RSS
No, that isn’t a deformed and brightly coloured picture of the planet Saturn accompanying this post, but instead one of the most ridiculous toy crazes to hit during the 1980’s. Take a disc of thick durable plastic and stick two rubber footballs that have been joined together through the middle to produce the Pogo Ball, or Lolo Ball as it was original called I believe.
To use a Pogo Ball you had to balance on the plastic foot stand, grip the top ball between your ankles, and then jump up and down in order to travel about. Sounds simple in theory, but in practice getting started was the hard part, whilst keeping going was the very hard part. All that jumping was extremely tiring, so the Pogo Ball was never going to become a major form of transport.
I guess the Pogo Ball could be considered as being part Pogo Stick and part Space Hopper. Personally I found the Space Hopper easy and therefore more fun to play with. My skill level with the Pogo Stick could probably be described as pre-beginner, and I didn’t do much better with the Pogo Ball either, in fact probably worse. On a pogo stick you at least had a handle to hold on to, but with the Pogo Ball you had to hold on with just your ankles. Now, hands are infinitely better at holding on to things than ankles. Its what hands were designed to do. Ankles on the other hand are merely boney lumps with little gripping power, so I usually found myself becoming separated from the Pogo Ball in mid-air, and therefore came crashing down fairly often.
One of those fears that most children go through is a fear of the dark, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Hasbro division Playskool when they launched their Glo Worm doll. Glo Worm was a soft toy made from soft bright green fabric with a cheerful vinyl face and a cute little green night cap that also glowed at night. By pressing the body of the doll the face would light up, and therefore was able to comfort young children in a darkened bedroom by providing a soft glow for them to see by.
There have always been two great modelling toys as far as I’m concerned. There’s Play Dough (or Play-Doh to give it its Homer Simpon-esque commercial name) and Plasticene. Both came in a range of colours, had a unique smell, kind of like marzipan though not quite, and could be twisted, rolled and generally formed into whatever shape you wanted.
There were some strange things available to play with when you were a kid, weren’t there? Who would have thought that a blob of brightly coloured red putty could keep kids both amused and baffled for hours?
Back in the days of 8-bit computers games were generally pretty simple affairs involving shooting aliens or jumping over barrels viewed in only two dimensions. That was until Elite came along.
The word guessing game of Hangman has been around for many, many years, and whilst it demands two players it can be played almost anywhere, so long as you have something to write with and something to write on.
There have been a great many different dolls over the years that try to mimic the actions of a real baby, some more successfully than others. It’s a given that most dolls have the weighted eyes that shut when they are put in a lying down position, but there have been attempts at emulating the sounds of a baby crying, gurgling and burping, wetting its nappy and even nappy rash! However, by far the most popular of these many dolls must certainly be the Tiny Tears doll.
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.
