional controllers, which was capable of detecting sixteen directions of movement as opposed to the Atari 2600’s eight.

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Posted in Toys - Videogames | 3 Comments »