Child Of The 1980’s

Do you remember visiting your local toy shop and looking at one of those rotating display stands that was brimming with tricks and jokes? From whoopee cushions to nails through fingers the stand was loaded with little toys at pocket money prices. You don’t seem to see these as often as you did, but they are still around if you look hard enough.

One of the toy jokes I distinctly remember was the Snappy Chewing Gum. This consisted of a piece of cardboard decorated to look like an ordinary stick of chewing gum when it was inserted into a standard packet of gum. The difference was that it had a sprung loaded piece of wire with a loop on one end stuck to it, something along the lines of the dangerous part of a mouse trap.

Approaching your victim you would nonchalantly ask if they wanted a stick of chewing gum. When they attempted to take the gum out of the packet the trap would be triggered, with the metal wire snapping forward onto their finger with a surprisingly loud whacking sound. If you got it just right then it could actually be quite painful.

This joke could only be spoiled in two ways. First, your victim refused the gum in the first place, but that wasn’t so bad because you could just seek out another person to surprise. The real spoiler was when the person took the stick of gun by using two fingers either side of the stick of gum, rather than one on top and one underneath.

This and a range of other chewing gum related pranks are still available today from SillyJokes.

Donkey Kong is one of the first examples of the popular platform game genre, and its just as playable now as it was when it first appeared in the arcades back in 1981. It is also a bit of a landmark in videogame history because it was also the first of many adventures for Nintendo mascot Mario, although in typical Japanese style he was originally called Jumpman! His name may have been different, but the player character certainly looked like Mario, and given that Donkey Kong was created by Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, its pretty safe to say that it was Mario to all intents and purposes.

The aim of the game is to rescue damsel in distress Pauline (nope, it wasn’t Princess Peach, Mario had yet to become an inhabitant of the Mushroom Kingdom at this point) who had been kidnapped by Donkey Kong, a giant ape in the style of King Kong. Donkey Kong got his name thanks to a Japanese to English dictionary. A word meaning stubborn was required, and donkey was the suggestion, presumably in relation to the phrase “stubborn as a mule”. Mario’s, sorry, Jumpman’s task was to try and rescue Pauline by getting from the bottom of the screen to the top, running along girders, jumping and climbing ladders.

The game was split into four distinct levels, the first of which involved running up a set of girders joined by ladders. To try and stop you Donkey Kong was hurling barrels down the screen, which could either be jumped over or smashed with a hammer. The problem with the hammer was you couldn’t climb ladders whilst holding it, so I always used to ignore it. Reaching the top before the timer ran out completed the level, but Kong would grab Pauline and head up higher.

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Some toys are totally useless, yet still remain amazing fun to fiddle with. The Gurning Flexiface is just one of those toys that I remember having as a kid, and has probably been around for a fair few years before I had one.

Consisting of nothing more than a reasonably ugly looking rubber face, the toy had a number of holes on the back into which you could insert your fingers. By moving your fingers in different directions the face could be amusingly distorted into all kinds of strange and disturbing poses, the kind of thing that if you were to pull them yourself, your Mum would probably tell you to “watch out, because if the wind changed direction you’d stay like that“. Funny the untruths that come out of parents mouths to stop their children showing them up, isn’t it?

Whoever came up with the idea for the Flexiface must surely have got it from watching TV footage of championship Gurners. You don’t seem to see it much any more, but Gurning competitions presumably are still running. Gurning is basically a competition where ugly looking men (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female Gurner) try to contort their face into the weirdest configuration they possibly can. Some of these guys must have extra facial muscles looking at the kind of weird things they can do. I’ve never understood quite why they have to stick their head through a toilet seat or a horse harness to do this though…

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Lego Fabuland first came out in 1979, and stuck around for most of the 1980’s, finally disappearing in around 1987. The Lego company had enjoyed great success with their Lego Town kits aimed at children aged around 6 and over, and also catered to the baby and toddler market with their larger Duplo bricks (or Big Lego as I used to call them as a child). Children aged from about 3 to 6 may find Duplo too simple, whilst the Lego Town kits may still be too complicated for them to assemble by themselves. Fabuland was the result of trying to bridge this age range gap.

Fabuland was based around the same familiar Lego brick format used for Lego Town and all the other variants of Lego, so it felt more “grown up” than Duplo. In order to make building of the kits simpler the bricks were generally limited to the larger lego pieces, such as the 4×2 stud piece that is around a centimetre high.

These bricks were joined by a variety of larger special purpose pieces that made building a model a simple affair. Examples of such bricks were large wheeled sections for building vehicles, windows with shutters, pieces of fence and so on. This made following the building instructions much simpler, so kids could start to build the models themselves and not get frustrated in the process.

The biggest draw of Fabuland however was the range of characters that came with the kits. These characters were similar in appearance to the standard poseable Lego man we all know and love, but were slightly larger in size, brightly coloured and with heads that were beautifully detailed depictions of animals such as pigs, monkeys, sheep and mice. They could still be attached to the Lego pieces, but were far easier for little hands to play with.

The characters also had a range of accessory items unique to Fabuland, ranging from ready built scooters and wheelbarrows to brooms and shovels, similar to those provided in the Lego Town kits but larger to fit the characters increased size and also generally more detailed. Indeed, some kits consisted of little more than a single character and an accessory or two.

The James Bond films are well known for their gadget equipped cars, and The Spy Who Loved Me had a particularly well remembered vehicle in the form of the Lotus Esprit which was also capable of travelling underwater!

When the vehicle went under the water a set of stabilising fins came out of the the bodywork, and some propellors popped out the back to drive it along. It was also armed with torpedoes, depth charges and surface to air missiles. Given that the computer generated special effects of today didn’t exist in 1977, when the film was released, it’s quite amazing to think that the film makers went to the effort of actually making an underwater car! Admittedly it didn’t actually work, but it was a cool piece of special effects works none the less.

It may predate the 1980’s by a few years, but this amazing car was also one of my favourite toys. Corgi made an absolutely brilliant model Lotus Esprit that drove around perfectly as a toy sports car, but with the flick of a switch out popped identical fins to the movie version of the car, and you could then pretend to drive around under the sea! Better still, the back window of the car had four sprung loaded missile launchers, and the car came with four little plastic missiles to put in them. Flicking another switch shot them out the back, only to then get lost under the sofa or be eaten by the family dog.

Personally I didn’t have nor even knew anyone who owned an Amstrad CPC home computer, but they were very popular and were one of the “main three” home computers of the mid 1980’s along with the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, at least as far as videogames were concerned anyway. If a game was released on either of the latter formats, chances are it was also available on the Amstrad CPC.

There were a number of different models, the first to be released being the Amstrad CPC 464, which was released in 1984. It was sold as a complete out of the box system complete with monitor and built in tape deck, making it a physically long piece of kit. Ironically, given that the CPC initials stood for Colour Personal Computer, there was a reduced cost option of buying a green screen. It’s hard to believe now that computers once only supported green text on a black background!

In 1985 the CPC 664 model was released, which had a floppy disk drive instead of a tape deck. It took 3″ disks, where the magnetic disk itself was encased in a rectangular piece of plastic. The Amstrad machines are the only ones I’ve ever come across that used this disk format, although I believe that some mainframe and terminal systems may also have used them. Later that year this model was replaced by the CPC 6128, which had more memory.

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One of the problems with boardgames is dice. They are one of the most important parts of any boardgame, as without them the game can’t really be played at all. At least if a counter is missing you could use a penny to replace it, but lose a die and it requires a trip to another boardgame to pinch one. The answer to boardgame enthusiasts everywhere was the invention of the Pop-O-Matic device.

The Pop-O-Matic device was a plastic dome with the required number of dice inside to play the game it came with. Being much larger than the average set of dice it was much harder to lose, and in fact was often moulded into the playing board itself. Under the dome was a small piece of slightly bent metal, on which the dice rested. Pressing the dome caused the metal sheet to flip the dice into the air, thus rolling them. Another advantage of this was that it also stopped people from cheating as you had no control over how the dice were thrown.

The pictured game is one called Trouble, which was pretty much an identical copy of the old classic Ludo just with the Pop-O-Matic device stuck into the middle of the board. It looks uncannily like a game called Frustration that I used to own, so I wonder if Trouble may have been the name it went by in the US. I believe this game dates back to the 1960’s or 1970’s or possibly even earlier. Certainly I remember the box lid featured some people playing the game with dress sense that could only have come from sometime around then.

These simple toys were all the rage for a time during the 1980’s. They were the sort of thing normally sold by blokes in the street or at Sunday markets, and sold all the more due to them being at pocket money prices, and incredibly easy to demonstrate. Best of all was that when you did buy one, unlike something like jumping beans, they did actually work, at least until the stickiness finally wore off that is, which was usually after they had fallen on the floor a few times and picked up pieces of hair and dust.

The toy consisted of a little octopus (other forms such as little men and spiders were also available) that was made out of a very stretchy rubber. The rubber was covered in a tacky substance which made them feel very strange against your fingers. The idea was to throw them at something vertical and shiny (Mum’s freshly cleaned windows were ideal) where they would first stick for a time before gravity took effect and the top legs would gradually peel away. Once the weight of the octopus body could no longer be supported the whole thing would flip over, and the legs that had just lost cohesion would stick back to the glass. The new top set of legs would then start to come away, and in this manner the thing flipped its way down the entire surface.

If the rubber got too covered in dirt it would no longer stick properly, and would either bounce straight off when you threw it, or else briefly stick then drop straight off to get even dirtier. Washing it in warm soapy water could bring it back to life for a while, but eventually even this did no good and the toy was reduced to something you could squidge and stretch, and perhaps ping at your little sister like a rubber band.