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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.
OK, so there’s obviously nothing that magical about the Magic Drawing Slate, but they are a lot of fun to play with just the same. I fondly remember these toys from my childhood, although they were clearly around for many years before the 1980’s had begun, dating back to at least the 1950’s and possibly even further. They are such simple toys, and fairly inexpensive, so most kids have probably owned one at some point in their life.
It’s good to see Swingball is still going strong, and indeed is supposed to be one of the most popular toys of the last 10 years. Whilst the image illustrating this post is of the current day Swingball, it hasn’t really changed a lot over the years, which is not surprising given its simplicity.
If you wanted to scare the living daylights out of your younger siblings then there was nothing better than the Devil Banger. I’m amazed that they are still available and haven’t been banned by Health and Safety years ago. These days they appear to be known as Fun Snaps, but they’re basically the same as I remember them.
Friction driven pull-back-and-go cars have always been a lot of fun, assuming of course you were trying to race them across a hard floor surface and not the livings room deep pile carpet that is. Pull the car back, let it go, and watch it crash straight into the bottom of the kitchen larder. Cool!
The Rubik’s Cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian Ernő Rubik, who was both a sculptor and a professor of architecture, and appeared in Hungarian toy shops in 1977, named the Magic Cube. It wasn’t until 1980 when it was signed by Ideal Toys that the cube hit the world’s attention and established itself as one of the most popular toys in the world, probably due mostly to the fact that many of the estimated 300 million cubes sold were cheap imitation models.
The craze for Bicycle Motorcross, or BMX, was at it’s highest during the early 1980’s. Popularised by films such as BMX Bandits and 
Today there probably aren’t many kids who don’t own a Nintendo Gameboy or one of it’s many variations. Back in the 1980’s such technology was the thing of Science Fiction, so we had to make do with our Palitoy Pocketeers instead (or the less catchily named Tomy Pocket Games in the US).